I woke up from a world of fractured sleep, not exactly helped by remembering at circa 2.00 am that I’d forgotten to put the recycling out, to find that we have all gone through the looking glass. The world I have woken up to is completely bonkers and, if I didn’t have other things to do, I’d probably go back to bed and hope we might find yesterday once more.
As ever, I start off by powering up my steam-driven computer to read The News. The actual real News, as well as the stuff you find in on-line newspapers, if you can call some of them newspapers in the first place (but that’s another story). And the first thing I see is the front page of the Daily Mail. Fucking hell.
The line between fact and fiction has become horribly blurred in recent times, none more so than in the completely unhinged world of ‘Mad’ Nadine Dorries, the former occasional MP for Mid Bedfordshire. Her new book, The Plot: the Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, is about to be serialised by – surprise, surprise! – the Daily Hate Mail and that purveyor of lies and filth has the serial writes to publish extracts. What a happy coincidence that both Dorries and Johnson happen to have lucrative contracts to write piss-poor columns from this drooping organ! Anyway, it looks like Dorries has gone full Fatal Attraction, judging from this headline.
Who reads this shit, you may ask? And worse still, why do they want to read this shit? In this case, with an election just around the corner, I’m rather hoping millions read it and not just the blue rinse brigade in the Shires. You can’t beat a bit of blue on blue action, politically speaking, and while Mad Nad’s prime motivation you might think would be to make shit loads of money, it’s also likely that she wants to fuck over, metaphorically speaking, those she deems responsible for what most right-thinking people was his self-imolation. One person Mad Nad blames more than anyone else is snake oil salesman Rishi Sunak.
Meanwhile, Sunak himself went wild, wild, wild in the country, chairing what was essentially a two day photo opportunity at Bletchley Park, dressed up as an Artificial Intelligence summit. And at the end – and I can hardly believe I am typing this – the prime minister of Britain and Norn Iron conducted a talk show interview with the richest wanker on the planet, Elon Musk. Most of the questions appeared to be along the lines of, “Just how great do you think you are?” and worse, as Sunak came across more than over-excited fan boy than international statesman. But then he said something to Musk that only an elite, out-of-touch politician who is worth around THREE QUARTERS OF A BILLION QUID could possibly say.
People, said Sunak, should be more willing to give up *takes a deep breath* (me, not him) “the security of a regular paycheck and be comfortable with failing” to start up companies. After reading that comment and having retrieved my jaw from the floor, I sat here, stunned. Let’s get this right. Sunak wants people to just give up their jobs, set up a new company from scratch and don’t worry if it fails. How does that work, then?
My impression is that most folk work hard and play by the rules. If they are fortunate, they mortgage themselves to the hilt to buy a house, spend years struggling in varying degrees to combine hard work with paying said mortgage and raising children. Sunak implies – no, he actually suggests – as someone who is likely to return to his luxury pile in Los Angeles after he loses the next general election, that people should give up their job security and take a punt. I mean, what responsible person does that? Not someone who loves and cherishes their family, for sure. But in Sunak’s world, a failed start-up would probably mean someone else losing all their money, not near billionaire Rishi.
I can only assume that in his pampered and entitled world, this little man who has never wanted for anything, didn’t even know how to use a smart card to pay for petrol and has his own private doctor, negating the need to queue like the rest of us for NHS treatment, blithely assumes we are all like he is. “Ah fuck it. I’m tired of working all the hours God sends, struggling to pay fuel bills and for basic needs, like shopping. I’ve got no experience of running a business but Rishi says I should just go for it. What could possibly go wrong?” Well, apart from poverty, homelessness, destitution, children having to go into care – absolutely nothing. Through the looking glass, Rishi? Mate, we’re never going to get you back.
These, lest we forget, are the people who run our country. The elite, the top minds, the problem-solvers, our leaders. No wonder there is an epidemic of mental illness in the UK. A sector where the likes of Sunak and Dorries have excelled in.
As I say so often, maybe it’s me? Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and everyone else is just waiting for the sainted Rishi to tell us to pack in our jobs and take a punt at running a business? Or maybe, just maybe, the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Norn Iron has collectively lost its mind, even worse than I have?
Anyway, do excuse me. I have to get back to Nadine Dorries’s book and discover where it all went wrong for Boris Johnson. I always thought it was because he was a useless, lying, charlatan and narcissist, but we live and learn, don’t we?
