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18th Jun 2019

The final six Conservative Party leadership candidates assessed and dissected for your pleasure

As we enter the 'squeaky bum time' of the Tory leadership race, here's a handy assessment of each of the remaining runners and riders. Giddy fucking up!

Nooruddean Choudry

(What’s the story) warring Tories?

As we enter the ‘squeaky bum time’ of the Tory leadership race, here’s a handy assessment of each of the remaining runners and riders. Giddy fucking up!

Michael Gove

The inside-out latex doll of the Tory leadership race, Gove genuinely believes he is the most affable and media savvy of the ghoulish assortment. Everything he does is a study in almost human behaviour, as if an alien from the planet Twaturn hastily read a book on social norms and body language with every other page missing. He can’t drink, clap, walk or run. Fuck knows how he hoovered up all that blow.

As much as he may try to assert himself with carefully rehearsed power-moves, such as leaving his lectern or breaking the fourth wall in a Noel’s House Party style attack on our living rooms, he is absolutely and fundamentally full of shit. A shameless and consistent hypocrite. Ask teachers, ask economists, ask Muslims, ask every fucker he’s ever stabbed in the back. Each word that falls out of his ruby-raw anus of a mouth is a lie.

Jeremy Hunt

Very much the continuity candidate to take on Theresa May’s mantle of presiding over a shit show of failure and incompetence and stubbornly insisting that everything’s fine and he’s actually doing a great job, sweetie. It takes more than a cannabis lassi to be that smacked off your tits that you’d voluntarily point to Cunt…I mean Hunt…I mean Cunt’s shameful record as Health Secretary.

Take any metric you like – GP numbers, A&E waiting times, the broken fucking will of junior doctors everywhere – and Hunt is a failure. And yet he has the demeanour of a man who’s just won Bake Off. What makes him so incredibly dangerous is that he’s a morally bankrupt empty vessel. Like May, a lack of conscience makes him ripe for complicity to the most heinous acts and opinions. Next up after condoning talk of ‘Londonistan’: killing as many Iranians as sick people.

Sajid Javid

“You’re one of the good ones!” is a supposed compliment you occasionally get as a person of colour. “You’re not like the others!” is another. It’s massively offensive because even your best qualities are used against you and your community as a sort of freak anomaly. In the case of THE SAJ, you get the sense he has to rush to the nearest public toilet to wank himself silly at the ultimate vindication.

It’s funny how he loves talking about his background and experiences as someone with a Muslim Pakistani background to spin a convenient narrative, and yet is more than happy to throw anyone of a similar shade under the bus to appease those who currently see him as a ‘good one’. Javid is not an exemplar of progress. He is the perfectly spherical face of shameless ladder-kicking populism; a Trojan brownie for right-wing bigots.

Dominic Raab

Raab is the worst. The very worst of the very worst. A perfect storm of zealous fanaticism, breathtaking stupidity, deluded conceit and chilling recklessness. It takes a lot to make you think ‘Ah fuck it, maybe Boris isn’t so bad after all,’ but Raab’s innate villainy pushes you to that point. He is the sweaty-lipped, shiny-headed, rage-grinning baddie in every Hollywood blockbuster. Patrick Bateman in an ill-fitting suit.

Raab is pretty much the perfect moral barometer, in that you really want to be on the opposite side of any argument. He is a raging meninist (“Men are getting a raw deal”), anti-democracy (“It’s wrong to rule out [prorogation]”), anti-human rights (“excessive protections”) and anti all sense (“No deal remains an option”). In spite of all these traits, perhaps his scariest characteristic is a lack of shame. Imagine being so viciously angry at a deal you negotiated yourself.

Rory Stewart

Lovely Rory. Lovely floppy-haired Rory. He’s the totes adorbs darling of the chattering centrist classes and it’s very easy to see why. As the caring, considerate face of the Conservative party, he’s out and about, eager to win hearts and minds with his mid-Atlantic Cliff Richard affability and toffy Hugh Grant charm. Lovely adorable creasy-faced Rory is the Tory candidate who actually wants to be your friend!

Except, as his voting record shows, he’s not your friend if you’re an EU national living in the UK; or an asylum seeker; or a tenant; or forced to rely on benefits; or worried about climate change; or think killing innocent civilians abroad is bad; or care about equality and human rights. Stewart is basically Michael Palin’s Nisus Wettus character in Life of Brian – he’s awfully polite and charming, but he’s still your captor and you’re still getting crucified.

Boris Johnson

And then there was Johnson. Who, barring an unforeseen miracle or monumental gaffe, will almost definitely be the next PM. Except, it’s funny that, isn’t it? That he’s effectively been gagged for two weeks by a Tory party who wholeheartedly back him to lead the country through the most pivotal and desperate period in our recent history, but don’t trust him enough to not fuck up for a whole fortnight.

Forget for a moment that he called gay people “bum boys”, and described Muslim women as “letterboxes”; ignore if you can his description of black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”; allow the fact he wasted £43m of tax payers’ money on a bridge to nowhere and a similar amount on unaffordable buses as London mayor; and even accept his poisonous and very fucking scary alliance with far-right nationalist and all-round shit stain Steve Bannon.

Ignore all that, and just consider this: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratliffe is a British national who is currently on hunger strike in an Iranian prison, separated from her young daughter, all because Johnson couldn’t be arsed reading his fucking briefing notes. And his only excuse is the glib and uncaring, “…everyone makes mistakes as Foreign Secretary.” Your next Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen.

We. Are. Fucked.