If there were more people like this, I think Starmer would be worried. A little while ago the Labour party invited their members to send in their suggestions for the policies the party should put forward. I responded with a raft of Old Labour, Corbynite policies – nationalisation of the utilities, renationalisation of the NHS, reformed and strengthened welfare state, strong trade unions and so on. All the good stuff that would have Blair, Mandelson and the rest of their evil clique, not to mention Murdoch, screaming in rage and horror. But I also mentioned that I thought the country needed a special parliamentary chamber, elected by working people for working people, to counteract all the millionaires in parliament. I got an email from the Labour party this morning telling me that somebody had left a comment on it and providing a link to it. This was from a Labour member, ‘Paul’, who liked the idea. He wrote
‘I love the idea of a workers’ chamber.
I’m fed up of being trodden on by former Eton pupils.
As well as no more wars, we should rejoin the EU. Be part of the world again, not just an isolated, xenophobic country run by corrupt racist millionaires.’
Absolutely. I’m glad someone liked my idea. If only there were a few more!
The Tories really are slave-driving sadists. Apart from the unemployed, there’s a real hatred of the sick and disabled, who they also consider to be workshy scroungers. I got this message the other day from the internet petitioning organisation 38 Degrees, asking me to sign a petition against their latest wheeze. There’s a bill going through parliament at the moment that’s gone under the radar, but if passed would force doctors to find suitable work to do for sick people rather than signing them off. I think they’ve tried something like that ages ago. I remember them trying to pass some kind of law to prevent doctors signing people off work. Anyway, it seems they’re going back to it with a vengeance. However, this mentality is actually crippling industry as well as workers. Presenteeism is the state where unwell employees nevertheless have to, or feel they have to come into work. This obviously spreads the disease and doesn’t contribute to efficiency. I can remember reading a piece about it a few years ago, which demolished the Tory policy of forcing people to work even so unwell that they really need time off. But the Tory party is so thick and vindictive that this has obviously gone way over their Eton-educated bonces. Here’s the message
‘David, this new plan from the Government to interfere when we’re sick is unbelievable. GPs would be told not to sign people off sick from work, and instead tell them to find ways to work through illness. [1]
The Government says it’s to help boost the economy, but targeting sick people – instead of corporations like BP and Centrica that have made billions in profit – is cruel and short-sighted. [2]
Luckily we have a chance to stop it. It’s one of many ideas being considered ahead of next month’s budget. And the Government will be watching closely to see how people react. So we have a chance to shoot it down before it becomes anything worse than a bad idea thrown around in a cabinet meeting.
So far it’s not made many headlines or gotten much attention so the Government might think they can get away with it. A huge petition signed by over 49,000 people, is calling out this terrible idea to be dropped before the budget. But we’ll need more people to add their name if we are going to get them to listen.
So David, if you think doctors, not ministers, should make decisions about what happens when we’re sick, sign the petition today. It takes just 30 seconds and we’ll make sure it gets on the radar of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt:
Here’s another three sketches of some of the people I consider to be great comedy talents – the satirist Alan Coren, and the actors John Wells and Roy Hudd.
I’m not quite satisfied with the picture of Alan Coren, as he really wasn’t jowly or fat in the lower face. But I do think he is one of this country’s greatest comic writers of the 20th century. He was for many years the editor of Punch, and just about the only reason in its last years to read the magazine. Coren’s method was to take a ridiculous story from one of the papers, and then write a ridiculous piece about it. Thus, a story about a ‘sexy actress’ missing her pet tortoise turned into a tale of the said reptile making an excruciatingly slow bid for freedom before finally getting caught. The beginning of package holidays to Spain with booze included turned into a tale of a totally blotto bloke trying to write back home. 1984 is rewritten as if it was about 70s Britain, where nothing works. The press runs headlines like ‘Come Off It, Big Brother’, the Youth Spy is annoying brat who shouts to its mother that Winston Smith has a lady friend, and Room 101 isn’t really terrifying because due to supply problems they can’t get a rat. They offer Smith a hamster instead, but he isn’t afraid of them and annoys them by telling them so. They inflict the hamster on him anyway, and he has to pretend to be frightened. Coren has been accused of racism because of a series of pieces, The Collected Speeches of Idi Amin, and More of the Collected Speeches of Idi Amin, in which he depicted the thug using the stereotypical Black pidgin English. I dare say it is racist, but as it’s directed at a brutal torturer and mass murderer, I honestly don’t care. Amin deserved far worse, and I don’t see Coren as personally racist.
