Category: Governing the people

OPERATION LAST GASP : Rumours in the political mills this morning that the old Emperor of the post colonial British Empire, plucky Australian/British/American upstart Rupert Murdoch is ready to change his prime minister again.

“All the little Satans are in a frenzy,” our Satanic mill correspondent reports, “pokers are being sharpened and heated, racks are being restrung, and the political gallows are being erected in the shadow of the giant brass toilet.”

The reason for the frenzy appears to be a reaction to a Twitter feed..

“Mrs MacBeth is almost clinically insane these days with thwarted ambition and she let’s her boss Rupert know about it,” our correspondent continues, “Mr Murdoch can’t sleep at the best of times anyway without that ‘mad English fart’ sounding off. And with the fall of democracy in English speaking, Western countries being partially incomplete. Jerry does her best, but he wakes sweating, screaming about “razing farking Liverpool to the ground and car parking the lot of it”. So something has to be done in the service of a good night’s rest.”

And that something appears to be the shock revelation of Prime Minister Johnson’s blithe and disinterested approach to the pre-match stage of U.K. v CV-19.

“Clearly anyone without blinkers on who was paying attention a couple of months back saw immediately that Johnson’s government of entitled bluffers were going to get Covid done just like they got Brexit (not yet done).”

Shame you can’t gaslight a virus.

“Or delay the consequences of your ideologically driven, human viral sacrificing choices over years and years. Long enough for old Odey to fill his boots again and again. Shame. Pity.”

But what does Mr Murdoch himself say of the rumours?

“Oh he only talks through an ouija board,” our correspondent finishes. “and right now the pointer is blazing out ‘I LIKE TO CHANGE MY PRIME MINISTERS LIKE I CHANGE MY UNDIES. YOU WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF IT? WHAT’S I”

The sentence remains unfinished, but Mr Johnson’s sentence appears to have been passed.

ALL MOUTH NO TROUSERS : A leak from Downing Street today reveals a bold new initiative to be launched by government in coming days that will “take the fight to Covid-19”.

The plan, which was intended to be leaked, in order to gauge public appetite for it, will see the new NHS Nightingale hospitals transformed into “red, white and blue nerve centres of patriotic flags and bunting”.

“Covid-19 won’t see this coming,” a genius advising the government told LCD Views, “it’ll be so wrapped up in feel good nationalist fervour it will sit down with nausea and retch. That’s when we’ll deal the killer blow.”

What the killer blow is exactly remains under wraps, but it’s believed to be a badge of some variety.

“When this virus was busy mutating in Tufton Street, I mean, in bats and pangolins, it never dreamed one day it would face thousands of freshly ironed Union Jack flags. England will be so festooned in symbolism it won’t matter that what we’re actually doing is still herd immunity. What’s a few tens of thousands of economically inactive dead between friends? Hey? Grandparents. Huh! What are they good for? Huh! Say it again.”

It’s fair to hypothesise that the nerds running Germany, with their elected officials and their PhD’s and their pragmatism, and the bleeding heart snowflakes running New Zealand, with their voluntary pay cuts by MPs and commitment to the sanctity of life, can learn more than a thing or two by watching how we go about CV-19.

But what if the leak reveals there’s little public appetite for thousands of flags? That what anyone paying any attention at all wants is proper PPE for all people on the front lines and a regime of testing, testing, contact tracing and isolation?

“Then we’ll announce some big showy numbers so client journalists can run with it and meanwhile we’ll keep hanging flags. Simple.”

He has risen! He had risen indeed. And gone straight home to bed.

Boris Johnson’s miraculous, not to say stage managed, resurrection on Easter Sunday is going well. It has generated a huge amount of sycophantic sympathy, which means he won’t be asked to take the rap for anything this week.

Adding to the miracle, he was able to make a five minute speech without pausing for breath. Pretty good for a man recovering from a lethal lung infection.

Instead he will be “working from home”. Working from home is one of those rare phrases where you can actually hear the quotation marks. Johnson is setting an example to the rest of the country by failing to do any sort of useful work from his comfy sofa at Chequers.

No change there, then.

In order to make his intentions crystal clear, Johnson has ordered a large quantity of wine. This has two benefits. Firstly, it means he has plenty of wine boxes to paint. It’s something to do. Secondly, if he ever needs to make a public appearance, he can pass off his hangover as a recurrence of covid-19.

Meanwhile all the useful people in the country are doing the essential work of contracting covid-19, so the rest of us don’t have to. All the nurses, doctors, supermarket staff, delivery drivers, and so on will be martyrs to the Herd Immunity “strategy”.

Who will be left? Apart from Boris Johnson, all the other people whose jobs, it turns out, were not that essential after all. The Earth will become a global B-Ark, populated by all the useless people. It bodes well for the future.

So while Boris Johnson stays safely locked away at Chequers, drinking and painting wine boxes, somebody needs to come up with an answer to this crisis, and quickly.

It will probably be 42. Or, if Priti Patel is involved, 4 hundredty thousand and two-ty  squillion.

WHAT SOMEONE’S WORTH : UK’S HOME SECRETARY, PRITI ‘resigned in disgrace in 2017’ PATEL is said to be resting comfortably and self isolating at home during the Covid-19 crisis.

“You get the leaders you deserve,” our home affairs analyst says, somewhat glumly, “Ms Patel was forced to resign by Theresa May in 2017 after a catalogue of dodgy dealings with the IDF was exposed. Apparently she was trying to funnel taxpayer’s money to them? Still, not something that should stop people voting her in again, is it? If the Tories won’t clean house themselves. Not in the 21st Century. So yes, you get the government the people of Witham deserve. And numerous other places.”

