Sit down, this may be shocking: the 1922 committee is outdated & we need to act. UK politics is at a long time fracture: the Prime Minister is a demonstrable criminal whose frontbenchers are at best desperate to clutch power between hands that remain uncalloused and estranged from hard work and their voters' lives. The back bench know their goose is cooked, so they’re following its footsteps towards fascism- goose stepping if you will- to try and maintain their power. Voters are disenfranchised, unwilling to put pen to paper for their money-shagging overlords but also put off by an opposition they still associate with socialism- a concept none of them seem able to define, but are certain they don’t like. Now, evidence emerges that Johnson plans to pile the 1922 Committee higher than the bodies of his voters with slavish loyalists to escape punishment for the ever clearer conclusion we all reached years ago: that he is as good at being a Prime Minister as he is at being a husband. So, as another lever of British democracy is unceremoniously yanked out of reach, we continue our inexorable orbit around the question: How do we win when the man in charge is as innocent as a jam smeared child in your best friend’s kitchen? The Telegraph tells us of a new plot to save Johnson from the terrible repercussions of his own actions: taking the already chocolate-fireguard-in-a-summer-crematorium useless 1922 Committee and filling it with even more sub-sentient grifters loyal only to the bumbling liar-in chief. The article is, of course, paywalled. Nothing like putting a premium on whether politics is being roughly dry-humped over the burnished desk of the Crime Sinister is there. Regardless, the article is clear enough in the title and intro: Johnson will hollow out the committee (who receive and manage letters of no confidence) to ensure that he cannot be called to heel by those who should have a say on his tenure. Kieron Clarke, political producer for GMB, was told by another shadowy Tory source yesterday, that some in the party speak of Johnson as “an ocean-going, gaff-rigged cunt” before professing “we can’t wait to kick his arse out of Downing Street before he brings the whole Conservative Party down”. Strong words for a party who has glibly ridden the port stained coattails of Johnson from his lofty tenure as a verbose journo for right wing rags, all the way to his current position, perched on the peak of the precarious pillar of British politics. But it’s easy to blame the harbinger isn’t it: we all know that they described Johnson’s blundering ineptitude as “priced in” when they collectively placed their hands on his cottage cheese arse and thrust him into the top job (apologies for using “Johnson” and “thrusted” together)- but lets not just blame Johnson for this. The 1922 Committee has long been held as a secret weapon we can roll out and deploy just as soon as Johnson and his party does enough damage - as soon as the conservatives do enough damage - but what do we define as enough, in this context? They stood behind him when he railed against feeding hungry kids, during his barmy strategy to let covid ravage the nation, when he refused to apologise for racist remarks or when it came out that he was boozing it up behind the blinds of downing street as we were all texting our loved ones tearful goodbyes. They didn’t bat an eye at telling us that he was ambushed, Rambo-style by cake and was lucky to have survived the frosting, or that he was the man to lead us as our economy’s breathing became more and more laboured in the corner of parliament. They eye rolled at his misspending of public funds on PPE, chuntered about woke lefty lawyers when he was asked if it was reallyappropriate to send desperate, exhausted refugees thousands of miles away at great cost. Johnson is a colossal haemorrhoid on the arse of a nation collectively exhausted by private school rich-boy buggery But make no mistake: he’s a symptom of the disease of the Tory party. A party that is, unfortunately, progressive in all the wrong ways. Ask any conservative voter “What has this government done for you?” and you will get a selection of stock responses. From the mouths of the permanently puce-faced rage-voters, it’ll usually be “we get to fight back against the woke remoaner cancel culture loving lefties”. "In what form does this take?" I ask. They normally can’t answer, but one person did tell me yesterday he was glad the HRA was being repealed under snake-venom-impressionist, Dominic Raab, because “it’ll teach the snowflakes”. Poor Gammon McGammon (a nom de-plume) didn’t seem to realise that he’s more like us snowflakes than he is a £90,000-a-year bottom-feeding elite who happily transcribes the culture war turds directly from Johnson’s rear end to a clean white sheet of A4 that restricts his rights just as surely as they do ours… “They got brexit done!” is up next; an ironic sentiment as David Frost recently stated he hopes to “see Brexit done by August 2024”. Amazing how it was done when we voted, done when we waited, done when they debated sub standard deal after sub standard deal, done when the clocks struck, done when we left, done when the extra paperwork kicked in, when the queues started, when the “sausage wars” began… I feel like Brexit’s shelf life is longer than the PPE stocks the government quietly squandered against the advice of Operation Cygnus. Whatever response you get from these people is as hollow as the soundbite they rehashed it from. Johnson’s raison d’être is to feed talking points to people who are angry at anyone who doesn’t resemble them, either by the hue of reddish white skin or by the ingrained superiority complex of being squeezed out of their harried mother and dropped onto the Great British Isles head first: None of these people will ever vote against Johnson. Why would they? Their lives are miserable anyway. Can’t Pay, They’ll Take It Away isn’t a tv show to them, it’s a threat. And it is of course not the man who lays down the laws of the land’s fault, the man who decides on tax and NI contributions, who can enshrine fair pay laws - no, it’s the murky shadows of them dirty forriners coming here on boats in their hundreds, positively swarming us - strange then, that we’re nearly 200,000 people lighter than we were before Johnson’s cross-eyed oversight of the pandemic. The surmising of all of this is simple: the real answer to the question of “What has this government done for you?” is “displayed my values or lack thereof”. A shocking amount of Brits don’t know or care what the 1922 Committee, or the HRA, or the EHRC, or the EU or prorogation are - they just know that Britishness is defined by accepting whatever toilet-warm turgidity the government feeds them, is the essence of true patriotism. They don’t care that Johnson has fucked our democracy harder than Arcuri in a Malmaison - because they’re under the impression that nothing can or will change. Who cares if he stacks the committee with allies, it’s all the same isn’t it? The desperation I feel about finally injecting this nation with the MRNA vaccine of political awareness and activism is reaching fever pitch. Seeing the cross-eyed indifference of the masses cheerily waving goodbye to rights and freedoms that were hard won is petrifying, and the time for peaceable chat over how to handle this bally scallywag is reaching its close. Real action must be taken to ensure that Johnson is stopped from concatenating his rueful reign of power with complete control of it. "How?" people ask me a dozen times a day. I wish I knew. Ten years ago I just had a dull indifference towards the Conservatives. Now I would face real, serious consequences if only to wake up a hardcore base of Brits to the squalor we’re in, under a man who would shoot someone and snappily blame them for getting in the way of his bullet. How we give our sedated countryfolk a collective finger up the bum and get them to pay attention to where we’re headed, I don’t know. What I do know, is as the option of dialogue gets closer and closer to obsolescence, the more frightening options are beginning to loom out of the dark that’s engulfing us: violence, real large scale protest, disruption to the lives of the masses. And let’s start by giving this gaffe-prone bumble-stick the neutering he so sorely needs.
