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Transcript

Ep257

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that sees No.10 Downing Street’s ‘wine time Fridays’ tradition and raises them an hour’s worth of condensed whining in an audio format. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as the Prime Minister and Captain Crackannalia Boris Johnson tries to save his job by launching Operation Save Big Dog, is that what he refers to himself as because he keeps humping furniture, shitting in his own bed and is definitely barking? Or has he just realised that it might make voters think they have to keep him for life, not just for Christmas?

It’s a trait of the British public that we always need to assume we’re the pariahs of humanity and that out there in the gunk of society it is someone else who is doing everything wrong. They want to work but they assume no one else does or is even trying because let’s face it, working is shit but if you can at least pretend you want to do it maybe no one will notice you crying in the stationary cupboard. Someone else is having too many children, someone else is leeching off the state and someone else is wasting the NHS’s time. During the last few years, over 90% of people surveyed said they were obeying lockdown restriction rules but were certain no one else was because isn’t everyone else the absolute fucking worst? It turns out though that the British government have been taking on the burden of being those people in order to support the public’s perceptions. If no one else is going to go out there and piss all over necessary life-saving laws in the midst of a global pandemic, then can you imagine how miserable the country would be knowing that they can’t feel high and mighty over anyone? So, thank you to the Conservatives who have, for quite some time now, been right there taking all the jobs and homes, having dozens of children they can’t afford, sponging all that cash of the state to hand to pals or pay for houses they didn’t need, not paying their taxes, signing things without checking any of the details, and generally talking down and dismantling British values and institutions. You’d think they’d all get knighthoods for their services to creating evidence for baseless assumptions but they’ve already given each other those for far worse, more useless reasons like breaching national security or being the worst possible person at their job. Actually, thinking about it, what do the British public need more than to be able to see that someone out there is so unqualified for their position and so bad at it, that they can feel confident that they aren’t as useless as they thought. The government just keeps giving us all morale boosts whenever they can.

And now of course, as everyone was trying their best to stay at home and save the NHS, and indeed other people’s lives, the government rightly worried about what kind of society we’d become if we worked together as a community and learned to trust each other’s intentions. Urgh. Sorry, I’m just retching a bit thinking about it. So again, thanks to the Prime Minister, that punched flesh version of a discarded salt bin, for going out of his way to make sure he and his staff partied endlessly throughout 2020 and 2021. In fact, they all partied so much it would now be easier for the news stories to simply list the days staff didn’t have to drag a suitcase of booze from the Westminster Co-Op to neck in the No.10 garden under the guise of ‘wine-time Fridays’, a name that must have been a third choice after the initial suggestions of ‘Unlawful Rule Bending Weekending’ or ‘Party While People Die Fri’. Sometimes these events were a works do, or farewell speech or formal meeting or ancient ceremonial cocaine ritual or traditional mocking of the poor or any number of inventive names that now means in Britain we have more words for ‘party’ than the Inuits do for ‘snow.’ Boris Johnson always insisted they were doing the best they can, and it seems he was really putting the work in. I’m 16 years younger than him and need at least three days to get over each hangover but there he was, for the country, for the people, at it endlessly. I’m sure if we checked his records in ICU, he had an IV of champagne and the oxygen tank contained laughing gas so he could give the appropriate response to the daily Covid stats. And what could be more British than drinking constantly and excessively to self-ruin? He’s just like us. Except you know, we had to drink at home alone while everyone died. But it’s basically the same.

