Confusion. Christmas. Covid. Must Be Britain Under The Tories

Looks like Boris Johnson’s Omicron response task force may shaft everyone’s Christmas plans again

If I had to come up with a two-word phrase to describe Boris Johnson’s approach to Covid, it’d be ‘bumbling cockwomble’. I think there’s been a fairly concerted effort on his part, and the part of all his under-competent lackeys not to issue any useful advice at all.

We now have Omicron. That’s great. I thought we likely would have by now… the UK quarantine system is currently asking people if they’ve sneezed at all in the last few hours and throwing them into an expensive hotel if they have.

That’s one way to boost falling income for airport hotels now that Britain has all the international standing of a paraplegic eel and all the tourist appeal of a dog turd amusement park.

When it comes to issuing Covid advice, Johnson is a master of hedging his bets. Some might see that as political expediency, others may correctly identify it as him being a shifty bellend with no real strategy past self-aggrandisement.

And his top team aren’t much better.

On this issue and many others, they’ve sat down, spun round on their chairs and brainstormed how to be as feckless as possible. I don’t know how many meetings they had, but any meeting with Michael Gove in it will likely end in an intellectual stalemate. The cabinet is a mess and the PM is a car-boot-sale Trump and the UK is only just waking up and realising this fact.

I’m planning to sneak into Downing Street as an aide and suggest the Jim Jones Strawberry Cyanide option. That’ll forge a new path.

So what are we supposed to do over Christmas?

Last Christmas we played the travel hokey-cokey. Johnson announced we could have a ruddy good time in early December, then weeks later tried to shut London with forty minutes notice. All this really did was spread Covid around in packed trains during the inevitable exodus of the capital. Book your tickets, now you can’t use them.

This year we’ve had to cancel the Coca Cola ‘Holidays are Coming’ advert because there aren’t enough HGV drivers to do it.

“I don’t think there should be much snogging under the mistletoe. Don’t need to do things like that.” said Therese Coffey, the Minister for shit haircuts in an interview on ITV.

Forty seconds later upwardly mobile brown billionaire and anti-racism tokenista Sajid Javid jumped onto ITV news to say “People can snog who they wish, I’ll certainly be kissing my wife under the mistletoe — it’s a Javid family tradition. It’s got nothing to do with the government who you kiss or anything like that. But the only thing is just — there’s guidance already out there — just be cautious and enjoy yourselves.”

Great. Thanks, guys. Now I feel sick and a bit sorry for poor Mrs Javid who has to deal with the threat of vegetation-based sexual assault at least once a year. So what does this show us? Two government ministers there, throwing each other under the bus. But like buses, there’s always three in a row.

Because that’s when the Science Minister (and sweaty egg of a man) George Freeman jumped to his feet to tell everyone that he was against Christmas parties, he got immediately shot in the head by a Downing Street sniper. That’s not the official advice they assured everyone. Now Mr Freeman will have to have an awkward Christmas party nobody in his team wants.

So what is the advice? Go out and snog whoever you want, whenever you want under or near mistletoe, but don’t have a Christmas Party, except you can, but don’t. Nobody really knows what the official line is

Little pieces of advice keep arriving from separate parts of the cabinet, who have all the coherence and general attitude of Medusa’s hairdo.

Confusion is how this Government survives

Comedian Matt Lucas said it best. “Go to work. Don’t go to work. Go outside. Don’t go outside”. This is the politics of confusion. Sow enough of it and there will always be someone to blame for whatever goes wrong.

Vladamir Putin has run Russia using pretty much the same tactic since forever.

British people don’t know what we’re doing, whether we’re coming or going and who or what we should trust. That’s why people are making their own minds up — and depending on your risk tolerance, you’re either inside wrapped in bubblewrap or outside licking pensioners.

Johnson is doing this on purpose… the ambivalence is a tactic allowing him to absolve himself of all responsibility. He’s determined to be one thing and it isn’t effective. He wants to be popular. Nobody wants to be the person who cancels Christmas — that’s a poisoned chalice.

But if the science keeps going the way it’s going, he will have to do something. A last-minute cancel-everything handbrake turn… at which point the British public will do what they want and then blame each other. I think that’s Johnson’s strategy. Divide and conquer.

Except he’s got a problem. The Tories are gunning for Johnson.

Story after story emerging of his inability to act from unknown sources. Someone at head office has their knives drawn — and if I can tell you one thing that’s certain about the Tory party, once you’re done, you’re done. They’ve taken all his support away, it’s why he keeps wittering on about Peppa Pig and doesn’t know how to read anymore.

The public are now being drip-fed stories about Johnson’s corruption and incompetence. They definitely aren’t coming from Dominic Cummings, that’s for sure! Definitely not Dominic Cummings. Once more for the people at the back… it’s not Dominic Cummings.

Could he have worked out that perhaps the great British public doesn’t want to hear revenge tales from Dominic? Could he now just be an ‘unknown source’? When all this comes out in dull and overly long autobiographies — I’m 99% sure the Scooby-Doo mask reveal moment will be Dominic Cummings.

Take away his populism defence team and Johnson is just a wittering . He is done… he just doesn’t know it yet. Dead man walking.

In order not to be the person presiding over a Christmas catastrophe, you have to be working hard over the summer to ensure Britain has a robust response to any new variant. Or you can spend the summer saying ‘piffle’ at strangers and doing your own thing — which is pretty much what Johnson has spent most of the year doing.

So Johnson’s time is nearly up. An ideal Christmas present for those of us who detested the floppy haired Etonian guffling before it was cool to do so. Only one question remains.

How are the Tories going to get Boris out without reanimating the Jacob-Marleyian corpse of Nigel Farrage? God help us. Everybody.