In which our Henry astonishes the pond with an assault on Caterism ... oh and Boris still wants one last glorious summer ...

 

 

The pond spend last night transfixed as the body count mounted on the screen, and the blood spread faster in the water than that scene in DeMille's ancient biblical flick.

And it's not over, with the resignation speech surly and ill-tempered and sullen, and Boris threatening to hang around like a Pommie pong into the autumn, sending Gaby right off with Johnson will leave scorched earth. The idea that he should stay until autumn is madness... 

Then there was Crace giving an impression of the tone ...

The Convict began by listing his greatest triumphs. The Brexit deal that wasn’t oven-ready. Flying to Kyiv twice. Not building 40 hospitals. Not levelling up. Coming out of the pandemic at about the same time as everyone else. Having the second lowest growth in the G20. He was a serial winner and the Tories had been lucky to have him. He had been the best prime minister the Conservatives had ever had. And they had just tossed him to one side ungratefully. The herd mentality of a braindead mob. He knows how to make friends.
There was not a single mention that he might have been the author of his own demise. That telling lies for a living eventually catches you out. That breaking the laws you expect others to keep is never going to end well. That covering up sexual abuse scandals in the party and blaming groping on the alcohol and the victim was a very 1990s look. No, it was just that the Tories had lost their nerve and had been ambushed by the media. Yup. The Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph have always been his sternest critics.
“Them’s the breaks,” he shrugged. Grudgingly. And yes, he’d do his best to support the next idiot the Tories chose. Though his best might not actually be very much. Why would he bother to go out of his way for someone else? Especially someone for whom he had no respect. Which was everyone really.
Johnson tugged the Toddler Haircut and scratched his arse one last time. Determined not to let anyone see that he cared. That his fragile ego had been shattered. He would survive, he told himself. Books and columns to write. Proper money. And he was sure he would find a way for Lord Brownlow to still stump up for a £150,000 treehouse. Even if he didn’t have a garden to build it in.
He sloped back into Downing Street. Dilyn the dog wisely gave him a wide berth. Maybe it was time for him also to be rehoused. Out on Whitehall, Bray was playing the Benny Hill theme tune. La commedia è finita.

Up against this rich comedy, which hasn't finished Mr Crace, not by a long finita, the pond realises it's swimming against the current, or the tide, or whatever watery metaphor by turning to the local reptiles, but dammit, an astonishing thing happened in the house of Oz this very morning ...

Usually at reptile HQ all the reptiles drink the same brand of kool aid, and then sing the same song, a murmuration of reptiles which a few doddery old farts find enchanting, but which in generality is perceived to be as pleasant as a din of cicadas ...

For some reason, the hole in the bucket man decided to break, and like a Boris blathering on about herd mentality, he took to the Caterist with some vigour ...

 

Sure out of the gate, our Henry starts off with a sop - a suggestion that the Caterist rightly argues, such a monstrously silly proposal that the pond almost stopped at the get go, and never mind the movement of flood waters in quarries...

But then came the astonishing line - our hole in the bucket man found the Caterist "deeply troubling" ...

Well it's a mild enough way to speak of a fuckwit of the first water, but still astonishing to see a reptile go there, and point out a few of the Caterist's monstrous stupidities ...

And once he got started, our Henry couldn't stop ...

 

 

Again it was mild - "has therefore hardly been as disastrous as Cater suggests" - is hardly as earth-shattering a phrasing as the pond might suggest ...

But still, here is reptile calling out another reptile for being a fuckwit. After Boris, it was almost too much for the pond to bear ... (it's not the autocorrect, though it would if it could, feel free to insert 'bare' for the comedy) ... especially as even the use of a high falutin' word like "comparators" couldn't hide the dissing of the Caterist ...

 

 

On and on he went, with an "it seems curious to claim", an invocation of Alice: “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” 

The reptiles did their best to hold the fort or their feet, and strike back, by running a click bait video featuring the dog botherer, blathering his usual nonsense about authoritarian assault, while working for a company that supported the mango Mussolini in an attempted coup ...

But it was too late. The pond neutered the video, and the damage had been done by the hole in the bucket man ...

 

Just the facts ma'am and a final shot at the neigh-sayers of the Caterist dog bothering kind? Talk of the Caterist helping take the debate into the vortex of unreason? The Caterist gripped by demagogy and cheap populism?

