The UK's Dystopian Summer

The Last Days of a Tory Nation

The past always looks a little rosier after a catastrophe, and the ‘golden’ Edwardian summer of 1914 once acquired an especially warm glow, seen through the mud and blood of the great slaughter and the collapsing international order that followed. Stefan Zweig once wrote that he had rarely experienced a summer ‘more luxuriant, more beautiful, and, I am tempted to say more summery.’ Writing in 1964 the New York Times looked back on the glorious summer in which ‘the peoples marched to World War I as if to a fete.’

Whatever happens in the coming years, the UK is unlikely to look back at the summer of 2022 with the same nostalgia. Because even though there is youth and innocence here as there always is, this summer is more likely to go down in history as the point when reality finally began to overwhelm the dire political fantasies that have consumed the nation for the last six years.

It will more likely be remembered - as so many of us are already seeing it - as the summer in which a Tory party that has inflicted so much needless harm on the nation, staggered on zombie-like, through a country desperately in need of real vision and real leadership and unable to find it anywhere.

It’s not that there is an absence of contenders - or pretenders. For the last few weeks now, we have all been forced to engage in the not-entirely-unsatisfactory spectator sport of Strictly Come Tory, in which a succession of chancers, no hopers, and right-wing extremists have pecked at each other and denounced the legacy of their, without the remotest indication that they were in the governments responsible for what they now condemn, or at least supported them one hundred percent.

There is schadenfreude in spades, in watching these no hopers devour each other and trash their own political legacy, but these vicarious pleasure are bitter and compensatory.

One quickly tires of the sight of Nadine Dorries, angrily stumbling through the airwaves in a succession of summery dresses with her affected teenage mannerisms, condemning the ‘coup’ that overthrew her object of love.

Maybe one day she and Johnson can do a remake of Je t’aime, with Dorries doing the moaning. For now her bleating and her persistent attempts to bring down Sunak are just another discordant note in the barnyard chorus of British political life.

Because if you ever come close to enjoying these antics, you only have to remember that Liz Truss - the dreary opportunist who rubbished her own school and the neighbourhood where she grew up in order to advance her own political prospects, could be the next Prime Minister of the UK.

If Truss is Johnsonism by other means, there appears to be no point at all to Rishi Sunak except that he, like all the others, just fancies the Big Job as a necessary milestone in the ongoing vanity project/CV of his life.

Kicking Down

For the last week these two have been knocking pieces of nothingness out of each other, while taking time out, as Tories appealing to the Tory base will always do, to kick downwards at migrants and refugees.

So Sunak promises to continue with Rwanda - a cruel and useless policy that has become a badge of Tory ‘toughness’. He also wants to put a cap on refugees, cut aid to countries that won’t take them back, and detain them in cruise ships.

Why not bring back the hulks, as we hurtle backwards to some Georgian steampunk dystopian mishmash? The main thing is to impress upon those Tory voters and the sadopopulist mob that you are prepared to kick downwards, and kick hard.

And Truss, the new Toys R Us Thatcher doll is no better. Not only does she support Rwanda, but she wants lots of other countries to be Rwanda. Never mind that the UK hasn’t deported anyone to the Rwanda it has signed a deal with. Or that the British High Commissioner for Rwanda has advised the British government not to send people to Rwanda over human rights concerns. And the US government has advised its own citizens not to travel there for the same reason.

Not of this matters to the zombie government or its would-be successors. Because these are politicians who cannot bear very much reality if reality doesn’t meet their expectations and delusions.

Asked in one of their debates whether the gridlock at Dover had anything to do with Brexit, both Sunak and Truss answered ‘no’, without elaborating. Not surprisingly, the interviewer didn’t press them, because the B-word is a tricky subject, and no one wants to upset anyone.

The unstated wisdom seems to be that if we just ignore that nasty Brexit, it will go away, and we can continue to watch the cricket and ignore the smell of burning fantasies that continues to waft across this septic isle.

Failing that, just blame the French, as Truss, the Tory papers and the ferretlike Jacobean villain Andrew Pierce all did, with the same ferocity and idiocy.

It’s no good pointing out that the Port of Dover asked for £33 million in 2020 to increase the number of ‘juxtaposed’ French passport booths, and received only £33,000. Or that French border officials are now obliged to carry out longer passport checks for ‘Third Country Nationals', which inevitably means longer queues at peak holiday periods.

