The Guardian's Frankie Boyle is on fire in his new column on the post-Brexit machinations in the UK Conservative Party, where the hardline, ultra-authoritarian elements of the party are splitting their time between knifing each other in the back and planning to eliminate the few remaining environmental, safety and finance regulations that have not been shredded since the first David Cameron government in 2010.
Boyle rounds up the current crop of potential leaders and their ghastly history, and as bisto sums up the infighting in the Labour party in a few devastating sentences ("They say they need a leader who knows how to oppose, albeit primarily their own party membership. The idea is that Corbyn is unelectable, and it's just one of life's sad ironies that none of the people who believe this will be able to beat him in an election").
Stephen Crabb has come under fire for links to a group that claims it can cure homosexuality, and, having had a quick look at him, he's definitely cured me: his beaming face is like a grim party game where blindfolded children have to try to place the eyes on to an identikit photograph of a murderer.The frontrunner, Theresa May, communicates something horrifying, not through her appearance, but rather her unique expression of unwavering, furious disgust. It is the expression some nameless, pitiless archon will wear 50 years from now as it signs a contract to rent out our city centres to pharmaceutical companies so they can crop-spray viruses and harvest antibodies from any survivors. It is the expression Lucifer wore when the other angels attempted an intervention. Surely May, of all people, could make a positive case for migration just by saying: "If you can't see the potential of a free-moving workforce, simply imagine how great it would be if I fucked off somewhere else." Bizarrely, it looks like she'll be involved in a runoff against Andrea Leadsom, who was created by Nazi scientists as a response to Dame Vera Lynn.
Michael Gove needs to get 50 signatures, but at the moment he doesn't look like he could persuade his mother to sign him off a cross-country run after a leukaemia diagnosis. And then there's Liam Fox. I seem to remember some sort of opprobrium being attached to him. Whatever it was, no doubt there can't have been much to it (even though he was forced to resign or something) or it wouldn't be getting comprehensively buried every news cycle by Jeremy Corbyn not indicating when leaving a roundabout or something.
The Tory leadership election is a sort of X Factor for choosing the antichrist
[Frankie Boyle/The Guardian]
(Thanks, Alice!)
(Image: Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Home Secretary, at 'The Pioneers: Police and Crime Commissioners, one year on', Policy Exchange, CC-BY)
