Suzanne Harrington: Teasock woman's cabinet is full of Roald Dahl characters
The new business secretary who has responsibility for energy and climate change, likes to describe it as ‘climate alarmism’ even as Pakistan washes away.
Now that we are allowed to go back to something previously known as normal, our heads no longer compulsorily taken up with sombre pageant, we can reflect on who exactly we will be dealing with when it comes to our next door neighbours. Who they have recently elected, having gotten rid of the Latin-spaffing haystack?
It’s the Teasock woman. Elected not by the voting public, but by a few thousand golf club elitists — 0.3% of the UK population — who make up the Tory party membership and couldn’t bear the idea of a brown one (Rishi Sunak was the preferred choice of MPs).
This latest PM hopes that by donning a pussycat bow and repeating a few stock phrases in a stern voice, people will think of Margaret Thatcher, rather than Miranda Richardson’s Queenie character in Blackadder. Good luck, love.
As for the cabinet, so far, so Roald Dahl. The health secretary, Miss Trunchbull, (who is doubling up as Deputy PM because barrels were scraped) has been photographed looking quite the opposite of health, as she clutches a fat cigar in one hand and a drink in the other, some of it spilled down her front. She is anti-abortion — along with the cigar, booze and red meat, not a great look for a health secretary. She has also voted against equal marriage. Bang on trend for rural Alabama.
The new business secretary, the haunted wardrobe that is Jacob Rees Mogg, has responsibility for energy and climate change, which he likes to describe as ‘climate alarmism’ even as Pakistan washes away and bits of Africa shrivel to a crisp. Like the health secretary, he is privately educated and Catholic. And super-wealthy, fond of giving his numerous children Latin names. How, um, relatable.
People have called the Teasock woman’s hastily assembled cabinet ‘diverse’ because there are differences of skin pigmentation and gender, but 68% of them are privately educated; there’s nothing diverse about wall-to-wall privilege.
As we bade goodbye to the worst UK Home Secretary in recent history — the one who said she would have deported her own parents, and more recently had been trying to send asylum seekers to Rwanda — the new one looms. Hang on. What’s she saying? Hold my beer? How long before she rips off her wig and tries turning unaccompanied minors into mice?
And what’s this? A new justice secretary who has said the UK government would be perfectly willing to break international law “in a specific and limited way” in relation to Brexit and Northern Ireland? Good luck with that, Irish politicians.
Still, at least the Teasock woman hasn’t publicly wondered whether Ireland is ‘friend or foe’, the way she did with France. Yet. Cue uneasy handshake with Macron.
As the rest of the cabinet is filled by a pantomime of Twits, Boggises, Bunces and Beans, Aunt Sponges and Aunt Spikers, and assorted Vermicious Knids and Snozzwangers, a nation — and its neighbours on both sides — holds its breath. Like watching a giant Jenga, with our livelihoods the blocks.
