The contemptuous and the contemptible have left the building. All that’s left now is a sneer: Truss; Gove, Patel, Raab. And Dorries, of course, who remains perhaps to remind us that there’s always been madness afoot here: something unhinged.

Spitting Image would have struggled to replicate these characters in distorted latex. For how can you caricature something that already looks like a cartoon?

Amidst talk about “honour” and “decency” the Tories who are preparing to bury Boris Johnson are saying that he isn’t like Theresa May and David Cameron. He has no integrity, they say, and he has thus become an electoral liability.

Yet, Johnson in his lies and contempt for British law, has always been a convenient deflection for the rest of his party and all that it represents: class power; unfettered profiteering and a sense of British exceptionalism which, at times, has edged into outright racism.

Johnson sought to prorogue Parliament and dispensed with 21 of his party colleagues who felt that this was a step too far. He oversaw a two-year, Covid bacchanal in Downing Street. He allowed a mafia enterprise to take root in Downing Street for the purposes of exploiting the pandemic for the financial gain of Tory friends and families. He lies publicly about what he knew and when and who told him.

And for more than three years Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid and an assortment of Westminster fluffers who have followed this ministerial pair out of the door supported him. They all profited from his Brexit night of the long knives, as it furthered their own careers. They backed Johnson’s desperate attempts to mount a far-right coup on Westminster.

They thought nothing remiss of the booze and the parties at Number 10 while 160,000 Britons died and the rest of the country observed the rules. If they didn’t profit from the squalid and corrupt trade in PPE equipment then they turned a blind eye to it all. They supported their boss even when they knew he was lying to the electorate.

They continue to back Priti Patel as she makes the UK a pariah state by throwing the most vulnerable people on earth back into the sea and almost certain death or torture. And they backed the Rwanda plan to bribe a Third World country to ensure these undesirable Syrians never set foot in Britain.

They are all happy to risk Ireland’s fragile peace and defy international law in doing so, impervious to the human cost that this might entail. They connive with the financial predations of the City of London which helps conceal the loot of other nations’ gangsters and despots.

So, forgive me if I laugh when Sunak and Javid and the rest of them claim to be acting out of a sense of honour and integrity. There is no honour or integrity in the Conservative Party and there never has been. They have simply concluded that Johnson’s egregious maleficence threatens to attract unwelcome scrutiny of what they truly stand for: greed; inequality and a feral desire to protect the interests of the super-rich. They do this in the seedy hope that one day their obeisance will lead to financial rewards later in their wretched lives.

Johnson’s antics once acted as a cover for his party’s more discreet iniquities. But that was always going to have a limited shelf-life.

I checked Twitter last night to observe an assortment of Poundland intellectuals competing to spin their wit and wisdom. I’ve had more laughs watching Countryfile. To my shame, I even considered entering this self-aggrandising, smug-fest. Thankfully, the temptation evaporated after about 10 minutes.

All these commentators and political savants talked about honour and integrity too. But who do they think will replace Boris Johnson? The Angel Gabriel?

The new Chancellor is Nadhim Zahawi. The last one, Sunak, is married to a woman whose family inheritance is worth around £3.5bn but who claimed non-domicile status to save a few more million. This arrangement continued after Sunak became Chancellor.

Zahawi’s conduct, I suppose, is pale in comparison. He is merely a multi-millionaire. In 2013 The Daily Mirror revealed that, not content with his millions, he claimed nearly £6k for electricity to heat his riding school stables. He resolved to repay “part” of the expenses, which can only be claimed for Parliamentary work. These two men are walking metaphors representing their party’s actual relationship with the people: contemptuousness built on greed and entitlement.

I genuinely do not care whether or not Boris Johnson survives as Prime Minister. Either way, the sewage will keep flowing.

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