But while that’s all well and good, the geographical location of the holder of one of the great offices of state is becoming a concern.

“I don’t see why? Have you seen the damage she does? All that fuelling of xenophobia and the base human hating guff she peddles? You should be happy she’s hiding out. Yes, she can work from home, presumably, but. Well. Okay. She’s probably working up an action plan for how to deal with CV-19 infections in immigration detention centres as we speak.”

Nail the doors shut and look again in a week?

“Ms Patel’s door? If you like. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure the Home Secretary is surplus to requirements. Raab has it all in hand, metaphorically speaking. And once it’s safe to slag off Polish bin men again Ms Patel will be the first you’ll hear speak.”

First Brexit, now CV-19. The UK has seen some very choppy waters in recent years. Now Labour wants to Steer the UK into Calmer seas. Labour’s new slogan promises to Make Politics Boring Again.

Steer Calmer is the phrase on everybody’s lips. No more floundering in the muddy waters of Lake Corbyn, no more desperate struggles to hitch the bandwagon to HMS Boris Johnson. Instead we are expecting oil to be poured onto the UK’s troubled waters.

This is a distinct change from the current Prime Minister In Hiding, whose instincts lead him not to pour oil on troubled waters, but to build a bridge over them instead.

This is the moment that lefty snowflakes have been waiting for. The Left may sometimes have better policies, but the Right usually has the better slogans. No slogan is better than a bad slogan, and Steer Calmer is not too bad as these things go.

A slogan in itself cannot create ventilators out of thin air, or bring harmony to international talks. But, by soothing the people and the economy, maybe the good old Magic Money Tree will be tempted to bear fruit.

Naturally, the world’s media all wanted to Zoom in on the slogan from the safety of their bedrooms. “Steer Calmer means Steer Calmer,” began the slogan, promisingly. Hundreds of eager hacks jabbed frantically at their bedside laptops. “It is an honour to be the new slogan of the Labour Party. New Labour, new slogan!” This was terrific stuff. Keyboards up and down the country were seeing action on a Saturday morning for the first time in decades. “My first priority is to preserve the NHS. And not by boiling it with sugar like my predecessor. I will un-jam the health service!”

The connection collapsed like the promise of free broadband, as every hack tried to ask a question at the same time. The virtual press conference was dead in the water.

Now there is only one thing for it. Get Boris Done.

THIS IS FINE : DOWNING STREET HAS RESPONDED to criticism of its Covid-19 strategy by hiring in the spin doctors that did so much for the great British public in the Brexit and GE campaigns.

The first thing that any sensible country needs in a pandemic is coherent messaging in favour of the governing political elite. The British people can rest assured now that such complex chants as “Get Coronavirus Done!” will soon take the place of policy.

“But we’re doing more,” a Tory MP (who no one has ever heard of before) told LCD Views, “it’s my turn in the media spotlight today. Just for 24hours, that’s the average self life of a Tory MP sent out to dissemble and bullshit the pubic during the CV crisis. It’s like aerial combat in WW1 [Ed. It’s not].”

And one of the raft of new measures to hit the ground running and lie in front of the Covid-19 bulldozer is mass public testing. Just like Germany and South Korea, but more British.

“If you don’t know where the Blitz Spirit is how are you supposed to employ it to combat a virus?” the Tory MP asked, and looked very satisfied.

“Some silly countries aren’t using herd immunity, they’re actually mass testing to try and save lives. As if that’s the job of government?! You can’t save people who will die anyway one day, but you can plant yourself and your staff in front of the tax havens and say Thou Shall Not Pass!”

As part of the drive upwards of 100,000 people a day will soon be tested to see if they have the magic ingredient needed to combat the virus.

“If you have Blitz Spirit you’ll be given a roll of toilet paper and told you can go back to work,” the MP nodded, “the virus doesn’t stand a chance.”

Message to the front line: “I say, you fine young men and women at the sharp end of the NHS, you’re laying down your lives for England! Jolly good show! When the War On Coronavirus is won – and England WILL win – we will remember your sacrifice. Whew! Spiffing! Did I leave anything out?”

Not bad for a first draft, but it does lack references to Spitfires and the Blitz Spirit.

Boris Johnson is to write to everybody working in the NHS to thank them for dying of CV-19, so nobody else has to. The envelopes will be sealed by Johnson’s virusy fingers, and the stamps licked by his virusy tongue. Recipients are advised to wash the letters in soap and water for 20 seconds before opening.

The letter is being cobbled together by whichever people in Number Ten are still free of the virus and at least semi literate. Lacking the guidance of head honcho Dominic Cummings, the letter is rather freeform and stylistically inconsistent. So no change there.

Amidst the waffle and the non sequiturs rests the phrase “taking one for the team”. Rumours suggest that Johnson himself inserted this particularly offensive metaphor, thinking it amusing.

Cummings would not have permitted this. He keeps Johnson on a very tight leash, although occasionally random wiff waff does slip out. However, Cummings was last seen loping away from the Downing Street back door and straight into self isolation. Maybe Carrie Symonds was tired of being the third wheel in the relationship.

NHS staff are utterly delighted to be congratulated in this way. “I think it’s fantastic to get such high profile recognition!” gushed nurse Tori Plant. Her remarks were later discredited since she was discovered to be a Tory plant.

Most NHS employees would rather have some decent PPE, but then some people do like to whinge on about health and safety. They have already had a round of applause, what more do they want of us?

Meanwhile, the foot soldiers on the front line ponder the old lie: Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.