It was too much for the pond to bear, as it turned to look for a bonus ...

 

Nothing to see there - the pond is done with tranny bashing, and watching that bubble-headed booby Claire go at it was going to be no fun ...

And talk about fixing the home paddock first seemed a tad askew when the entire planet was being comprehensively fucked, not least by the climate science denialists in News Corp ... and then there was the Swiss bank account man talking of assuaging white guilt ... perhaps still with a lingering Swiss bank account sense of guilt ...

There was nothing for it, but to select a few pieces from the shattered dreaming, a few shards from the reptile survey of the wreckage ...

 

The bloodied reptiles had to finally break and admit that there was trouble with their favoured son ...

And there was the bromancer, suddenly aware that the circus was destined to come to a messy end ...

 

There you go. The British people voted for Brexit again and again ... and so one narrow vote in one referendum is transformed by blatant lies on the side of a bus ... but it did remind the pond of its favourite headline during the whole sorry saga ...

 

 

It goes without saying that just as Brexit has been a disaster, he couldn't get his own exit done in any style ... and the exit might drag on for months, much like the Brexit ... and so desperate was the bromancer that he managed to drag Bob Hawke into his accounting ...

 

 

The pond won't bother to trawl through ancient bromancer pieces, showing an unhealthy, almost uxorious level of devotion to Boris ... there's enough by learned correspondents about moggies and tongue baths in the comments section ... nor even note that Ming the merciless could not bear to have strong figures around him ... and regularly sent them packing.

No, it's enough to simply sink into the bromancer gloom ...

 

 

There was more sublime comedy: "The Conservative Party will surely create reasonable transition arrangements."

This written as the pond was still remembering Boris's desperate attempts to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, with talk of a new ministerial team on the morning of his demise, even as the pond still hung on to watch a parliamentary session about a very strange meeting, even as Gaby was full of apprehension ...

...the prospect of him spending the summer trying to line up lucrative gigs for his political retirement seems unconscionable, given the powers of patronage that would still be at his disposal and his history of seeming none too fussy about who pays for the gold wallpaper.
And more prosaically for his party, the longer he stays, the more the scandals keep coming. Even in his final hours he conceded that as foreign secretary he had met the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev, the father of his friend (and the then owner of the Evening Standard) Evgeny Lebedev, without officials present in Italy at a time of high tensions with Moscow. This is the man we want to leave in charge of national security over summer?
But that’s not all. Johnson’s insistence on clinging to power long after it was tenable brought us frighteningly close to the brink. In his final hours he was visibly positioning himself to go full Trump, arguing that he was the people’s choice and only they can fire him. So far, he has stopped short of attempting to mobilise the deranged strand of rightwing populism that constantly fears its Brexit is about to be stolen in some deep state Remainer plot. The tone of that resignation speech, with its odd references to parliamentary “herd instinct” moving against him, will however ring real alarm bells for some Tories.

It might be said that in the final moments, it wasn't so much a fly as a Lebedev in the ointment, and more will come out about that ...

And so to the grave Sexton, still managing to sound like a braying donkey even as he tended the grave and put a few flowers into the vase ...

 

It's all the EU's fault? The pond knows this went viral and that everybody and his donkey has recycled it, but why not do it again one more time for good old Blighty ...

 

And yet at this very moment, the nice policeman at the door and Larry the cat have failed to get the Convict out the door ... but at least the pond finally understood why Larry had become a meme ...

 

 

Hour after hour, and only the cat for company and visual entertainment, apart from the odd plod dressed in period helmet, as if out for a nostalgia party ...

Now for a final gobbet of the grave Sexton getting things entirely wrong ...

There are those who will regret? A colourful and engaging personality? Why that's very Richard III ...

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious by this one last summer for Boris
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

Time to call on a Rowson, with more calling to be done here ...

And so to a last bit of reptile inanity, this time from the lizard Oz editorialist, managing to be as silly as the grave Sexton ...

 

It wasn't Brexit, it was climate science? It was net-zero emissions targets? And Brexit had nothing to do with the current state of the economy? Nor those delusions of grandeur about going it alone?

And there in a nutshell is why it's not just Britain ... why, in short, the planet has been fucked, is being fucked, and will go on being fucked by News Corp ...

 

Uh huh ... but at least all that blather allowed the pond to turn to a Wilcox for a wrap ...a reminder of all the reptiles have gifted us in recent years ...