It was the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who wrote “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose“. Not that I had a clue what that meant until someone with a basic grasp of French told me it stood for, “The more things change, the more they stay the same“. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, if I could say it properly, would seem to sum up how I feel about just about everything at the moment.
I mean, what great news that dithering snake oil salesman Rishi Sunak has sacked home secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman (yes, she invented Suella in order to avoid people confusing her with the alcoholic wife of fictional oil baron J.R, Ewing) from his cabinet of the incompetent, shifted the halfwit James Cleverly to her job and brought back – are you fucking kidding? – David Cameron to become foreign secretary. Sunak, who is keen to present the illusion that his government is entirely new and fresh and has nothing to do with the government we’ve had for the last 13 years, appoints the bloke who broke this broken country in the first place. You couldn’t make it up.
Anyway, Cameron, along with the useful idiots of the Liberal Democrats, plunged this country into austerity, which has seen an explosion in the use of food banks, has seen pay fall in real terms virtually year on year, has brought the NHS to its knees and given us schools that are literally falling apart and, just to remind us what a dingbat he really is, he’s the man who decided to hold a referendum on our membership of the EU, purely in order to end the damage it was doing to the Tory party. That went well. As we now know, unless we have been in hibernation since we voted to leave Europe in 2016, there are no benefits to Brexit and there never will be. And the bloke who brought about the self-imolation of the UK has been restored to the heart of government. To be honest, if I had the energy, I’d despair.
Are we supposed to cheer in the streets to welcome back Cameron? Or is it a last desperate throw of the dice by a desperate and weak prime minister, desperate that something must be done, but beyond bringing back the day before yesterday’s man, he has no idea what that something might be.
Braverman’s replacement in the home office, Cleverly, reassures us that he’s got his finger on the pulse. With the cost of living crisis, higher mortgages and cuts to real term wages, he announces that he’s “absolutely committed to stopping the boats“. The what? Small boats containing desperate refugees, that’ll be them. He could deal with that in a heartbeat by speeding up the processes whereby refugees and asylum seekers are processed, a system brought to its knees (that term again) by the austerity introduced by – oh, who was it again? – David Sodding Cameron and disastrously mismanaged by Priti Patel and Sue-Ellen. IT WAS ALL THEIR FAULT, THEY LITERALLY CAUSED THE PROBLEMS. Do they think we are entirely stupid? Clearly so.
That’s the trouble with the current government. There’s plenty of noise but no action. Braverman talked a good talk – actually, a very bad one – but there was no accompanying walk. And like so many of today’s so-called leaders, she talks down to us. Entitled to rule, do what you’re told. But we elected you. You should be working for us. But no. Not with this lot.
Christ, Cameron’s not even elected, but then neither is Sunak. There wasn’t even a vote to make him Tory leader and then PM and when there was a vote for leader in 2022, he lost to Liz Truss. And that was only a vote among the geriatric gammons in the Tory shires. Now, Cameron is in the House of Lords for life and accountable to literally no one. Every day and in every way we disappear further through the looking glass.
We keep changing prime minister, or rather the Conservative party keeps changing the leader who becomes PM, and it’s basically like 50 shades of shit. Every single one, from Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss and now Sunak but the only way things change is that things get even worse.
More than anything, Sunak has stated publicly that not one of his 350 MPs is up to the job of being foreign secretary. What an admission. “You’re all useless,” he says, “So I’m bringing back someone with no particular skillset in foreign affairs, who fucked the country over in 2016 and has spent the last seven years spending more time with his money. Vote for change. Vote Conservative.”
Good old Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr. He may have died in 1890, but his finger is still on the pulse in a way that the modern Tory party isn’t. The country is on its way to hell in a handcart, but don’t worry: Rishi Sunak is here and he’s managed to extract a failed PM from his shed to do a job his parliamentary colleagues are apparently too useless to carry out. Can I expect John Major to return to the government tomorrow morning? Anything must be possible with this lot.