That’s how I’d frame it if I was the Conservative Party press team anyway but instead, they’ve chosen the amateur route of insisting none of the things that happened actually happened, but also happened enough that they’ve had to apologise to the Queen. They definitely didn’t party the night before she had to attend Prince Philip’s funeral by herself due to restrictions, but also, they did party enough to apologise to her about something to do with them partying that evening. Just last week one of the many Conservative MPs that resembles a rich swollen ear, was demanding the national anthem be played at night on the BBC to give the country unity and pride in the nation, but after making her mourn her dead husband alone and of course lying to her in 2019, that sort of offering of a song I’ve no doubt the Queen thinks is shit too, is very much thinking petrol station flowers as an adequate apology after shagging your partner’s sibling and accidentally killing their pet in the process and setting fire to their home. Then again, maybe all the No.10 staff were staying up partying in the hope of hearing the national anthem at 3am and it’s been this hope that’s driven them to be consistently more patriotic than we could ever imagine, staying up every single night for the last two years? Maybe we just don’t realise how much they’re doing for us. We will have to wait till the report by Sue Gray, the Second Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office and who has the constant expression of someone witnessing a car hit a deer. She is carrying out the independent report into all these illegal restriction breaking parties, and we know she’ll be independent as all the government ministers say they know her and she’s really good. The report is meant to come out this week but with evidence of more and more parties being revealed every day, you do wonder if the plan is simply to keep delaying ol’ Sue’s work until this enquiry takes longer than the Chilcot report and has even less impact on British politics. Which would pretty hard to achieve considering. Everything has to wait for Sue’s report as she is the only one who can say if there was a party. We used to have someone at my school like that. Little Marlon would turn up to wherever a gathering was happening and if he declared ‘I can see spaces on the dance floor’ you knew you’d done bad and no one was coming to your gaffe again. I wonder if that will be how Sue Gray let’s everyone off the hook. No of course they weren’t parties because people have fun at those. So, this has to be a work event because why else would anyone sit through Boris Johnson telling that fucking jaws story again, while Housing Secretary and sea jelly Michael Gove contorts like he’s been possessed. Gray is going to look at the drinking culture at No.10 and there will be a booze ban announced to stop what they’ve called ‘Club Downing Street.’ But honestly, I wonder if it was a coping mechanism to get through having to work with some of the most stupid, dishonest arseholes you’ll ever meet. If I was a civil servant knowing that I’d be dealing with the cabinet on a regular occasion, I think the only way I could keep going would be with enough absinth to keep me in a permanently numb state. It does feel like a lot of the last few years makes more sense if you imagine everyone involved in the shambolic governance of the country was just off their face. Makes sense now that Justice Secretary with his nerf bullet head Dominic Raab thought the sea was closed. I’ve definitely had nights like that before.

It’s funny that this is what has cut through to the public, with the Conservatives now at the lowest they’ve been in the polls since Johnson became PM, and his own popularity has plummeted. I suppose it’s a big shock to voters that the man known for lying, breaking rules, doing things entirely for selfish reasons, and drinking too much turns out to have been lying to them, breaking the rules, doing things for entirely selfish reasons and drinking too much. How were they supposed to know when they voted him in in 2019 that he’d continue to be the same useless fucking destructive idiot he’s always been? I mean there was no evidence he’d behave like this apart from all of the evidence, but I guess Sue Gray didn’t write a report on it so it’s hard to say if any of that actually happened. It makes you wonder what it is about the parties that have made people more angry than letting 150,000 die, or spending £37bn of state money on an app that didn’t work or any number of authoritarian policies. Do we have to be honest about who we are and is it that those are things that people actually wanted? Everyone wishes a good chunk of the population would just keel over and fuck off, is happy to waste money on utter shit and probably thinks it’d be easier if they couldn’t do as much stuff and didn’t then have to make decisions about it. Is the anger at the parties a selfish FOMO response knowing other people were having fun without them. They had to watch someone they cared about die over zoom, while they could have been doing lines off a Churchill bust instead and that’s just not fair is it?

Labour have shot up in the polls by doing nothing except not being the Conservatives and not having parties. It must be nice to become popular for not being very popular, which I think sums up most of the opposition’s electoral tactics to date. Party leader and what if someone put a mute on Beaker from the Muppets Keir Starmer has actually been attacking the government for once rather than just voting with them, and has accused Johnson of breaking the law, for the parties I mean and not all the other ways in which he’s done that.  Deputy Labour Leader and star of Abney and Teal Angela Rayner said that the Prime Minister can run but he can’t hide, though based on all the evidence I’ve seen I think the exact opposite is actually true. Several Tory MPs have also called for Johnson to resign and said the Prime Minister must lead or step aside, which could be confusing when it sounds just like directions for taking part in a conga at a party. 1 in 5 Conservative party members have scrapped their membership and many are saying this could be the death knell for the party party, which they won’t hear with the music playing that loud. Johnson seemed to weather this by hiding away for several days, though the stories said he had cancelled a visit due to a family member testing positive for Covid, which begs the question of which one and how did it affect him when he never sees any of them? Must’ve been a total coup for one of his kids whose not seen him in eight years to find out he’s now their dad again.