At the same time as he was editing it, Coren also appeared as one of the contestants on Radio 4’s News Quiz, facing Richard Ingrams and Ian Hislop on the opposing side representing Private Eye. I read Private Eye now, but back then I far preferred Punch, which seemed more genteel and funny without being vicious. Punch died the journalistic death after Coren left it to edit the Radio Times, but he still continued to appear on the News Quiz until his sad death in the early ’90s. He eventually stopped editing the Radio Times and took up writing a column in the Times giving his humorous view of life in Cricklewood. These pieces are funny, but the really good stuff was earlier in Punch.
His pieces were collected in a number of books, some of which had deliberately bizarre names. In an interview on Pebble Mill he revealed how one of them got its particularly striking name. He rang up W.H. Smith to ask them what their bestselling books were about. They told him, ‘Cats’. He then asked them what their second bestselling books were about. ‘Golf’, they replied. He then asked them what the third most popular books they sold were about. They told him it was the Second World War. So, he called it Golfing for Cats and stuck a swastika on the cover. For his next book, he contacted them again and asked them what the most popular product they sold was. They told him it was tissues for men, so that’s what he called it.
Coren’s humour was distinctive – it was dry, but also slightly silly. Answering a question on the News Quiz about one of the members of Thatcher’s cabinet, he replied, ‘Oh – this is the ministry of Gummer’. A question about Prince Philip on an edition of the show in Edinburgh prompted him to reply, ‘This is the patron of this fair city, Zorba the Scot’. When the Tory election broadcast for the 1987 general election showed Spitfires and other World War II planes zooming about, Coren remarked that it was the Royal Conservative Airforce and pointed out that when the servicemen came back from the War, they all voted Labour. He’s been succeeded as broadcaster by his daughter, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, who is genuinely erudite and intelligent, and his son, Giles, who is a right-wing snob, and who made a sneering comment about people in council houses. Although Coren edited the patrician and eminently establishment Punch, he himself was a former grammar school lad, and there was a bit of class friction in the News Quiz between himself and the genuinely upper-class team from the downmarket Private Eye. I stopped listening to the News Quiz a long time ago because I got sick of the anti-religious sneers when Sandi Tokvig was chairing it and didn’t agree with many of the views of the panellists, who seemed to be stuck in the London bubble with a contempt for the rest of the country. Previous series are available on DVD, however, and they are well worth listening to, not least because of Coren. A great comic wit, sadly missed.
John Wells. He was one of the Private Eye team and was as patrician and establishment as the people that magazine skewered. He was the headmaster and French teacher at Eton. He was also one of the writers of the Dear Bill diaries in the Eye, which were supposed to be the letters of Dennis Thatcher to Bill Deedes, one of the writers in the Times. The book’s hilariously funny, especially when it describes Keith Joseph getting egged everywhere, but no-one can work out why it’s only him that does. Other highlights include him visiting the old folk’s home in which Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan are respectively housed, with Heath hating and ranting about Thatcher while Macmillan still hates and rants about Heath. As with Bentine and the Bumblies, this work of fiction excited the interest of the security people, who asked Wells where he got his information from. Wells replied that he just made it up, and he wasn’t getting any information from anyone. ‘Thank heaven for that,’ the rozzers replied, ‘We thought there’d been a leak.’ Wells had got the tone of Dennis Thatcher’s speech and mindset exactly right, in my opinion. He also appeared as Thatcher’s husband in the farce Anyone for Dennis?, which I can remember being put on TV. There’s a piece of very Cold War humour there, when the Russian ambassador fears that a nuclear war is imminent and talks about the brave Soviet soldiers with their eyes fixed on the last dawn, before collapsing with relief when he finds out that he’s mistaken.
