Does Boris think he's Scarface?

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4235 of the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world with me Andy Zaltzman here in London where not for the first time in the history of our esteemed radio chronicle of the known universe politics has been happening this week and without wishing to give a spoiler as to what may be coming up later in this week's show Yes!

Joining me in no fewer than three dimensions right here in my house to discuss the dramatic events of this week and whether there has ever been a clearer definition of the meaning of the word inevitable.

I have Alice Fraser and Mark Steele.

Well, it's been an interesting week, hasn't it?

It's

yeah, and I find myself actually

really really I mean genuinely genuinely on the side of Boris Johnson on this one because I feel that most politicians as we know they they have principles when they go into politics and they abandon them but I don't think Boris did that.

I think he started out as a self-serving narcissistic sociopathic fing lunatic compulsive lying shit face fing

horror of a set bit of a barrel of filth and I think he stayed true to that right to the end and I think we should commend him for it.

I mean this is the thing like he was an unkempt self-indulgent greedy obnoxious mass murdering bastard who like

mass murderers sorry

Sorry, scratch that.

I'll go back.

He's an unwanted man in almost exactly the way a man on a wanted poster is an unwanted man.

But it turns out that letting people die through like smug negligence, grift, nepotism and incompetence isn't arrestable in the same way as driving a bus full of pensioners off a cliff is.

Even if in this instance many more pensioners than a busload died suffocated by their own lungs and those deaths can be traced directly back to your incompetent self-insert erotic Churchill fanfiction.

And

you think of Churchill, you think, yes, he was an unkempt, self-indulgent, greedy, obnoxious, mass-murdering bastard who saved us from the Nazis.

And the bit of that I'm going to try and cosplay is all the bits I said, minus the Nazis, because I'm friends with some of them.

Yes, there's no redeeming qualities.

That's quite a quality, isn't it?

I mean, he literally, he hasn't actually resigned.

He said he will resign.

Yes, this is the key.

I mean, I don't know if he's plotting some kind of miraculous escape.

I mean, it feels a bit like one of those horror movies, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it absolutely does.

Well, on that night, if you were in Britain, I don't know if it was like elsewhere, but I mean, you were

here.

I mean, it was that night.

We were sort of about this earlier, but just where you went, oh, let's put the tele, telephone

like it was like a big sporting event.

Put it on, and it was just pretty.

Oh, he sacked go for that.

I thought, you're just gonna sack random people.

I've now sacked Maureen, who works at the dry cleaners, she's a sneak.

Just and you think you're this is gonna.

There was a point when he said, I'm not resigning.

I thought, I was so happy because I thought this goes on now for another.

It's going to end up with you crawling out onto the roof of Downing Street like Al Pacino with covered in cocaine and

shit out

and leave him alone he's the best prime minister we've ever had you changes and he's gonna be

I still SAS are gonna take him out it's

I do not think that that's out of the picture I think it's gonna end with him up the top of Big Ben with Carrie under one arm swatting at helicopters just refusing to leave my favourite bit of it was the Tory MPs like stumbling when that when the writing was on the wall they were like so quickly trying to get their resignations in before he resigned.

Yeah, some actually missed, some resigned after he'd already announced that he was going to because I don't know if they technically counted to the overall tally.

No, I don't know.

All right,

they were still coming, they were still coming in.

It was uh uh oh no, I think it was just it was just fantastic entertainment and all of those resignations.

I now, it is with great sadness that I must, uh, that I can no longer work along.

It's been my honour, it's been my pride and honour to work alongside somebody that I now realise is a relentlessly sociopathic

narcissist.

And it is with great sadness that I can no longer continue to serve alongside someone who is the most morally reprehensible person, a fruit bat in all capacities.

And I shall miss working with him.

For years I have been swallowing gallons of cum and now at last it sickens me to my stomach.

He literally said them's the break.

Oh, yes,

this was interesting.

So well let's just

go over the some of the

linear timeline of what happened before Johnson ended up holed up in a bunker realising it was all over.

You picked the wrong World War II leader, you idiot.

So he's basically gone from greased pig to hog roast in

48 hours of

chaos.

And it was a kind of appropriate way for his three years of chaos, because he fundamentally does have

an almost

almost a fundamentalist belief in mayhem as a political philosophy.