But by those numbers, that leaves 4 out of 5 members who are absolutely delighted with everything that’s been happening and couldn’t think of a better leader than Johnson which shows how shit their old boys network is. I know loads of people better equipped to be at No.10 than he is and right now I’m not even thinking outside of my daughter’s class at nursery. There has been support for the Prime Minister from his cabinet too, though some of it was more lukewarm than others. And yes, I realise for people who are usually cold blooded, lukewarm could sound like a positive thing. Chancellor and child perpetually on a school trip Rishi Sunak managed to plan a trip to Ilfracombe the day after the fall out from one of the 400 parties, and eaked out a late tweet about the Prime Minister being right to apologise and supporting his request for patience while Sue Gray carries out her inquiry. Translated that means I want to be Prime Minister, and I hope no one asks me about all those parties as I only live next door. The rest of the cabinet though is supporting Johnson and not just because he’s too drunk to walk again. In fact, there are two big plans that are supposedly going ahead to keep him at No.10 aka the ministry of sound. The first is ‘Operation Save Big Dog’ which is down to Johnson’s self-references to himself as ‘Big Dog’ probably because he has terrible breath and leaves hair everywhere. The idea behind this one is to offer resignations to a whole list of officials so they can take the bullets for him, even though you’d hope as the big dog he’d show some loyalty. What a massively shit dog he is. He’s like if Beethoven took Valium and also was a total prick. The other is called ‘Operation Red Meat’ which sounds like one of those diets that causes halitosis and makes you lose weight through malnourishment. It is a long list of the most right wing policies you can think of, as though they’re shouting in all caps directly at Daily Mail readers in the hope it’ll boost support from those who’d otherwise be happiest screaming ‘woke’ whenever they see a rainbow. The policies include giving the military control of stopping illegal immigrants in the channel, a job made harder by none of them being illegal and most of them heading here because we abandoned their country and let the Taliban take over. I suppose at least if the army are puncturing dinghies they’ll be able to say a direct goodbye to the people who helped guide their tours in Afghanistan before they drown. Another policy is to freeze the BBC licence fee for two years and then scrap it altogether in 2027. An curious move by Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, whose job title only makes sense if you remember No.10 has a problem with drinking culture. If she wants to destroy the BBC then why doesn’t she just demand they dramatize her books and I reckon they’ll lose all their viewers within the first 5 minutes of episode 1?

There are also plans to scrap all Covid restrictions from the end of the month of the kind Boris Johnson broke until he decided to follow them in order to hide for several days. The self-isolation period when testing positive for Covid has already been cut from seven days to five days which is great news when a recent study in Japan says those with Omicron are most infectious six to eight days in. The latest variant is classed as being considerably more mild than previous editions and has caused fewer hospitalisations or patients in ICU. It’s still causing 150 deaths a day, so it is bizarre to think we’re just fine with that now. Good luck I say to the next serial killer or terrorist who’s going to have a field day when they realise, they can really go for it and will probably be let off for being ‘no worse than a cold’. The government line is that it’s time for Covid to become endemic, but the meaning of that word is just ‘widespread’, and it already is, and no one’s really enjoyed that so far. Still the dropping of restrictions is to the benefit of Covid and if it is to become properly endemic, then maybe that is the voters the Tories are appealing to? Covid will definitely turn up to the polling stations no matter the weather.

These are the policies that will supposedly keep Johnson at Downing Street, and the news has already started to turn to fun distraction pieces claiming that Keir Starmer once had a beer during lockdown although all pictures prove that absolutely no one, including him, is enjoying themselves while it’s happening. Then there was some story about a Chinese spy Christine Lee trying to influence politicians including Labour’s wobbly car dog toy Barry Gardiner which no doubt could have led to devasting changes in policies that got absolutely nowhere near power. Hilariously by bringing the story back up, Lee’s connections to the Conservative party have also risen to the surface which could really cause them problems if all their Russian donors find out they have competition.

What next? Either Johnson steps down and is immediately replaced by someone equally as awful and the nation of goldfish that we live in will decide it’s fine to vote for a leader who in the pictures of the parties didn’t look like they were enjoying it. Labour then drop in the polls on account of not just being the alternative to an idiot. Unless of course the Conservatives vote in Liz Truss as leader, whose intellectual equivalent is a dropped bowl of cat food. In which case Labour might do ok. Johnson will go on to a career of getting paid a million pounds a pop to do after dinner speeches about how he thinks he may have let 150,000 people die but can’t remember as he was wasted at the time, and then probably that fucking jaws story again as there’s no way he’ll have bothered writing new material.

The other option is that Johnson just stays as a lot of British life has been relying on people to resign out of shame or guilt for doing the wrong thing, but the Prime Minister doesn’t feel either of those emotions because he’s a psychopath. So, he might just stay for ever and we’ll have to hope that at some point, with all the parties and continued exhaustion from a seemingly never-ending supply of offspring, that at some point he’ll just roll over from exhaustion. Much like a big dog. And then the country will mourn this great dog man who made every British person feel happier about their life because at least they weren’t him and would never waste that much money on shit wallpaper and knew how to brush their hair. And they would gather at his memorial as his body is carted off inside a Peppa Pig mascot costume encased in a large fridge, and they’d all be immediately arrested by police for being annoying. There’s just so much to look forward to in 2022.

In other news, Foreign Secretary, supposed leadership contender and what if space ice cream had a stupid grin Liz Truss has said there is a deal to be done over Northern Ireland. Which yes, that’s what the Northern Ireland protocol was and you agreed to it. When backing Boris Johnson last week over the No.10 parties, Truss said she supported him because he got Brexit done, which then makes you wonder why she’s still trying to get it done as well. Constructive talks with the European Commission will start again next week, so it’s nice to know that one consistent in British politics is that Brexit will never ever, ever, end.

