The Tory MP

It’s campaigning time for the May elections but Percy Craven, MP, is feeling slightly sick. Acid reflux? Indigestion? Peptic ulcer? It couldn’t be his conscience, could it?

Impossible. Percy’s conscience has not given him a moment’s trouble since he was reselected in 2019 on the understanding that he would back Boris to the hilt. For the last eighteen months Percy has been as bad as his word. He cheered the hardline Brexit, he tweeted support for the psychopathic Dominic Cummings, he formed a square around the ministerial code-breaking Pritster and he voted down a parliamentary enquiry into Dodgy Dave’s Greensill lobbying. For a year and a half he has kept stumm about Downing Street’s descent into a cesspool of sleaze and chaos, he has breathed not a word about the bullying, the backstabbing and the lies. When drafted in for his PMQs shift he has dutifully roared approval at his leader’s every infantile evasion and laboured bloviation. Meanwhile he has voted against legislation to create a register for domestic abusers, against legislation to protect leaseholders from ruinous cladding costs, against legislation to enforce minimum habitation standards for rental properties, against legislation to prevent imports of American GM meat… when shown a hoop Percy Craven has just jumped, higher and higher.

And thanks to Covid he hasn’t had to face any of his constituents who have been domestically abused, or those trapped in unsellable flats in cladded tinder-boxes or renting from negligent landlords, or the farmers trying to make ends meet while maintaining decent standards of animal welfare. Until now. No wonder Percy Craven is feeling sick. ‘They won’t care about any of that,’ Tory HQ assures him. ‘Just remind them how many millions we’ve vaccinated, tell them that Boris is proud of their British bulldog spirit, and promise that they’ll be able to go abroad this summer.’

Percy, like every ambitious coward in every demagoguery throughout history, accepts without question that immorality is simply not an issue if the people don’t care about it. Anyway, it’s all for the greater good. And what else can he do, without risking his career and his kudos? He has become part of the culture of indifference that always ends up betraying the poor and voiceless.

Every night he dreams he is in a dungeon below No. 10, strapped to an operating table while a cackling Michael Gove performs a conscience-castration on his brain with long pointy implements. Percy lurches awake in a mire of cold sweat and twisted sheets, clutching his prefrontal cortex. But the reality is even more disturbing than the nightmare, because Percy himself has destroyed his conscience, warped it to service expediency, battered it into submission. It is now shrivelled and silent and without it he is quite alone.

Then comes John-Lewisgate: the need – the right – to have ten-thousand-pound sofas and gold wallpaper, and Boris the jolly populist is recast as Boris the scornful elitist. And then comes ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’, and Boris the cosy chum is shown to be Boris the chilling sociopath. When moral decay finally brings the whole teetering oligarchy crashing down, Percy’s conscience, wounded but not quite dead, will have the last grim laugh by haunting him for ever with the knowledge that he enabled the regime whose corruption led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. This is a spectre even more soul-destroying than Michael Gove.

© C P Jenkinson 29/04/2021

For more Corona Caricatures follow the links below, or for a full list click the Archive at the top of this page.

To receive email notification of future posts please fill in the form on the Homepage. No marketing or spam, promise.

Thank you for reading and please share!