So it was a kind of appropriate way for it to reach its, well, sort of its end, as you say, it's not quite the end yet.

But after all the previous scandals, the incompetencies, the immoralities, the hogwashings, and the deeds and words in simpler times would have resulted in him being, I don't know, given a debenture in a not particularly luxurious room in the Tower of London, he was finally brought down by a mixture of sexual misconduct and bullshit, which seemed appropriate.

The sexual misconduct was not his, allegations of sexual impropriety against Chris Pincher, the deputy chief whip, which is a fancy term for assistant school bully.

And Johnson falsely claimed he'd not been aware of previous similar allegations and sent his underling ministers out to falsely claim those false claims and that seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's one remaining fragment of intact vertebra.

I mean that camel has taken a lot

scaffolding on it.

I don't think that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I think the vote of no confidence was them like they voted for him with the understanding that he'd take the hint in the way that previous prime ministers have resigned for far less.

Having even called the vote of no confidence is it sufficient for them to be like take the hint and and leave so he's like this is not the straw that broke the camel's back this is the straw dropped onto wily coyote who is already far out over the edge of the cliff and just hasn't realized that there's no ground under him anymore yeah i think probably well i thought he was stuffed the moment i thought he was all honesty was was when uh ant and deck were doing those jokes in the i'm a celebrity last year with the parties i thought wow this is really if you think mr johnson that this is only the westminster bubble and anton deck who

were, well, I suppose it was, no, it probably wasn't in Australia last year, but it was more mainstream than a horny salmon.

Exactly, exactly.

And they were doing jokes all the way through about Boris Johnson's parties, and they'd have made a little t-shirt with vote Boris.

And oh, look, the first contestant for next year has already been announced.

I thought, well, you're stuffed once that's become...

the norm.

But it's taken that long for it to permeate through and the booing at the Jubilee as well.

And so there is a, even with that, even with the Chris Pincher thing,

I've said the gropey sex pest man, I couldn't have known about the gropey sex pests, and then it turns out, oh, you did, Noel, and you don't, if it had carried on in stealth now, be going, I can't have known, I can't have known at the time because at the time I was a pelican,

I was in a pond, I was catching fish, and until we've had an investigation

into

the transformation from Pelican, I can't possibly say.

And he's like, like Basil Forty, you know, Basil Forty just can't stop flying.

And

no matter how much he's caught, he just can't.

And even now, them's the brakes.

Just bad luck.

What bad luck?

Them's the brakes.

I said I wasn't at a party that I was at, and then it turned out I was at it.

What?

How does that account for luck like that?

I mean the brakes.

Them's the brakes.

It's a term referring to random acts of misfortune.

If he knew where the brakes were, he wouldn't have driven quite so far into Clown Town.

I mean, it's like, you know, you have

a priceless Ming vase, you scrawl a cock-on-balls on it, an indelible marker pen, you then smash it with a five-iron and urinate on its shattered remnants and say, oh, I'm afraid your vase has suffered somewhat unfortunate physics.

You know, it's not the brakes.

You then deny that you drew the cock and balls, although it's on film.

And you then announce that there's going to be an investigation into who dropped the Drew the Cock and Balls.

And that until you, because I might not, it's possible that it was not me, I might be Shirley Bassey or Pepper Pigs, who we don't know.

And then you say it'd be really, really bad to go on about the vase at the moment because we should draw a line under it because there's a war in Ukraine.

Yes, let's not politicise our politics, shall we?

I mean, the upside is that Kier Stahmer's clearly hired a better joke writer.

He said it's like the sinking ship leaving the rat.

Yeah, which I thought was like

someone, the charge of the lightweight brigade.

Yeah, yeah.

I reckon he's hired one of my friends in the comedy scene.

Oh, I think he's going to get the big joke to his head.

I think I once got asked to write some jokes for a Labour politician.

Did you?

Yes.

Oh, no, I said no, but...

Which one was it?

It was one of the Miller bands.

I can't quite remember which one.

one's your heart

i wrote jokes for corbyn

because i thought of it and i i thought so it was when uh when he was pictured i uh on a virgin train remember that yes it was pictured sitting on a virgin train when he was leader of the labour party and there was a picture of it and this is the state of britain's train service.

You know, people are just sat everywhere and all that crowded trains.

And so, I, because I'd agreed to write a joke, his opening joke.

