Suzanne Harrington: Eton's greatest mess, Boris Johnson has finally come unstuck
Resign 7, Johnson Today, Thursday Dominic Has Boris To July Lipinski/pa Pic: Agreed 2022 Wire
It’s like watching the next-door neighbours — the ones who recently built a big high wall around their house to keep everyone else out, but forgot to include a gate — having a brawl in the garden, overlooked by everyone else in the neighbourhood. There they are, the posh neighbours, rolling around on the lawn, all dignity gone. Pelting each other with cucumber sandwiches. From a safe distance, it’s comical. Everyone else is filming it for posterity, the way people film fights in pub car parks.
I’m writing this an hour after the BBC announced the only resignation anyone is interested in, despite the run-on House of Commons-headed paper. Tories have been carpooling their resignation letters in a rush to distance themselves from the Greased Piglet — David Cameron’s unaffectionate nickname for his fellow Etonian — who seemed determined to barricade himself in, like some gunless British Trump. Etonian entitlement coalesced with innate sociopathy creating a kind of hybrid only Dynorod could dislodge.
It's just so enjoyable, the whole thing. So deeply, satisfyingly pleasurable. Whole days lost on Twitter, shivering with schadenfreude. Positively schuddering with it. The wallpaper jokes, the Paul Gascoigne turning up with lager, fishing rod and a copy of the ministerial code jokes; all the jokes. Perhaps the funniest is the idea of high-level Tories, who have been defending their own self-serving interests by propping up the Greased Piglet through corrupt thick and incompetent thin, suddenly finding a big bag of ethics, integrity and parliamentary standards down the back of their gilded sofa. Piglets will fly.
Actually, when you think about it, it’s not funny at all — even the joke about Nadhim Zahawi, the one who replaced Rishi Sunak as finance minister, whose horses are warmer than your children (he claimed six grand on expenses to heat his stables while voting against VAT cuts on heating bills for humans so that low-income households shivered). From miners to minors, the Tory trajectory — unless you are one of them, at high level— flattens everything in its path, a bulldozer in the rainforest. Nurses eating out of food banks, the reintroduction of malnutrition.
And so people deflect their own rage with jokes — because if they didn’t what would happen? Nobody knows. The English have never rebelled — superlative forelock tuggers, they remain deferential to anyone with an expensive accent. They have been divided, and conquered. They have been colonised. Unlike the French, they’ve never had their 1789 moment. (Chaps, it’s never too late. Carpe Diem).
Meanwhile, here’s a quote from May 5, 2010 from the Piglet himself, while he was still Mayor of London: “This is unbelievable. As I write this, Gordon Brown is still holed up in Downing Street. He is like… David Brent haunting in that excruciating episode when he refuses to acknowledge he’s been sacked. Isn’t there someone — the Queen’s private secretary, the nice policeman at the door of No 10 — whose job it is to tell him that the game is up?” It's come to life. Gold. Pure gold.
