The UK : a world beating embarrassment

The bloviating man-child Boris Johnson, has gone full Trump over the preliminary findings of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee, which has reported that there is credible evidence that the former Prime Law-breaker misled Parliament on at least four different occasions, and in the process demonstrated that he can indeed drag the tattered credibility of the standards of behaviour in public office to even lower depths. Johnson and his supporters – and quite remarkably he still has supporters are now trying to discredit the Parliamentary committee by claiming that it’s all a Labour stitch up because senior Civil Servant Sue Gray, who conducted the original investigations into the series of lock down busting parties held at Number Ten Downing Street during the height of the pandemic, has accepted a post as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Johnson’s supporters are now taking to G Beebies News to claim that Sue Gray was not independent and that partygate was all a Labour conspiracy to ‘bring down Boris’ and that there has been nothing in the story all along. There is no law or precedent to stop civil servants going to work for a political party – David Frost was a civil servant too, and Johnson gave him a peerage and made him a government minister. The same Conservative apologists who are now clutching their pearls about Sue Gray had no issue with that at all.

Johnson and his delusional supporters now want to make this a story about the alleged ‘constitutional impropriety’ of Sue Gray and the Labour party rather than the fact that the Parliamentary Privileges Committee has reached some damning conclusions about Johnson, including stating that it beggars belief that Johnson did not know that the parties in Downing Street were a flagrant breach of the lockdown rules in force at the time. Yet for all their whining and greetin faces, none of Johnson’s supporters has identified any part of the Sue Gray report as inaccurate. Johnson held parties during lockdown, he got found out, he was fined by the police, he lied repeatedly about it, and he still refuses to take responsibility.

However it is worth bearing in mind that Sue Gray played no role in uncovering partygate, it was the press which broke the story. Sue Gray was only called in to investigate after the allegations had been dominating the news agenda for days and one damaging photo and story after another was being published in the media. Gray’s was not the first investigation to conclude – that was the Met police who found PM broke the law. Or are we to believe that the police are also party to Keir Starmer’s evil plan? It’s also important to remember that Sue Gray’ report played no role in Johnson’s departure. He brazened her report out even though her findings were backed up by the police who handed out 126 fines, including fines that had to be paid by Johnson and by then chancellor and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It was Johnson’s mishandling of the Pincher scandal that finally caused 57 Conservative ministers to resign, setting in motion a train of events that gave us the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss, followed within weeks by her being turfed out and Sunak, the man who had just lost a leadership contest in his own party, being anointed as Prime Minister. Yet now those same Conservatives see fit to lecture us all on constitutional propriety. That’s like Harold Shipman lecturing us on the care of the elderly.

But for Starmer to announce this week that he’s offered Gray a job was a massive own goal which has only bolstered Boris Johnson just when we thought that the abandoned mattress of British politics had been finally been consigned to the dumpster fire of ignominy where he rightfully belongs. But now we have an outbreak of faux outrage from the Johnsonettes because they think it’s a way back for him to become PM again, using the classic Trump whinging line of “it was a witch hunt”, “It’s fake news.”

Giving further proof of his unfitness for the position of whelk stall manager, never mind Prime Minister, in his long delayed resignation (dis)honours list Johnson is reportedly seeking a knighthood for his father Stanley Johnson, presumably for services to upper class middle class boorishness. Johnson Senior who has six children, and whose son has an indeterminate number of offspring once took to the airwaves to pontificate about how the ‘black and brown and yellow races’ have too many children. Stanley Johnson also took out French citizenship so that he could continue to enjoy the freedom of movement that his son was removing from the rest of us. He was also accused of inappropriately touching up Tory MP Caroline Noakes.

Johnson giving his father, whom Boris Johnson’s mother alleged was a violent and abusive husband who once broke her nose, is like a child giving its parent a grubby crayon scrawling which gets pinned to the fridge with a fridge magnet alongside the menu from the local Chinese takeaway. It might make Johnson Sr. very proud of his wee boy, but it is utterly meaningless trash to everyone else. All it achieves is the further debasement of an honours system which has already lost all credibility and completes it descent into rewards for cronyism. On the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show in 2019, the elder Johnson claimed in 2019 upon being told that a viewer had called his son Boris ‘Pinocchio’ retorted : “That requires a degree of literacy which I think the Great British public doesn’t necessarily have.” Be that as it may, Stanley, but we do have the requisite degree of literacy to spell W.if.e. B.e.a.t.e.r.

The honours system is nothing more than a means for British party leaders to reward their donors and supporters, it is state sponsored patronage which bears the same relationship to the recognition of true public service that Elon Musk’s subscription service blue tick on Twitter does to public notability. Anyone can get it if they pay enough to the right people.

On Tuesday the Conservatives unveiled another inhumane and cruel bill which heaps yet more misery on the desperate people attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats. The proposals, which aim to pander to the basest instincts of the Daily Mail, will strip those who cross the Channel in small boats of any right to asylum in the UK, and seeks to deport them to third countries, barring them of any right to enter the UK or ever to apply for British citizenship, the bill is almost certainly unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the extremists in the Tory party , which is most of them these days, have renewed their calls for the UK to exit the ECHR, joining such human rights abusing states as Russia and Belarus. In 2014 Scotland was urged to remain a part of the ‘world beating’ UK, but nine years on we see all too clearly that the UK is only world beating in being a disgrace and an international embarrassment.

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