And then

I just sat there in the kitchen thinking, what am I going to do?

This is going to go to the conference.

What have I done?

And then I thought, oh, I've got it.

I thought he'll start the speech, start his speech by saying, it's marvelous to see this room absolutely packed.

Although Virgin Trains have assured me there are actually 600 empty seats.

And then, as soon as I I sent it to them, and they went, oh, I've got a thing from his office.

This is perfect.

And I have never been so nervous.

I was one that was sitting watching the telly going, don't f it up.

Don't fuck it up.

And did he f it up?

No, no, no.

He f ⁇ ed up everything after that.

Yeah, he did say some extraordinary things in

his resignation speech for those who

missed it.

What can you guess which of the following was in there?

Humility, contrition, remorse, and acceptance of responsibility for the predicament he, his party, his government, his country find themselves in?

Maybe an acceptance of the flaws and mistakes that have led to his precipitous downfall?

Or was it arrogance, recrimination, blame, delusion, and piffle?

Yes, correct, it was option C.

To be fair, the same qualities that won him the leadership, won him a general election, and won him gold member status in the International Association of Willfully Divisive Politicians and Rampant Egotists.

He didn't even say that he'd resigned.

He just sort of talked around it and blamed the party.

And he talked this bizarre stuff about the herd, that

the herd mentality.

He said, when the herd moves, it moves, which is true, but if you are standing behind the herd firing a rifle in the air, wearing a lion outfit, it's more likely to move.

He was standing as he gave the speech behind Elector in the sport that sported the UK's national crest, which features a lion and a unicorn.

And I don't think that's ever seemed more appropriate, a creature renowned for inflicting its own aggressive nature on others in a brutal and often terminal way, and something entirely made up.

I mean, that's that's,

I mean, it's always been appropriate for us as a nation, but even more so.

When he said the herd, I kept thinking, is this the herd that he thinks is getting immune?

Is this the immune herd that he's talking about?

This is a different herd.

Herd and immune.

This is a herd that's just immune.

Yeah, they're just murdering.

No, I thought he was quite aggressive in that speech about that.

I'm not accepting any responsibility for any of this.

We're only a few sent behind in the pools, and

I think he honestly believes it.

And I bet he is sitting there right now thinking, no, there's still a chance, there's still a body mog.

Well, one has to accept that, and I think that's probably what

they're talking about.

And can't you encant some Latin and summons up some spirits or something?

Is it possible that

Jacob Reese Mogg could stand for leadership, then allow Boris Johnson to use his his skin.

He wouldn't fit.

No, it'd be awful.

It'd be very, very flabby, wouldn't it?

Jake Carismog's quite a skinny sort of creature, isn't he?

He said it was eccentric to remove him now, which is true.

I mean, it would have been less eccentric to remove him after three minutes in 10 Downing Street saying, you've had your fun, you've fulfilled your lifetime goal, now let the fking adults do their jobs.

They really are the Burton Ernie of British politics.

You've got Mog with his sort of tall head and Boris with his round head.

And just, just, like, I just don't trust them to understand any of the common meanings of words.

Like, I think they live in this obscure fantasy land where food security is that thing where you're a baby and you have food in one hand, but you insist on having food in the other hand before you'll eat the food you have in one hand.

And that's the crisis that they think is facing the nation.

He stands out amongst

all the people who went to boarding school from the age of four and were then sent to Eton and were told that you by

dint of your own birthright will be a supreme leader and you are superior to all the people in the world who haven't been born into your family line even amongst that demographic

E was a

the um

the the the the path of the resignations was, I mean, particularly for me and my, I've been immersed this summer in my other job as a cricket statistician with just numbers floating in front of my eyes.

And just seeing the total of the resignations topping up was, I mean that was that was glorious from a stats point of view.

It began with two of his most senior...

Yes, two of his most senior cabinet ministers resigned on Monday.

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and Health Secretary Sadjajov.

And that sparked a deluge, as we're talking about, of resignations of other ministers and government officials.

Sorry?

Can't spark a deluge.

It's fire and water.

Well, there are no rules anymore, Alice.

And during the course of this, on Wednesday, he had to face a grilling by a parliamentary committee.

And this was kind of so at the time, you know, his cabinet was collapsing.

He was facing questions saying, oh, you're still going to be prime minister tomorrow.

