Political Monsters

So, the Tories are now down to blaming old movie monsters for their failures.  Today it was the 'The Blob' copping the blame for Boris Johnson being investigated - again - for breaking his own lockdown rules, Suella Braverman  having to accept a fine and points on her licence for a speeding offence, (apparently it absorbed the only providers of the alternative speed education courses that might have offered her a one-to-one course), not to mention forcing Dominic Raab to stand down as an MP at the next election.  That's a pretty impressive tally for a monster that hasn't been seen since that 1988 remake.  Perhaps tomorrow we'll have Liz Truss telling us that it was actually Godzilla that crashed the economy when he ate the Treasury.  Or maybe Kwasi Kwartang will claim that it was all down the Invisible Man sneaking into his office and altering all of his calculations to balance the budget.  Come to think of it, there's a rumour doing the rounds that former Chancellor Nadim Zahawi didn't pay his taxes because while he was doing his returns he was distracted by the Frankenstein Monster and the Wolfman fighting outside his window after they had been revived by a passing mad scientist.  I'm sure that The Mummy will soon be getting the blame for Brexit, (Lord Frost couldn't concentrate properly on the negotiations with the EU becaise he was constantly being throttled by Kharis) and Dracula for the Tories' poor showing in the recent local elections.

Of course, you could argue that none of this has anything to do with monsters or other outside agencies.  It all could be self-inflicted: nobody forced Boris Johnson t break the law, or Suella Braverman to break the speed limit, any more than anyone other than Dominic Raab was responsible for Raab behaving in a bullying manner toward his departmental officials, thereby undermining his position.  Likewise, nobody other than Truss and Kwartang came up with that disastrous budget - nobody forced them to make unfunded tax cuts which everybody warned them would spook the markets.  Just as Zahawi alone is responsible for his own tax returns and nobody forced Johnson and Frost to negotiate that supposedly 'oven ready' Brexit deal.  But the right and their media apologists and enablers are in full denial mode: nothing is their fault.  Instead of taking responsibility for own mistakes, incompetence, venality, greed and corruption, they make up mythical threats and conspiracies to blame.  If it isn't some amorphous Whitehall/establishment 'Blob' consisting of civil servants, 'experts' and the like who constantly seek to frustrate them, then it is down to conspiracies by Keir Starmer to gerrymander elections by, well, allowing people to vote.  Both, of course, are gross distortions of reality - the Tories are the establishment and they are the one's trying to fix elections by discouraging people to vote through the introduction of voter ID, (something actually admitted to by the unspeakable Jacob Rees-Mogg).  Like all bullies and miscreants, however, they like to present as the victims, the ones being oppressed by an unfair system, despite the fact that they have been running said system since 2010.  So, instead of responsibility, we get excuses about mythical monsters having eaten the Tories' homework.