These are mere facts, which no self-respecting post-Brexit Tory can possibly acknowledge. Nor it seems, can the Labour opposition, whose representatives have accused the government of being ‘absent’ at Dover or said that Dover is ‘stuck’, without mentioning why Dover is stuck or what the government is absent from.

Silence is golden, the Tremeloes once sang, but my eyes still see. Except that most UK politicians are too mesmerised by fear of Brexit to talk about what is staring them in the eyes.

And beyond the mayhem at the border, the reservoirs are drying up and the country is facing its worse drought since 1976. Wildfires have been burning in London even as the Daily Mail told its readers that the record temperatures were nothing to worry about and definitely, nothing to do with climate change, and why don’t we all just stop being wimps and get beach body ready.

Meanwhile the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire health and care system has declared a critical incident in response to Covid-driven bed shortages and lack of social care capacity. So much for ‘living with covid’, but that is another problem about which Tory politicians cannot speak.

And last but by no means least, this battered and fractured country faces a devastating ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that threatens to make even the essentials of daily life unaffordable for millions of people.

Today, it was announced that energy bills this winter could reach £500 a month. I repeat, £500 a month. How many people will be able to pay this incredible sum and continue to pay their rent, their mortgage, or even for their food? What happens if they can’t?

The government-of-the-undead has an answer, of sorts. Today the zombie-in-chief Boris Johnson told the Commonwealth Business forum in Birmingham that the cost-of-living crisis is an ‘inevitable’ period of difficulty that we all have to ‘get through.’

It’s no good worrying, the Great Man assured us, because

Every athlete - to pick a a metaphor entirely at random - every athlete knows that you have to go through times of real strain and real sacrifice when you sometimes feel it’s not worth it if you’re going to be ready to win. And by the same token we in this country have to get through these difficult times, but we have to keep investing and getting ready.

I like a good metaphor, but there are some metaphors that dissolve in your mouth and others just make you choke. And listening to Bertie Booster comparing pensioners and the poor to athletes is particularly galling from a man who has never sacrificed anything in his life, and actually partied while his countrymen and women were dying or living under quarantine.

And no one can talk about ‘the country’ getting through the energy crisis when the energy companies themselves are making record profits and their CEOs are taking home record bonuses. There is no first person plural here.

We are not all in this together, and no one is less-equipped to tell us that we should just put up with it than the first prime minister to leave Downing Street in disgrace through his penchant for lying and over-indulgence.

Over the last week the Great Man has taken time out from cosplaying a fighter pilot for some photo-ops, in which he even participated in exercises with Ukrainian troops training in the UK (‘look at me, I’m Ukraine!’), dressing in camo while handling weapons and looking awfully manly.

Johnson also awarded his best buddy Volodymr Zelensky with the Winston Churchill Leadership Award (‘look at me, I’m Churchill and Ukraine.’)

Incredibly, some of Johnson’s supporters have been touting him as a potential NATO secretary-general; the same Johnson who once nipped off from a NATO meeting without a security escort to attend a ‘there will be girls’ private party in Tuscany, hosted by the soon-to-be-a-Tory-peer Evgeny Lebedev.

There the then Foreign Secretary met Lebedev’s ex-KGB agent father Alexander, though Johnson didn’t talk government business, ‘as far as I’m aware’ - an interesting collocation which raises all kinds of problematic possibilities that have not been unresolved, and as far as Johnson’s supporters are concerned, remain unasked.

Over the last week, some Johnson’s most fervent fans have even managed to gather 14,000 signatures from Tory members calling for his return.

For a while Johnson was rumoured to have supported these efforts, but he now seems to have abandoned the effort, perhaps because 7,000 of these signatures turned out to be non-members, or because ‘senior Tories’ have warned him that this is one comeback won’t fly.

Instead, he and his cabal seem to be concentrating their efforts on getting Truss into Downing Street. And no one can be surprised that the prospect of a general strike is now being discussed, in part because Truss, true to her newly-minted Thatcherite heritage, is promising to crush the unions that are already on strike or threatening strike action.

Somehow it seems as unlikely that Truss will succeed in doing this, as she stares blankly at a country she barely seems to understand, with a mouthful of clichés and a handbag full of snake oil. Yet in just over a month’s time, she may well become the next prime minister.

That is an outcome that the millions of us who are not and never will be Tory must now contemplate as the country drifts rudderless through a dystopian summer that, whatever may be happening in our personal lives, is likely to be remembered as the summer before the dark that we all knew was coming, and could not stop.