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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Marina Hyde

Behold the warring Tories, fighting like cats in a sack to achieve – precisely nothing

Boris Johnson (C), business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (R), and No 11’s Nadhim Zahawi (L).’
‘Sitting round the ‘Get Jack Shit Done’ table yesterday were Boris Johnson, business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (right), and No 11’s Nadhim Zahawi (left).’ Photograph: Kyle Heller/No10 Downing Street

Nothing could possibly be longer than this Conservative leadership race – not even the final minute of your washing machine cycle. Every promise made in it should be treated with the same deference you’d reserve for the claim that the tab closure on a cardboard cereal box “seals in freshness”. Given the crises raging outside, the contest resembles a Dickensian reality show, in which two grotesques compete to run the workhouse, simply refusing to be thrown off course by the increasingly desperate entreaties of their paupers. Who, as a mark of lavishly sarcastic respect, are these days referred to as “clients”.

The hustings now take place at a pitch only 75-year-old sociopaths can hear, so I’m afraid I don’t know whether bubbly detention centre redcoat Liz Truss last night promised to “look again” at bringing back the poor laws, though I am enjoying the doomed efforts of the Sunak campaign to insist that their guy gets it. “For too long, water hasn’t had the attention it deserves”, burbled Rishi, on the same day the Northern Echo ran an aerial photo of the huge swimming pool complex Sunak is building at his constituency home in Yorkshire, under an authority that this morning announced a hosepipe ban. Sunak’s really done everything to show us his struggle is real, short of running under the slogan “Kim, there’s people that are dying!”.

Attempts by our underdog to garner sympathy are best described as mixed. Last night Sunak revealed that he’d messaged and called Boris Johnson in recent weeks, but hadn’t heard back. Don’t worry, mate – you can catch up on the backbenches in September. Except, regrettably that joke doesn’t really work because it relies on the frankly incredible premise that Johnson will turn up to parliament.

He certainly can’t be arsed being prime minister of a country on the point of immolating itself for his attention. Today’s splash headline in the mild-mannered Metro newspaper is: PM TURNS UP FOR MEETING. This was the story about Boris Johnson unexpectedly presenting as the “surprise guest” at a Downing Street meeting with the energy bosses who are about to plunge an unspecified but hefty percentage of the country into dire financial distress. The meeting resulted in the government announcing precisely zero new measures. So think of Johnson’s quirky cameo as a sort of “and finally” to the cost of living apocalypse. According to his comments after the meeting, the prime minister plans to “keep urging” the sector to help people. The official readout adds that Johnson also “emphasised” some stuff. Thank you for your service, sir! The Rock has something he calls his Get Shit Done table. Downing Street has the opposite – a Get Jack Shit Done table.

Also sitting round it yesterday were business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (more on him later on), and No 11’s Nadhim Zahawi, a man who’s realised he’s only going to be in post for a few weeks, and consequently wants to have a hot chancellor summer doing things such as naffing off on holiday and ignoring questions about his tax affairs. Still, great to see Nadhim recharged by his time away, back round the table for another hard day’s urging and emphasising. He apparently chucked out some flannel about “the spirit of national unity” – and you may well feel he will have success bringing the nation together in an overwhelming desire to call him a waste of space.

Hand on heart, however, you can’t accuse Keir Starmer of filling the vacuum created by those at the top of the government to which he leads the opposition. A highly unfortunate clash of holidays has left the Labour leader and his frontbench missing in inaction, with Starmer’s absence from the debate once again raising the suspicion that his most tirelessly nurtured political skill is simply waiting for it all to go to shit. I don’t know what you’d call this strategic ideology. Defaultism? Can your opponent double-fault you into No 10? I guess we’ll end up seeing, but there is a school of thought that winning the argument is a better bedrock to build on than some other epic failure losing it. I note that the Labour leader is finally beginning to unfurl his proposed economic package like the fronds of a not-to-be-rushed rare fern, but leaving Gordon Brown to step in and make the counter-argument for him has felt a lot like getting your mum to do your school project.

As for Kwarteng, it feels ironicidal that he was one of the Tory MPs (along with Liz Truss) who once wrote a book claiming that British workers were “among the worst idlers in the world”. High praise! The UK “rewards laziness” apparently, which feels accurate in this case, given that 10 years on, Kwarteng is now a cabinet minister whose job is being done by TV’s Martin Lewis, along with those of about four other secretaries of state. I keep boggling over the lesser-known fact that turning the flow temperature down on many boilers can save consumers about 8% a year on their annual energy bills. When the Social Market Foundation’s James Kirkup asked various politicians why the government wasn’t out there formally giving the public boiler optimisation advice, they all essentially said they didn’t want to be accused of nannying. They prefer to “nudge”, apparently – so do be glad they didn’t nanny those currently being nudged into the abyss.

Incredible, given all this inaction, that we are still somehow hearing about “the blob”. Do you know about “the blob”? This is the invisible foe that ministers and their media frotters love to talk about because it shows how some woo-woo antagonist is stopping them being in even the same postcode as “adequate”. The blob is a bone idler’s version of The Power of Nightmares, where a bunch of sensationally indolent ministers and their brosé-addled spads concoct an enemy that will allow them to do the square root of nothing for the people they’re supposed to serve, while blaming something called “the blob”.

It’s really a mark of how utterly beaten political discourse is that this way of talking about executive failure is still given the time of day, when the biggest decision Boris Johnson has bothered taking over the past few months of crisis is whether to let some tax avoider pay for another chocolate fountain at his wedding. In recent weeks the blob has been retrospectively blamed for Johnson’s demise, and pre-emptively blamed for a Truss prime ministership’s failings, and as these crises deepen you can be sure it’ll carry on being cited by increasing numbers of lazy, unfocused or ineffective ministers trying to put the blame for ordinary people’s anguish anywhere other than their own doorsteps. The blob?! Sorry, but no. Don’t talk to us about the blob. THE BLOB IS YOU.

  • Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

  • What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde is published by Guardian Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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