Saturday night and I’m at home alone with the kids. The missus has gone out for her annual Christmas (/late-Nov) catch up with the girls and I’m trying to decide how best to make use of the time. It’s a Saturday night not spent stroking her feet while watching a True Crime murdertainment box set. Feels like time that should be spent positively. If only for the novelty. “It’s nice to relax on the weekend, isn’t it love?” “Shhhhh! Or we’ll miss hearing about how somebody somewhere had a very, very bad time with a crowbar.” *stuffs popcorn in mouth to the rhythm of the blunt-force trauma* Do I prank call GB News? Do I spend the next four hours trying to make this website more engaging? I don’t know. What do you think? Are you even still here to ask? Or did you lose interest in the first couple of lines because there aren’t any animated gifs or cookie notices or flashing colours? I can’t decide. My heads all over the place. It’s been a weird week. One where I’ve inexplicably found myself telling my friends “don’t lose faith in England just yet, lads!” mere hours before we witnessed Matt Hancock make it into the final four on I'm A Celebrity. It’s almost as if the second you dare to believe we *might* be capable of something resembling unity - ten million idiots are right there, on cue, to reset your expectations. Like coming up on Ecstasy while watching someone vandalise your car. You hope and you pray there might be consequences for someone like Hancock, don’t you? For his incompetence and flagrant corruption (Google "Lobbying Randox Paterson" and fake-Hancock-weep). I mean, this is a guy who spoon-fed his pub landlord a lucrative PPE contract (despite never having produced PPE) and who sent infectious pensioners out to care-homes like Covid had started a fucking Uber Eats partnership; You’d hope that someone like that might be blackballed, wouldn't you? Maybe? Honestly, for all the tit-shitting we do about Cancel Culture, I challenge the Alt-Right Grifteratti to explain this: if you're all so terrified of being cancelled over using the wrong pronouns, if Right-wingers are so under threat of being silenced - how do you explain Matt "Oops I Killed 20,000" Hancock out there living his best life? Christ if all it took to ruin Alastair Williams' comedy career was the fact that he supported Brexit - you'd think maaaaaaybe a mass murderer might at least be on time-out? I digress. Anyway, as I was saying, you’d hope there'd be repercussions. And if not immediate and direct, then at least by proxy. You'd hope that the morality of TV bookers might step in where the personal ethics of politicians (lol) had failed. But no. There are to be no repercussions for Matt Hancock. Just as there are unlikely to be any for Whitehalls *other* Burtons model: Dominic Raab. Raab, who has seen his career descend into a binfire (or perhaps a 'Raabecue') this last week is Justice Minister. And as such I'd like to think that a Secretary of State for Justice wouldn’t, I DON'T KNOW, have a history of seeking to illegally prorogue parliament or wrapping NDAs around women. I'd HOPE he’d be put on administrative leave after the second or third accusation of bullying had landed. But hope in the context of Politics now feels like faith in the case of Religion. We hope for repercussions... we truly do hope for them... ...but whether the idea of “repercussions” can ever be resurrected, whether accountability will ever have a Second Coming is truly a matter for who waits around the longest. And I simply do not have the patience. Still, they do a good job of pretending there’s repercussions, don't they? Which is almost as good. Not *quite* justice but a passable counterfeit. Like frowning at the KFC refurbishment and instead getting your dinner from a place called Legally Fried Chicken. They want you to think that what you're witnessing is consequence. A clapback for their conduct. The Find Out to their Fuck Around. And so they choose from a suite of options designed to make you *think* they take, say, bullying (or illegal lobbying or dodgy donations or tax avoidance) very seriously indeed. But none of these options bear any relation to real accountability. They all remain employed. No one goes to jail. But as i say, the counterfeit is passable. They're still there on the morning rounds, saying things like "We take a zero tolerance approach" and "The Conservative Party take accusations of bullying VERY seriously..." So seriously they "considered the matter closed" and rallied round the Prittster. So seriously that Raab himself dismissed an outrageous attack (the Savile line) as just part of the Cut & Thrust of Parliamentary life. So seriously that Sunak still had confidence in Gavin Williamson after he’d told a senior civil servant to slit her own throat. But they present their failure in a way that pretends to be success. For Williamson, he resigned (previously), but was re-hired within months. For Braverman it was a week. Raab has been dogged by allegations of bullying, should almost certainly resign but has outsourced his response... to a Parliamentary investigation. And so presumably now no one in Govt can respond to questions while the inquiry is ongoing. Incidentally, reader: don't get excited. For all the talk of referring himself to the committee for a thorough investigation, it is reportedly NOT an independent review; in fact it only gets to investigate what PM Sunak says it can investigate. So again, failure pretending to be success. Corruption dressed as accountability. So that's Raab, Braverman, Williamson, Patel; Finally, back to Matt Hancock, who can ostensibly kill a few thousand, funnel money to his mate and break his own rules - and be forced to resign - and yet here we are a few months later and he's probably Mortgage-Free, charting in Waterstones and guesting on Graham Norton before you can say Jungle-washing. God, I hate it here. I'm going back to True Crime, where there are at least there's consequences for the criminals.
