Twilight of the Clods

The Tory Party Melts Down

Karma is an overrated force in politics and in life. It rarely comes when you want it to, and mostly it doesn’t come at all. Its absence has been particularly notable in these depraved political times, when lies are greeted with tickertape parades; where the loudest, the most corrupt, the most malignant, the most useless and incompetent, and the most dishonest people even the most dystopian imagination can conjure up, not only get away with it, but actually thrive and prosper.

But sometimes, retribution of a sort does come, slipping in by the most circuitous and unlikely routes, and such appears to be the case with the moral vacuum known as Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson. For those who believe that history does occasionally have plotlines, it’s extremely satisfying, however implausible, to see how Johnson took the unprecedented step of using lawyers to fend off a parliamentary enquiry, only to find that these same lawyers have handed over documents implicating him in further Partygate breaches to the Cabinet Office, which then handed them to the police.

We can ask why these breaches were not investigated by the police or Sue Gray in the first place, but really we should be giving Karma a big hand, because this was neatly done, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. If this was a tv series - lets call it Bastard - you would definitely want another season. It could be the stuff of Greek tragedy, if the hero was not a morally incontinent Hooray Henry, who partied while his people died, and if the wounds that he inflicted on himself consisted of something more than vomit on the walls of Downing Street and probably Chequers as well.

The genuine tragic hero has a tragic flaw that brings him down, but Johnson is nothing but flaw, with all the tragic grandeur of Benny Hill performing drunk in It’s a Knockout. This is a king who should never have sat on his metaphorical throne, a man who has never served anyone but himself, whose entire career has been based on his ability to lie with a smirk, with the gormless applause of too many people who should have known better, and too many who never did, and stuck with him anyway, because they believed he could further their interests.

Now, once again, Johnson has shown that you could take the boy out the Bullingdon Club, but you can’t take Bullingdon out of the boy, and he is floundering in the mess he made entirely by himself, and all because, to paraphrase the Beastie Boys, he lied for his right to party in the midst of a lethal pandemic even as he told everyone else to do the opposite.

It that isn’t a series to get the popcorn out for, I don’t know what is. That’s not how he and his pals see it of course. No tragic flaw for them, only The Parallax View for morons, in which every reversal, ever blow, every setback that their hero suffers, is actually the fault of the shadowy conspirators behind-the-scenes. They might be the ‘lefty media’ as the ludicrous troll Dan Wootton put it in the Mail today, dipping his greasy fingers even deeper into the dreck than usual. Or they might be ‘the Blob’ - the sinister cabal of liberal woke civil servants that tried to ‘stop Brexit’ and now wants to take revenge on the man who got Brexit done, even when he didn’t.

They might also be the Sunakites - the same serpent-tongued smoothies who stabbed our hero in the back - et tu Rishi! - and now want to finish him off.

Whoever they are, they are evil. Evil I tell you. Cowards and knaves, conspiring against a great man more sinned against than sinning, the man who gave us Brexit and the vaccines and saved us from Marxist tyranny and saved Ukraine and blah blah blah - the emperor of the land where pigs fly with a cheque from Sam Blyth in their trotters.

This is playground-level discourse, of the kind that we have become tediously accustomed to over the last few years, no matter how deeply we might plunge our fingers into our ears. It is pathetically dishonest and pathetically demeaning, not only in its complete indifference to truth, but in its arrogant assumption that its listeners are stupid enough to believe it.

Some will, but the evidence suggests that many more won’t. Because if enough people had believed these narratives when Johnson was in power, then he wouldn’t have fallen from power in the first place. In the real world, which still counts for something - just - he was removed by his own party, not because his party had suddenly regained the decency and morality that they lost when they brought the scheming oaf to power, but because the public revulsion at Johnson’s rule-breaking and lying was so visceral and widespread that it had placed their own careers in jeopardy.

The Coalition of the Damned

That hasn’t changed, and it’s now very likely that further revelations may make it worse. The ‘seething’ backbenchers now joining the Johnson rent-a-mob can seethe till smoke comes out of their backsides. They can weaken Sunak, but it’s unlikely that they can destroy him, while Sunak lacks either the moral fibre or the political will to see off the Johnsonites, the Trussites and the Bravermanites, or the once-feared Urg.

In effect, the Tory coalition that Johnson assembled has bet everything it had at the Brexit casino and come out of it with nothing but some air tickets flying refugees of their choice to Rwanda. Now that coalition is fractured, and it’s difficult to see how it can be put back together by anyone, let alone by Johnson.

Beyond Brexit, they had only Liz Truss’s tax cuts utopia, which died at birth. And a country without immigrants, which now turns out to be a country where immigration has increased, because - who’d have thought? - it turns out that immigrants are needed.

So on one level the current turmoil is good news to all of us who see this party as a blight on the nation, as its factions turn against each other, and yet cannot destroy each other, and grope around in the dark for a leader or a big idea that can bring them back from the abyss.

They can, as I suggested last week, lurch even further to the right, and lose the few moderate Tories who still remain in the party in the process. Or they can lean back towards the centre and lose the lunatics. They can pursue the Johnson-as-victim fantasy, which is neither, and will only keep Johnson in the news, thereby increasing the public disgust towards him and everyone around him, while bringing more pressure to bear on their crumbling seats.

These are not games that winners play, and many MPs clearly realise that the game is up, which is why 10 percent of them are standing down, rather than face their night of shame. And many of those who aren’t standing down will almost certainly be forced out, as a shattered, demoralised, and angry country wakes up to the damage that has been done to it and finally takes revenge on the parasites and grifters responsible for it.

In other words, the most successful political party in the world is locked into a death spiral, and clinging to Johnson is only likely to speed it up. As a well-known pseudo-classicist, the Great Bloviator will no doubt be familiar with Marcus Aurelius’s maxim: ‘Rotting meat in a bag. Look at it clearly. If you can.’

Johnson is the meat. The Tory Party is the bag. And it is very doubtful that it can look clearly at what is inside it. That would mean looking at itself.

But many other people will look. Or smell the stench of decay, whether it comes from Chequers or Teeside.

They know that, whatever comes next, this is a party that deserves defeat and disgrace more than any party has ever done. They know, as Oliver Cromwell once said of the Long Parliament,that the Tory Party is ‘a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.’

This is as true now as it was then. So let Johnson and his supporters cry conspiracy as more sleaze leaks out. Eat your popcorn, but guard your vote, until the opportunity finally comes to confine this dreadful rabble to the oblivion they deserve.