I see you rubbing your hands together with glee, watching from the wings as Boris starts to melt under the glare of the stage lights. It’s been remarkably easy so far, hasn’t it? You started as the underdog, less popular even than Michael Gove, a spam sculpture of a child’s nightmare brought to life by the sheer power of undiluted narcissism. You didn’t expect much, putting your hand up for the top job like Edmure Tully riding hot after slaying the dragon of the NHS. Yet here you are, still in it and playing a careful game, shutting your mouth and stepping back and watching your opponent tangle his bollocks up in the length of the rope he’ll inevitably end up hanging himself with.
That’s the plan and it should be absolutely no surprise to anyone that when faced with a task requiring a small shred of commitment or concentration Boris singularly fails to rise to it. You remain a charisma vacuum with a record so awful Coldplay could have released it, Jeremy Hunt, and the contest remains his to lose rather than yours to win. The spotlight is a vast one, the media scrambling over itself to wring every last drop of news out of the fight. You’d be forgiven in the face of all the coverage for thinking the whole thing was a vast exercise in democracy, rather than a call left to a tiny proportion of voters so far removed from rational thought that they’d quite happily vote for Peter Sutcliffe if he’d promised to get us out of the EU.
Johnson dodges scrutiny like Kevin Spacey’s understudy dodges hands, bumbling his way through offered solutions to the Brexit impasse that hold no water and have no basis in fact. He may play the idiot but he’s acutely aware of just how far the heels of his base are dug in, the Tory membership having now sunk so much of their hope into the fallacy of Brexit that they’ll slavishly commit to him regardless of the consequences. It says everything you need to know about just how diseased the two horses in the race are that the public at large would rather have Jeremy Hunt above anything, a man who in a choice between death by foreskin wasp colony and his leadership would still somehow come third in my list of preferences.
Our prospects seem so very bleak that Russel T Davies feels positively optimistic in comparison. Labour continue to tear themselves apart and Farage is undoubtedly quietly rounding up as many MP candidates as he can frantically vet for overt racism. There will be no meaningful progress on renegotiation by October regardless of who’s in charge and what comes then? Whether it’s a no-confidence vote or the complete collapse of the two-party system as a whole, some ill-planned and damaging form of Brexit one way or another will inevitably limp over the line.
And you, Jeremy Hunt? You’re as cold and calculating as you always were, brazen and happy to sacrifice jobs and industry on the altar of WTO rules and tariffs if it keeps the wheels of the Conservative machine greased and creaking along. You’re a party man first and foremost, an ideologue who doesn’t waver in the face of the hard calls. They want services cut and privatisation by stealth and they’ll get it. You’re a serious statesman after all, your experience in the NHS giving all you need to bring the country back together.
I see you, Jeremy Hunt, your eyes grim and focused, your breath hot underneath your surgical mask. I see the nurse wipe the sweat off your forehead as your hands work, your fingers deftly manipulating needle and thread as you work. The big job is done – now it’s just the neat cosmetic stuff, leaving as few visible scars as possible. It’s been hours, days, years of careful surgery to get us to this point.
I see you step back, Jeremy Hunt, your bloody hands moving to your face. I see you remove the mask, your face breaking out into an enormous grin. You’re finished, aren’t you? You’re finally done working on the patient.
I see the country, Jeremy Hunt, carefully dissected and repackaged. A tax cut here, a reform there, all carefully nipped and tucked and hidden under careful PR sutures. It’s a beautiful corpse. As for the guts of it? The heart, the very soul of it all?
They’re in a refrigerated box tearing down the motorway on the back of a bike, ripped out and sold to the highest bidder.
I see you, Jeremy Hunt. I fucking see you.
