Russell Jones

In 2020 the United Kingdom reached a bewildering milestone: ten successive years of Conservative rule. In that decade there were three prime ministers, each in turn described as the worst leader we ever had; ministerial resignations by the hundred; and an unrelenting stream of ineffectual, divisive bum-slurry oozing from 10 Downing Street. The Decade in Tory is an inglorious, rollicking and entirely true account of ten years of demonstrable lies, relentless incompetence, epic waste, serial corruption, official police investigations, anti-democratic practices, abuse of power, dereliction of duty and hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. With his signature scathing wit, Russell Jones breaks down the government’s interminable failures year by year, covering everything from David Cameron’s pledge to tackle inequality – which reduced UK life expectancy for the first time since 1841 – through the bewildering storm of lies and betrayals that led to Brexit, devastating education cuts, serial mismanagement of the NHS and Boris Johnson’s calamitous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It will leave you gasping and wondering: can things possibly get any worse?

An inventory of idiocy from the coalition to Covid

The Decade in Tory

Laura Dobie

Obviously, not much detail of the rising debt, rising inequality and skyrocketing poverty made it into Cameron's half-term review, which mostly focused on how much he loved his Tamagotchi, or as the rest of us called him, Nick Clegg.

Let us consider for a moment Boris Johnson, a moral man, and a fine politician: I'd love to talk about all three of them, but I only have space for Boris.

There isn't a magic money tree. There isn't a magic nurse tree either. Or a magic teacher tree, or a magic police officer tree. None of those people can survive on a diet of praise for their sense of duty. They need money, something the government could quite easily get its hands on by, for example, cancelling their manifesto pledge to cut corporation tax for the umpteenth time.

October had brought three dozen accusations of sexual misbehaviour, a slack handful of resignations, an arrest, and a homeless Greek tarantula; and we weren't even out of the first week. Surely it couldn't get worse.

It would be crude to refer to Mr Rees-Mogg as shit- for-brains, so let's put it in terms he'd understand: he is compost mentis.

The mass resignations actually benefited the notoriously idle Johnson, because it meant he had fewer people to sack in his first reshuffle.

Having made us all feel patriotic while their halt- hearted, quarter-brained, eighth-souled ineptitude destroyed the country, the Tories' next move was to start hurling a thesaurus at truth, in the hope that a subtle adjustment in language would bend reality into a less embarrassing shape.

The Decade in Tory quotes

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