But they're also like really kind of forensic questioning about government policies.

And this highlighted his,

frankly, almost heroic lack of attention to detail and grasp of policy.

And it did sort of highlight how, even without these ethical and behavioural issues, he is still harrowingly unfit for office.

He managed to cling on to the following morning when the resignations reached the half-century mark,

sparking

another deluge of

applause.

Was it a county cricket 50?

And the

private, first or private secretary to the deputy minister of Transport has resigned.

And that brings up the 50, so jolly well done to Marcia.

It was riveting television because at the same time as he was being grilled, this number was totting up.

So there's a little bit of that thing where that woman who tweeted the mildly racist tweet was in the air and getting fired.

And everyone was just watching to see the Schadenfreude when she landed and realised that she'd ruined her life

with an ill-timed tweet.

And it had a little bit of that of him.

Is anyone keeping him up to date on the fact that it's all crumbling out from under his feet?

There is a a shadow minister for Schaden Freud.

We've been very busy this week, a shadow minister,

but it's extraordinary.

The rules have all changed, haven't they?

So, you're right.

So, that even that thing would have normally, with someone going, I don't know, oh, it's this,

I think it's something to do with Ireland, no, it's actually to do with Canada, Prime Minister, yes, all the same, the people that anyway, whoever it is, who's now in jail or something.

No, they're not in jail, they're actually the head of the International Monetary Fund.

Yes, this person, anyway i i'm going i was i'll be honest i was drawing a picture of a porcupine while you were listening but that was the uh

that was the uh economic forecast for next year yes well fk them all that is quite

because the uh

and and now we've just got used to that yeah yeah it's like the weaker he becomes the stronger he becomes he's like a flasher with a humiliation fetish he he thrives on being told to f off yeah yeah yeah okay that the

that's gonna happen, isn't it?

Do you watch the odds of him getting through these next two months without flashing?

I didn't flash, it wasn't mine, my penis.

He's under investigation, I cannot.

My favourite resignation,

which is I mean it's quite quite a long list actually, was the Education Secretary, Michelle Donnellan, who resigned after less than two days

in the job,

Making her actually arguably the most effective education secretary of the past 12 years of Conservative rule, based on the simple mathematical equation of benefits brought minus damage done.

I think that makes an all-time cross-community.

Yes, we

did notice, to be fair to her, about 20 hours into her

tenure that education started improving quite a lot.

So I think she was doing a really, really

excellent job.

I miss her.

Is this not perhaps a lesson for the future?

That really all we need for cabinet ministers is just a series of two-day appointments, so no one has the time to do too much damage.

My favourite bit about the broadcast was the fact that there were activists outside the Houses of Parliament playing Yakety Sacks, the Benny Hill theme music.

Oh.

Apparently, inspired by a tweet by Hugh Grant.

So it became the soundtrack of the Tories' humiliation

in front of all of the world's news services.

I just feel like if only, to me, hitherto, inexplicably,

the appeal of Hugh Grant has been completely, it's got passed me by.

But if he'd been, like, if that appeal had been based on giving like activism tactic advice rather than being a like a bumbling, floppy authorial insert in his Hollywood heartthrob days, I might have understood the point of Hugh Grant enough to do things throbbing myself.

It's very much in his favour.

So I was watching it with

my son and he suggested we get a little whiskey so we did that and we were watching it and and when that and i was sort of i'm a bit ashamed really because i was

uh i was sort of trying to listen to whatever that bloke was going to say which is completely of no consequence and then my son elliot just went they're playing the benny hill music

oh it's so British and so entertaining.

There was another highlight that I saw in the TV coverage that the evening before when all the cabinet ministers were going in to tell him to go with at least some vague vestige of dignity, and I think it was Nadine Dorries walked out and they do that thing where they shout questions across the road, and no one ever answers them.

And they're saying, Oh, is he going to resign?

Are you going to resign?

So, one of the journalists shouts out, How many children has he got?

That moment just kind of summed up the Johnsonian regime.

But now they're letting him stay on, though.

Yeah, well, this is so, so as we we said, yeah, he said he's going to, well, he's no longer leader of the Conservative.

He's stepped down as leader of the Conservative Party, so he's interim Prime Minister until the Tories have a new leader, which

is likely to be in early September.

So he's got kind of two months serving out his notice.

