YOU HAD ONE JOB: And you certainly didn’t do it. Robert Jenrick is only the latest pretender to the throne of Emperor Boris who has not been fired.
The setup is simple. Week in, week out, young Turks who aspire to Borishood compete to fulfill basic tasks. Every week, the Johnson dismisses the least successful, or at least the most anonymous. The last man standing becomes Apprentice to Johnson.
But Johnson never fires anyone. And so the shitshow continues indefinitely, and none of the candidates fears failure. It has become a competition to see who can get away with the most.
In Jenrick’s case, it’s a simple matter of helping a billionaire to avoid paying tax. Jenrick has not been particularly good at Borishood, and he is certainly anonymous. But the stakes are higher these days, and a simple case of blatant corruption no longer cuts the mustard.
Indeed, when an unelected bureaucrat can break lockdown, claim to go driving to test his eyesight, lie about it, and instead of being sacked is rewarded with his own cosy press conference, the stakes are higher than Michael Gove on a fact finding mission to Amsterdam.
Matt Hancock has tried especially hard to get fired. He has tried lying, being creepy and patronising, concealing information, contradicting himself, and fiddling the figures. Yet Johnson hasn’t fired him either.
The only wannabe Boris that Johnson would like to fire is Keir Starmer. Unfortunately for Johnson, Starmer is not an arse licking toady on the take, but a genuine rival. A typical exchange between them goes thus:
“Prime Minister, the figures show that your government is doing a particularly bad job, please explain.”
“The figures are wrong!”
“They are your own figures, Prime Minister.”
At which point Johnson generally splutters and engages in some irrelevant whataboutery instead of replying.
Shitshow means shitshow. Unfortunately Starmer can’t fire Johnson either.