Wells also appeared as a guest on a number of TV shows, including Lovejoy, and the radio shows The News Quiz and Tales of the Mausoleum Club. He had a camp manner, which he knew how to use for great comic effect. For example, when the teams were answering a question about the controversial portrait of the royal family that showed them all nude, he remarked that it was glad one royal was absent because ‘that would have been really gristly’. A question about the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland prompted him to describe her as a woman, who wrote covered in small, white dogs. Tales from the Mausoleum Club was a series of parodies of Victorian classic literature. One of these was a spoof of Treasure Island, ‘Trevor Island’, in which a gang of pirates go after the treasure buried on the island of Tombola. Wells played the pirate’s camp captain, who at one point remarked, ‘Oh damn, I’ve snapped my second-best bra!’
Roy Hudd. He was on TV quite a bit in the early 70s only to subsequently vanish. I can remember him from when I was at junior school presenting an afternoon programme for the elderly. While he vanished from TV, he carried on broadcasting on the radio, where he was the star of the satirical News Huddlines on Radio 2 with June Whitfield. He also appeared from time to time on other programmes, including as an astral seaside entertainer playing the Wurlitzer on the Reeves and Mortimer revamp of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). I’m including him here as he was also an expert on the Music Hall. Back in the 1980s he appeared on a Radio 4 programme about the original Peaky Blinders, who were so notorious that they even wrote Music Hall songs about them. The one he performed was about how they could drink a brewery dry. Away from such elevated matters, he also apparently appeared as the Litterbug in the 1970s public information film against littering.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist it. It was too a good a joke for just one cartoon. Here’s another, showing Boris as bald as his lies. If you can’t read it, he’s also got a sign on his head saying ‘ETON’. And his wig is still a living animal, but this time perched on the wig stand.
I found this brief biography, ‘Who Is Jacob Rees-Mogg’ on the Led by Donkeys channel on YouTube. It covers Mogg’s life and career from his birth to today and shows exactly why he shouldn’t be anywhere near government – the greed, snobbishness, mendacity, duplicity and sheer governmental incompetence. Here’s a summary of its contents.
Mogg was born in May 1969 in London, the son William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the Times. He was naturally educated at Eton. In 1982, while he was a twelve-year old schoolboy, he was the subject of a French documentary as he was a financial trader and supporter of Thatcher. In one interview for the programme he said, ‘I love money. I always have done.’ When asked if he wanted to get married, he replied ‘No’, as he didn’t want to get divorced and his wife to get his money. In 1997 he campaigned for the Tories in the traditional Labour seat of East Fife. The image accompanying this shows him stepping over a fence looking exactly like John Cleese as the Minister for Silly Walks, but without the bowler hat. The locals were bemused by the fact that he was accompanied by his nanny, who was there to iron his shirts. 1998 – according to a biographer, his maid and his nanny took turns holding a book over his head at a picnic at Glyndebourne to make sure he didn’t get sunburnt. That same year he campaigned in the Wrekin, where he also lost. In 2006 he made a statement comparing people who weren’t privately educated and who never went to Oxford and Cambridge to potted plants and implied that they were incapable of writing an articulate letter. The next year, 2007, he and two of his friends set up Somerset Investment Capital. This committed itself to business ethics, but then stated that environmental, social and governmental concerns would not form the basis of their ethical policy.
In 2010 he finally succeeded in getting his wretched backside elected to parliament in the Somerset Northeast constituency. Three years later in 2013, Mogg distinguished himself by denying that workers have a right to a paid holiday. Then he took the decision to attend the annual dinner of the far-right Traditional Britain Group, despite being briefed about them by anti-Fascist organisation and magazine, Searchlight. He only decided to disassociate himself from them when they issued a statement denouncing Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, as a ‘monstrous disgrace’ and recommending that people like her should be asked to leave the country. He also described man-made global warming as ‘much debated’ – totally wrong, as the vast majority of scientists are convinced it exists. The next year, 2014, Mogg advises that humanity should adapt to rather than attempt to mitigate climate change. He also lies about a UN report, claiming that it states that if measures were adopted to combat climate changes today it would take hundreds or a thousand years to produce results. The report said no such thing. In March the same year it was revealed his investment company was making a cool £3million from mining and £2.4 million in oil and gas.
