Regicide, we can forgive: economic suicide to please Greta... no.
Bear with me. This is going to be a long one. But I hope it'll all make sense by the end.
You'll notice that here at Light, Bright and Right we've been disturbingly absent and very quiet lately. You have to understand something about the British. When it comes to the weather, whether or not you should put jam or cream on your scone first, or the French, you just can't shut us up. As a race, our capacity for lengthy discourse about the completely trivial is legendary.
But there are some things which has the average Englishman completely lost for words. Some things are just too shocking. Farting in front of the Queen. Kicking renowned playwright Alan Bennett in the balls. The sight of the most popular and successful Conservative government for four decades eating itself from the inside. No. These things are too shocking. And so we remain both silent - and shocked.
Many commentators more eminent than we have attempted, in spite of their complete incredultity and open-mouthed disbelief, to explain why a political party which elected a leader popular with 66% of his party membership members on the day of his election and 63% of those members on the day of his departure felt it necessary to get rid of him at all. No-one can. It defies description or belief. Why would a government which won a landslide victory under Boris just two short years ago - with an 80-seat majority, no less, decide he wasn't the person to lead them any more? Particularly when that same Boris has, having fought back from his own near-death brush with Covid, led the country through the introduction of a vaccination programme envied by every other nation on earth, defied calls for further lockdowns, and got our country back on its feet sooner than most others in the civilised world?
Of course, you will have seen the naysayers comparing the pound to the dollar and throwing their hands up in mock horror at the failure of the UK economy - whilst remaining blind to the fact that the Euro's performance against the dollar has been far worse.
No, the UK has remained remarkably resilient in the face of threats from Russia and a global pandemic. And the Conservative Party has decided the man who calmly and resolutely led us through it all is no good. And so he has gone.
Much will be said and written about Rishi Sunak (the slimebag heir of Blair) and Liz Truss (competent, but with all the charisma and personal charm of a chicken being fed through a blender) but, outside Westminster, where people are more concerned with how they're going to afford to fill up their petrol tanks and pay the gas bill than they are about a bunch of insipid little Conservative (largely male MPs) having a wanking contest to see who can end up in the next Cabinet, we're not impressed.
The British have always had a curious relationship with haplessness. Our national heroes are not the heroic Tom Cruise Top Gun-style fighter pilots and muscular Schwarzenegger Robocops. They are Captain Mainwaring, the pompous, incompetent, and yet rather endearing bank manager thrust into heroism by circumstance. And Arthur Daley, the Cockney wheeler-dealer hero of Minder. Or Frank Spencer. Or Victor Meldrew. Or Del Boy and Rodney. Even the Kray twins.
We have a firm place in our national heart for the flawed, the dodgy, the deceitful, the chancers, the opportunists, and the teller of tall stories. It's part of our national and cultural psyche. Why? Because they're a bit like us.
We like our politicians to be like us. Like Boris. We don't like them not to be like us. Like the smooth, polished, and ultimately untrustworthy Blair (or his special lovechild, Sunak).
In many ways of course, Boris isn't anything like us. He went to Eton. He is fluent in dozens of languages. He's a maverick. Possibly even a nutcase. But it's his very obvious flawedness that makes us love him and - indeed - trust him; because he's one of us.
JK Rowling, in one of her now much-maligned Harry Potter books (Quidditch being renamed because no-one is allowed to have a cock or vagina any more) warned Harry not to trust anything unless he could "see where it keeps its brain". We like Boris, because we know he keeps his brain in his pants. We're less sure about all those who contributed to his downfall. Their motivations in life are less clear and we are, rightly, suspicious of them.
More seriously, the Conservative Party leadership contest has highlighted some serious fault lines within the party itself. The membership loved Boris - as did quite a lot of ordinary, working class people who lived in the Red Wall seats. For all the reasons I've outlined above.
The contest has exposed some very difficult truths:
The voting of backbench Conservative MPs has been strongly at variance with polling of party members throughout. Clearly, not only are Conservative MPs not listening, but they're deliberately ignoring the will of their own membership. And let's remember that it's this membership that - though small - has loyally spent many years tirelessly campaigning to get these people elected. Knocking on doors. Delivering leaflets. Writing letters to local newspapers. The sheer arrogance of the MPs now inevitably means that, come the next General Election (and it will come soon) they will find they have no one to help them campaign any more. And they will lose their seats. And frankly, they deserve to lose them.
The obsessive love affair of many rather inadequate male Conservative MPs with Penny Mordaunt requires a great deal of scrutiny. There is an inherent sexism within the Conservative Party which leads MPs to laud the attributes of women clearly not suited to the job whilst simultaneously ignoring the flaws of other men. Now, if I'd been to the sort of school where 'sexual awakening' meant a bit of light buggery between cocktail hour and Evensong, I daresay my relationships and attitude to women would be a bit fucked up too. So in some ways, one can't blame them. Perhaps we should rather admire Boris for his ability to have gone on from a background like that to develop proper heterosexual relationships with women! But seriously: Penny Mordaunt. Her massive tits were about all she had to offer (apart from blow jobs to all the simpering males who agreed to support her). But how they worshipped her! How they came flocking when she made her siren call. By contrast, Liz Truss - whose attitudes are so much more muscular (let us not say masculine) - has been all but ignored by these self-same men, in spite of having a considerably more impressive CV when it comes to international trade deals, Cabinet experience, and much more. Kemi Badenoch - the greatest Conservative leader we'll never have - presented some brilliant ideas and real Conservative ideology during her well-fought campaign. But she's black: that's just a bit too exotic for the public-school educated boys of the Conservative back benches.
And so here we are. A party so in thrall to the sainted Greta, with its misguided Net Zero ambitions, that it cannot see the real pain and hurt in the country. The green agenda is costing ordinary families money they simply cannot afford - and all in the name of reducing the mere 1% of global emissions we produce still further in the name of virtue-signalling. A party which is still conflicted over Brexit, with a core of MPs still trying to overturn the result of our democratic 2016 vote. A party of backbench MPs who got elected solely on the back of the Brexit and Boris fervour of 2019, now turning on both Brexit and Boris because they think it will buy them some advantage.
I hate to say it, but the equally hapless Starmer - Laurel to Boris's Hardy - is now the best hope for our country. We really need a Labour win to achieve two things: to purge the Conservative Party of the 2019 intake of backbench MPs, for whom loyalty, honour, and integrity mean so little; and to remind the country as a whole how fucking useless a Labour government is.
If the Conservative Party has any sense, it will take advantage of those wilderness years to rebuild as it did following the disastrous tenure of John Major (another sexual inadequate sub-male); to renounce woke; to remind itself that men are men and women are women (Boris being an admirable example of the former, and Baroness Thatcher a formidable example of the latter); to learn that Net Zero matters not a jot to the average Briton struggling to pay the bills; and to generally stop being such a massive bunch of twats.