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23 hours ago
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You can tell that Elon Musk must have overstepped the mark when even Kemi Badenoch has taken a break from tweeting her support for the ketamine-riddled world’s richest man. The Tory leader’s reality is largely shaped by what she reads on social media, so unless she’s taken time out to help the Muskster find a drug counsellor, she’s decided that she’d be better off keeping quiet for a while. Quite the concession for a politician who never knowingly avoids the chance to make a bad situation worse.
But you can always rely on Robert Jenrick to step into any vacuum. It’s hard to know who the real Honest Bob really is. Is it the fresh-faced David Cameron wannabe who was first elected in 2014? The soft-hearted liberal who was totally in favour of remaining in the EU. Is it the minister with no moral compass who was happy to expedite a planning permission for an erstwhile pornographer and Tory donor? Or is it the politician of the far right? The man who has never yet met an immigrant he didn’t want to deport?
Not even Honest Bob really knows. There is so little to him that he can only approximate to what he thinks best serves his interests at any given time. And right now he has somehow got it into his head that he should be the next leader of the Tory party.
What the Conservatives have done to deserve him is hard to fathom, but that doesn’t worry our Bob. He’s always led a gilded life. Assumes that people must always be thrilled to see him. Just by breathing he is doing us all a favour. And he’s come to the conclusion that his best chance of fulfilling his destiny is to shape-shift to the right. So that’s who he now is.
Along the way, Jenrick has also become a useful idiot to people like Musk. While Elon works his way through his stash, Honest Bob is on hand to pick up the pieces of his increasingly deranged tweets. It’s win-win for both of them. Musk gets to feel as if he is as important as his ego demands while Honest Bob gets to kickstart another culture war. Along the way, reality has long since left the building. Not that either of them have noticed.
With Musk’s tweets about child grooming gangs still dominating the news, it was inevitable that sooner or later Bob would turn up on the radio to be unpleasant and make a fool of himself. And sure enough, he was granted the prime 8.10am slot on the Today programme. Presenter Nick Robinson couldn’t believe his luck. It wasn’t a fair fight.
Robinson began with a reminder that it wasn’t Elon Musk’s tweets that really mattered; it was getting justice for the girls and young women who were victims of sex abuse. A caveat that was wasted on Honest Bob as, like in all things, this was all about him and his ambitions.
“We need a national inquiry,” Bob demanded. Labour were trying to cover up a scandal. Robbo looked at Jenrick as if he was a halfwit. Um … He was aware that there had already been an inquiry conducted by Prof Alexis Jay, wasn’t he? And that Jay had said there was no need for another one. What would really help was for its recommendations to be implemented.
Honest Bob wasn’t to be distracted. The first inquiry had achieved nothing. Jay hadn’t really known what she was doing. Only he was in possession of the real facts. Except, as you will have guessed, he wasn’t. Robbo had to spell it out as simply as possible for him.
Let’s get this straight, said Robbo. You are saying that child sexual abuse is still going on all over the place. Yes. So why didn’t you do anything about it when you were in power? You could have set up any number of inquiries if you thought the Jay inquiry wasn’t sufficiently wide-ranging. And why are you only talking about child grooming gangs now and not when you were a Home Office minister? You didn’t mention it once in parliament. He had checked Hansard. You’re just an opportunist.
All this rather confused Bob. Logic has a habit of doing that to him. So he went back to the beginning. Could he have another inquiry please? For the first time, Robinson was taken aback. There was simple and then there was Jenrick. To recap. Inquiries took an age. Some had never reported after 10 years or more. Was that what he really wanted? For justice to be further delayed?
“Absolutely,” said Jenrick. There was no arguing with him. And he wanted to correct one statement. The Tories may not have implemented any of the Jay recommendations but they had carried forward two of them. And how did that help the victims? Aha! Honest Bob wasn’t to be distracted. Carrying forward was a necessary first step. It was far too easy to get hung up on implementation.
Robinson chose to move on. So had Bob had a chance to reflect on his remarks that Pakistani men were from an alien culture with medieval attitudes? It hadn’t gone down well with Samuel Kasumu, a former race adviser to the Tories.
I stand by every word, Jenrick declared. So Sajid Javid had medieval attitudes? Well, maybe not him. Though he couldn’t rule it out. How about Sadiq Khan? Almost certainly. The thing was to keep the hate going. None of this was about achieving justice for the victims. Just a reminder to observe the two-minute hate. War is peace.
Over on LBC radio, Nigel Farage was bewildered to yet again find himself to the centre of the Tory party on L’Affaire Musk. He tried to rectify the situation. He wouldn’t personally call Jess Phillips a rape-genocide apologist but he was happy for Elon to do so. Nige wasn’t going to let go of a multimillion-dollar potential donation that easily.
“I too want an inquiry,” Farage said. “And if Labour won’t give me one, I will have one myself. We could get it up and running in a couple of weeks or so.” That’s £100m and the next 10 years taken care of.