In 2015 he stated his opposition to gay marriage and followed this in 2016 with a statement backing Donald Trump, who was then running a very racist, sexist and bigoted campaign. A year after that, in 2017, he revealed that he had never changed a nappy despite having six children. He also lied again, this time claiming that Labour had deliberately not told people they could get help from food banks. He also said that he thought the idea of people giving to these charities was ‘uplifting’. This was much mocked at the time. It is uplifting that people are willing to give to them, but utterly despicable that they have to exist in the first place. He also still opposed marriage equality and abortion in all circumstances as well as the morning after pill. Thus, he suffered no little embarrassment when it was revealed that he had investments in a company producing a stomach pill widely used in illegal abortions in Indonesia. He also had shares in a company producing drugs for legal abortions in India. He sold these shares, but retained those in tobacco, oil and gas companies. He also met Trump’s aide, Steve Bannon, a journalist for the far-right news outlet Breitbart, discussing how the right could win both in American and Britain. This segment has footage of the torchlight fascists marching in the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville. In 2018 it was revealed that Somerset Capital had also invested in Sberbank, a Russian bank that had been sanctioned by the EU since 2014 because of the Russian occupation of Crimea. It was also revealed a year later in 2019 that he’d made £7 million in profit from the Brexit vote. But backing Brexit didn’t stop him establishing two funds in Dublin to take advantage of the fact that it was still in the EU while London was not. Somerset Capital was paying him £15,000 per month and he owned 15 per cent of the shares. His firm was managed by subsidiaries operating perfectly legally in the tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Singapore.
Going back to the far-right, in 2019 he retweeted a comment by the leader of Germany’s Alternative Fuer Deutschland. He was also interviewed by Trump-supporter James Delingpole for Breitbart. The ousting of Tweezer by Johnson that year was also due in no small part to his machinations and that of his European Research Group. He also chose to show precisely what he thought about a debate on Brexit by lying down and appearing to go to sleep on the hallowed green benches of parliament. He also implied in a radio interview that the victims of the Grenfell fire died because they were too stupid to leave the building. He then mysterious vanished from the campaign trail, suggesting that his aides had advised him to lie low for a while. When a voter did try to ask him about his comment, he fled.
This year Truss made him Minister for Brexit Opportunities, despite profiting from investments in a Russian gas company, whose chair was one of Putin’s chums. He did, however, promise to divest himself of these investment after the invasion of Ukraine. Truss then appointed him Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. He backed the disastrous minibudget to the hilt, which has resulted in catastrophic mortgage hikes and the reimposition of austerity. Rather than accept responsibility, he blamed the mess on the Bank of England. The video ends with a young female journalist at the Financial Times describing this as ‘bollocks’.
This is who is now in government. And he’s only just down the road from me in Bath and Northeast Somerset. Uuurgh!
And after watching that video, here’s something that might cheer you up. Mogg’s frank statement that he loved money made me think of the Flying Lizard’s cover of the Beatle’s class, ‘Money’. Here it is, also from the TopPop channel on YouTube.
I found this spoof advert for the job of Prime Minister on the Larry and Paul channel on YouTube. It purports to be from the UK ‘Govurnmunt’, complete with images of the Jobcentre and official UK government logos. It gives the details of how well the prime ministers are paid, their severance pay and pensions. It also reassures applicants that they don’t have to worry about having no previous experience or a high IQ. This is backed up with images of Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. Nor do you have to worry about having left before in disgrace, which is accompanied with images of BoJob, Dodgy Dave and Tweezer. On the other hand, you have to be good at maintaining important relationships. This has images of Rupert Murdoch, amongst others. And if you’re not ready for the change just yet, there’ll be another recruitment opportunity in about six weeks. Probably. It ends with the announcement that the job is open to any sociopath who went to Eton.
And so, the office of prime minister becomes a farcical joke. Though the mock ad’s funny and is the type of satire we should be getting from mainstream media. but probably won’t. ‘Cause if you laugh at the Tories on television, you’ll lose your license fee and end up with Nadine Dorries demanding your privatisation.
I’ve got a few interesting remarks from some of the great commenters on this blog about a piece a put up about a video by Simon Webb of History Debunked about Kwarteng. Webb wondered if the man now doing his best to trash our economy was a diversity hire, whose sole qualification for the job was his skin colour. Mark Pattie and Jim Round have pointed out that he isn’t. He was appointed because he was another Old Etonian willing to implement the programme of the Tory hard right.