Housing Secretary Michael Gove has set out plans to help leaseholders trapped in unsellable homes with unsafe cladding but just like unsafe cladding hasn’t managed to provide good cover for so many residents. Gove told companies who had cut corners on building homes that the government is coming for them, but it doesn’t sound like much of a threat when chances are they’ll just get bought lunch and an opportunity to donate cash to the party in return for more development contracts.

Former Health Secretary and your friend’s embarrassing dad Matt Hancock has caught Covid a second time. This means he’s had two positives in his career. And lastly, sweatless Duke Pukem Prince Andrew has to face a civil sex assault case in the US, which is funny because ‘civil sex assault case’ is a perfect way to describe him. Buckingham Palace have stripped Andrew of his military titles and say he will be defending the case as a private citizen. Which I’m not sure about as I think it’d be far safer for everyone if we know where he is and what he’s doing.

ADMIN

Hey! Yes, the podcast is back just in time to report on endless parties. This isn’t the party-political broadcast, come on. I did a slightly different name on purpose. How are you? This year is taking a while to get going, isn’t it? I mean, it could just be that I’m taking a while to get going, which I forget now happens every year. I spend the first half of January not wanting to do anything and panicking I’ve got no work and then everyone seems to kick into gear around the 12^th and then I get panicked that I’ve got work but I still mostly want to sleep. Also, this month always goes on forever like when a film does all the credits before it starts or when you play a computer game and it shows you 4 hours of story before you get to actually do anything. Despite being a January kid, I’m not really a fan of this month. When I was a student, it was brilliant as everyone got their student loans at the beginning of the month and then it would be Feb that was shit as we’d all drunk away our money in January. It was like constant work event month as the kids say nowadays. What’s your thoughts on Johnson? Think he’ll go? I find it very hard to be excited about him resigning when I’ve been wanting him to do that from before it was fashionable. Also, I want him to go but then if he does, he’ll be replaced with someone else I absolutely hate like Sunak or Truss and then everyone will just like them as they aren’t Johnson and chances of kicking the Conservatives out will be ruined again. So, is it best for him to just stay there and keep ruining people’s lives? Imagine if the next one who gets in isn’t partying all the time and so is even more shit because they’re actually working to make things worse? I don’t know. Its endlessly exhausting and one of the things I want to try and do on this podcast is get to speak to people with any vague hope about the future. I don’t know who they are or if they even exist but if you know of any who are politically optimistic, please send me their deets to the usual place and I will try to make this show a once a week haven of possibilities of a brighter post Johnson world. Should I just interview Wordle? That’s all anyone’s doing on my social media. I tried it once, got it in two goes and decided I must now never do it again. It a sort of retire undefeated attitude. Wordle also definitely sounds like a place on the south coast. I’m sure I’ve done a gig in Wordle.

There is no interview on this week’s though because I think everyone has the same mindset as me of not wanting to do anything. I spent last week emailing so many people and got endless out of office replies that all said they’d be returning two days before but clearly hadn’t or had omicron or had fled the country to return to nature and live in a forest. Maybe. But there will be one next week, which may be hopeful but probably not. I don’t know yet, I’ve not yet interviewed them, so we’ll see. But again, as with every year, I’d love to know what you think I should talk about on here, who I should interview and generally what on earth I should do with my life. Ok not the last one, but I will accept suggestions. Most suggestions. There was a new article about a job going on Piel Island to run a 300 old pub and be crowned the King of Piel and I did wonder if that’s where I should be aiming for. Just for a change you know? Pile? Peel? King of Pile is not so good. I should probably look that up before not applying.

So, this is a jokes only ease into the new year of new spew and thanks being back here with your happy new ears. I mean they’re probably the same ears you had last year. If not though, they look great and really suit you.

And so, on that note….

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast. Much appreciative sounds like this one – aaah – and this one —- mmm – for returning your ears to this podcast for 2022. If you’ve gained anything from this show, even if it’s just the sort of mind numbing boredom that makes sleeping easier, then please do recommend it as a handy sleep aid to those that you know. If you can, please join the patreon.com/parpolbro, and give the show a nicely review at one of the podcast holding ports like Apple or other fruit based sites are available. Are they? I don’t know anymore. I’ve reached an age where I stop knowing what new things are out there and I don’t care.

A weird and slightly cringe poem of thanks to Acast for pod hosting, Kat Day for linear liner notes and to my brother The Last Skeptik for all the musics.

This will be back next week when Sue Gray’s report finds that there were so many parties at No.10 Downing Street it was technically a nightclub, which means the government are unable to support themselves adequately and have to close.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Wine Time Fridays.

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