Marina Hyde: Never mind wine fridges, the Tory party is drunk on Kool-Aid

Conservative MPs really are rallying around a PM who used a paedophile-based conspiracy theory as a figleaf, writes Marina Hyde

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson still only speaks in the first person plural when it comes to “taking responsibility” for what his investigator Sue Gray found to be “failures of leadership”.

If you ever wondered what Jim Jones’s corpse would have looked like if it had spent three weeks getting bleached and bloated by a Guyana river, it floated up to the House of Commons dispatch box on Momday at 3.30pm.

Let’s begin with some real talk. The prime minister is under police investigation for multiple breaches of his own Covid laws. At least four gatherings or parties in which Boris Johnson was directly involved are being probed by the Met, including one in his private flat. In total, police are investigating 12 potentially law-breaking Downing Street parties which took place after the British people had been ordered – BY HIM – to live under the most draconian restrictions imposed in peacetime. The Global Britain that Johnson promised saw him bin off a call to the Russian president, who is apparently on the brink of an invasion, so that he could explain that he needs to wait for police officers to decide if he went to an illicit party in his own home. The Conservative MPs somehow able to make their peace with all this increasingly resemble cult members accepting the latest transparent lies and failures of a cult leader.