Mark wrote
‘Kamikaze Kwarteng was *not* a diversity hire. He may be of Ghanaian descent, but he was Eton educated (hence probably why he got the Chancellor job). Suella Charlatan got the Home Sec job because she was more right-wing than Patel, and James Cleverley got his role because of his many years in the Army. Unlike the rest, he seems to be one of the very few (ten or so) genuinely decent Tories I’ve any respect for. It’s a damn shame he didn’t run for the leadership.’
And Jim commented
‘As with quite a lot of Simon Webb’s videos, it is what isn’t said rather than what is. It isn’t mentioned that groups like The Taxpayers Alliance and The Institute of Economic Affairs had a major influence on this “budget” (Tim over at Zelo Street has covered this) Also remember that The New Culture Forum, who Webb has been a guest of are based there. They think that this is a “Conservative” budget but it is unknown whether they thought that the markets would react so badly. Also not mentioned is the fact that Kwarteng is highly likely to be a millionaire, as well as attending Eton. But no, let’s feed the narrative that he is only there because of the colour of his skin.’
The Taxpayers’ Alliance tends to turn up on BBC News programmes to give their views on economic policies. They are always presented as if they are a politically independent organisation, but their leaders are all members of the Tories. The Institute of Economic Affairs have been demanding hard-right economic policies since before Thatcher. I don’t think Kwarteng’s a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but this shows that the people at the Arise Zoom meeting on the Tory minibudget were absolutely right: he’s a Thatcherite true-believer, working for arch-Thatcherite think tanks, and so shares the same grotty mediocre views as his leader, Liz Truss. I should say that I haven’t watched Webb’s wretched video, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a section of the Tories is now trying to make him a scapegoat for Truss’ abject economic failure.
I realise many of you are heartily sick and tired of hearing about Johnson and his, what, 18-odd parties, and feel that they’re a distraction from the real issues. And honestly, I couldn’t agree more. Johnson’s cavalier flouting of the Covid rules is indeed an insult to everyone else who kept to them, despite the enormous hardship and grief they may have caused them. And it clearly shows how the Old Etonian buffoon really does believe that it’s one rule for him, and another for the plebs.
But this is just the insult. The real issues are the deep injuries he’s inflicted on the people of this fair country, and those of his wretched Tory predecessors before him. They are the deep cuts to public services and especially the further attacks on the welfare state. The wage freezes, which mean that millions of people are now facing a choice between heating their homes or eating. The work capability tests and the benefit sanctions that are still being used to throw needy people off benefits. The privatisation of the NHS and the destruction of Britain’s economy, industry and agriculture by Brexit. This latter has been for the benefit of Bojob’s chums in the financial sector, particularly Jacob Rees-Mogg, who moved his financial interests to Eire so he could go on trading with the EU. This was when he was loudly touting how wonderful Brexit would be to the rest of us. These are the policies that should be bringing down the government, but unfortunately aren’t.
But at least some of the satirists out there on YouTube are giving us a good laugh at the Tories’ expense. Politics JOE has put up this video portraying Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Dick as the ’80s pop band, the Beastie Boys, singing their classic, ‘You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party!’ And it’s hilarious. One little gem is when Rees-Mogg is shown leering over a porno mag called Toffs Only, which portrays an Edwardian lady slightly raising her dress above her ankle.
At the time, I didn’t think much of the Beastie Boys. I thought they were morons, but I’ve been told since then that they were and are very left-wing, giving money to immigrant groups and the underprivileged. Which makes them far better than the clowns we have in government. So here’s the video – enjoy!
The Independent dug up a few of Michael Gove’s old speeches in which he expressed opinions that really should cause him considerable embarrassment. Should, but probably won’t, as this government seems to be impervious to any kind of shame or guilt. One came from a speech he made as president-elect of Oxford University’s debating society in 1987. Speaking for the motion ‘This house believes the British Empire was lost on the playing fields of Eton’, Gove used the term ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ for Black people. This caused a member of the audience to shout ‘Shame!’ I know it was a different time then, and racist jokes and material were more acceptable then than they are now, but times were changing. Racist language like that wasn’t acceptable.
He also had similarly grotty views on the north, celebrating Thatcher’s humiliation of the region and its people:
“We are at last experiencing a new empire, an empire where the happy south stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner. At last Mrs Thatcher is saying I don’t give a fig for what half the population is saying, because the richer half will keep me in power. This may be amoral. This may be immoral. But it’s politics and it’s pragmatism”.
The happy south? I live in Bristol, and I don’t recall this bit of the south being at all happy under Maggie Thatcher. Not when there was rising unemployment, St Paul’s exploded into riots along with Brixton in London and Toxteth in Liverpool, cuts to unemployment benefit, the ending of student grants, the introduction of privatisation into the NHS, cuts to education budgets so that many schools didn’t have the funding to repair decaying premises and so on. Presumably by ‘happy south’ Gove is talking about those rich areas inhabited by himself and his extremely wealthy and complacently happy chums.
He also made a number of, er, forthright comments about homosexuality. He said that gays thrive on short-term relationships and praised Thatcher’s policies as “rigorously, vigorously, virulently, virilely heterosexual”. To be fair, the Observer, writing about the rise of AIDS amongst American gays, stated that most relationships between gay men were short-term and rarely lasted a year, in contrast with the much longer-lasting connections between lesbians. I’m not sure whether this is still true. As for Thatcher’s policies being ‘heterosexual’, there’s nothing heterosexual or otherwise about privatising everything that wasn’t nailed down and looking forward to selling off the NHS and ending the welfare state, because the poor should look after themselves. On the other hand, Thatcher did try to stop the promotion of homosexuality in schools with the notorious Clause 28. This resulted in massive protests by gays and straight people, who feared it would be the start of real persecution, including incarceration. He also claimed that John Maynard Keynes was also a ‘homosexualist’. I’ve heard those rumours too, and to be fair, I think some of them come from gay rights campaigners. Keynes did have close relationships with men, but he was also happily married for 20 years to the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Of course, it could have been a ‘lavender marriage’ designed to hide his real sexuality, but it’s doubtful. And in any case, what Keynes did in private with consenting adults was his own business. What matters is his ground-breaking economic theory, which has lasted a dam’ sight better than Thatcher’s wretched Monetarism. Gove’s allegations of homosexuality looks a bit like an attempt to discredit the theory by making insinuations about the man.
But it seems Gove’s own sexuality may also be open to question. According to Zelo Street, there was a recent piece in the Spectacularly Boring in which Mary Wakefield, Dominic Cumming’s wife, says that David Cameron was worried that Gove and Cummings were having an affair. Now there would be a ‘gruesome twosome’. She dismisses the idea, stating that it’s all rubbish but the rumour mill goes on. The Street, however, is not so sure, and convinced that at least one of the newspaper groups knows the truth. He urges them to come forward with it, as we’re now in the 21st century. Except for the Tories, of course.
Ah yes, the Tories and homosexuality. I remember how, under Thatcher and Major, it seemed that every week a Tory MP or cabinet minister would have to resign due to extra-marital shenanigans. Gay rights activists took particular delight in outing vociferously anti-gay Tories, who were then caught with their male lovers or rent boys. This reached the point under Major that Private Eye joked that when he talked about going ‘back to basics’, what he really meant was ‘back to gay sex’. And if it wasn’t homosexuality, it was old-fashioned heterosexual adultery with mistresses and prostitutes.
The remark about ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ is the kind of racist comment that has caused Tories to resign in the past. I doubt it will do that to Gove because of how long ago it was made. Gove’s comments about homosexuality also seem to be par for the course in a certain section of the Tory party. Despite David Cameron promoting openly gay Tory MPs, Boris Johnson himself managed to upset the gay community by calling them ‘tank-top wearing bum-boys’. Well, I remember back in the 1970s it seemed everyone was wearing tank-tops, so it wasn’t only gays who were fashion victims.
I suspect if any of his comments does any damage, it should be that about the north. Because that shows the real hatred and contempt metropolitan Tories had for Britain’s former industrial heartland.
And that hatred and contempt is still there, despite the Tories having somehow convinced the northern working class to vote for them.
It’s sad but true that many people have been taken in by Boris Johnson’s image as an affable buffoon. Whatever he does, no matter how inept or offensive, like reciting ‘The Road to Mandalay’ in Thailand’s holiest temple, coming back from talks in Moscow to ratchet up tensions with Russia rather than decrease them, the massive cronyism and corruption, the continuing destruction of the NHS, the tens of thousands whose deaths from Covid could have been prevented, there seem to be any number of people ready to ignore all those because of Johnson’s jovial persona. He’s a buffoon, yes, he’s bumbling, but he’s well intentioned and has the nation’s interests at heart. Yes, he went to Eton, but somehow, like that other scion of money and privilege Nigel Farage, he has managed to convince too many ordinary people that he’s somehow one of them. The American radical magazine Counterpunch once quoted a porter in one of the northern English fish markets as saying that Johnson was working class like him. The reality is, of course, far different. Johnson’s an aristo, and as Jeeves once said to Spode in an episode of Jeeves and Wooster all those years ago, he and the working classes are barely on nodding terms. Like his hair, which is normally neatly combed but which he deliberately messes for effect, all the bonhomie and the image of being a man of the people is a carefully crafted pose. Johnson is genuinely inept, but what is false is the image he projects of having any kind of regard for working people and their concerns.
Mike has put up a very revealing piece originally put up by Damian Furniss, about the real face behind the carefully constructed mask. And, as the Ferengi used to scream about anything they didn’t like on Star Trek, it’s ‘Ugly. Verreeee ugleeee.’ Mr Furniss had the misfortune to encounter Boris while having a pint in the bar while awaiting an interview to get into Oxford. The future Prime Minister then amused himself and his similar rich and snobby friends by sneering at Furniss, mocking everything from his speech impediment to his far humbler social background. Mike’s put up this quote from Furniss about Johnson’s nasty performance.
“Three years older than me, and half way through the second class degree in Classics he coasted through with the diligence he later applied to journalism and red box briefings, you’d have expected him to play the ambassador role, welcoming an aspiring member of his college.
“Instead, his piss-taking was brutal. In the course of the pint I felt obliged to finish he mocked my speech impediment, my accent, my school, my dress sense, my haircut, my background, my father’s work as farm worker and garage proprietor, and my prospects in the scholarship interview I was there for. His only motive was to amuse his posh boy mates.
“In short, he demonstrated all of the character flaws that make him unfit to be our Prime Minister. Nothing I see today suggests he has changed. He’s not Falstaff, he’s Faust. If you are an ordinary working person and think he has your interests at heart, think again.”
I can’t say I’m surprised by any of this. I’ve heard stories myself about how he was a vile bully at Eton, though that’s hardly anything extraordinary given the vicious bullying culture that’s run rampant there and in the other public schools. And for all his aristocratic background, it also shows a monumental lack of good breeding. At some of Bristol’s grammar schools, for example, the pupils were taught that they were to show the same respect to the gardener and the ancillary staff that they would to the teachers. It’s bad form for someone from such a privileged background to sneer at those further down the social hierarchy. But clearly, Boris and his noxious chums regard such morals as for grammar school oiks rather than such lofty personages as themselves.
Unfortunately, I doubt Mr Furniss’ piece will make much of a dent in the impressions of those who continue to be taken in by Johnson. Some of this is, no doubt, because they want to be deceived. They want to believe that somehow Johnson represents the working people of this country, in the same way that there were people more than willing to believe Tweezer when she said that she and her cabinet weren’t members of the ‘elite’, when every single one of them was a millionaire. It’s the other side of the Tories’ equally carefully constructed image of the left and especially the ‘woke’. Membership of the elite isn’t just a matter of wealth and social class, but also of values. The elite, as described ad nauseam by the Tories over here and the Republicans in America, are rich leftists who attack decent, working people with their assaults on national pride and aggressive attacks on racism, misogyny, homophobia and anything else they consider bigoted. Highly privileged individuals, who don’t share the concerns and values of ordinary working people. Unlike them, of course.
But this is all just right-wing rhetoric and propaganda. Johnson, Tweezer and the rest of the Tories are the real elite. They’re millionaires from extremely privileged backgrounds, unlike very many of the Labour party, and particularly the Labour left. There are many MPs from that side of the party, who do come from a real working class background, and whose socialism reflects their genuine concern with improving conditions for ordinary working people. This is despite the attempts by Blair and Starmer to turn Labour once again into a middle class party pursuing Conservative policies and voters.
Johnson and the Tories have nothing in common with the working class, for whom they have nothing but contempt. But they’re very good at manipulating their public image, and so have succeeded in persuading many working people that somehow they represent them.
But every so often the mask slips to reveal the seething mass of class hatred, greed and snobbery beneath.
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