And I had one job in my life.

I had to do a month serving out my notice.

And I have to say, I wasn't fully focused on the job in hand.

I spent a lot of time doing crosswords and I may have emerged with some branded pens.

What was the job?

Why do they call them crosswords when they make you so happy?

It was I was sub-editor at a business publishing house in my pre-comedy days.

I think this is what he's been shooting for the entire time.

This is his perfect job.

He is called Prime Minister, and yet he is not even allowed to do the job itself.

You're not allowed to make any big changes if you're interim prime minister.

So I think this is what he's been waiting for all along.

Just prime minister in a purely ceremonial way being just just having the having the credit and none of the work duchy of lancaster or the duke of cornwall or something

so if he can then stretch out the tory leadership election for say 10 years

then that's yeah his lifelong dream fulfilled

It's a strange thing to leave him, Ms.

Prot.

You would think that, right,

we have come to terms with the fact that the person who has been the Prime Minister is a sociopath, serial, compulsive liar, that there is no restraint upon him whatsoever, that there is nothing that can be done that can stop him being a dangerous maniac.

So you can only be Prime Minister for another two months.

Now, do you promise

not to do anything bad?

Do you promise?

He is exactly the kind of lunatic who'll get into a modern car and not plug his seat belt in and then ignore the beeping.

Like, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for the Boris Johnson.

He just, I cannot understand somebody who will stay longer than they are welcome, as somebody who leaves things regularly that I am welcome at for the fear that I might suddenly become unwelcome.

Well, I've had gigs where I've definitely stayed way beyond the point of being welcome.

He compares.

That's what it'd be like a comic.

That is the equivalent, isn't it?

The whole room, you're doing

somewhere a bit tricky, like at the comedy store, and the whole room is like they've asked you to leave, they've left, there's some of them are coming in and screaming at you to go,

and then you say, Yep, and then you announce, I am carrying on, I'm going to carry on with this show,

I am not going to go along with your herd instincts,

and then they're burning, they're setting fire to the place.

The army have surrounded the place,

and you know, I'm sacking you, that bloke who left 20 minutes ago I'm sacking you

he compared himself to a Japanese army officer who refused to surrender at the end of the Second World War and didn't emerge from the Philippine jungle until 29 years later now this to me sounds like a TV reality show we could easily crowdfund.

So, I mean, I'm sure you'd chip in quite a bit for that, wouldn't you?

Boris Johnson honestly

in the Philippines

jungle for 29 years, hacking away still thinking he's fighting the Americans.

Demanding a personal letter from the Emperor of Japan

for that.

But it was kind of weird that the Conservatives said

he can't be trusted to lead their party, but they will let him run the country for another two months.

That does show exactly where the well-being of the United Kingdom is.

I think he's secretly hoping that Russia will bomb the UK.

Yeah, definitely.

And they'll let him stay on.

Definitely he is.

is.

And I think that there's every chance that, what we're now, 4021 of the bugle, that 4027 will take place in a bunker.

Because he's, oh, come, I mean, that's, well, there we are, that's what's happening.

One of the candidates, Liz Truss, I mean, Putin said that when he put his nuclear arms on high alert, it was because of a speech by Liz Truss.

And I thought, I can take

the human race as a species coming to an end after however million years it's been.

I can just about accept that.

But let it not be because of this.

That's what brought all civilization to its final conclusion.

In analysing the legacy of Johnson,

he's, I think it's fair to say, had a decent amount of criticism from across the

political spectrum.

Andrew Neal in the New York Times wrote, No other prime minister in the long history of Britain's parliamentary democracy has been so prepared to sacrifice the governance of the nation to save his own skin.

That is Mr.

Johnson's special achievement.

That's not a ringing endorsement for someone who is essentially on the same side of the political seesaw.

And a lot of people say, oh,

he delivered Brexit.

And he did deliver Brexit in the same way that I delivered my son

just upstairs from where we're recording this.

In fact, incompetently, I got away with it despite not knowing what the fk I was doing.

But that's not, yeah, yes, I did, but

I guess the key to the thing is to deliver something.

Yes, you've got, well, yeah, that was

I did report on it on the bugle.

It was world exclusive, in fact, just three days later, back in 2008, during the final day of the Chennai test match when India chased down 380 to beat England, of course.

Just to put that in some kind of historical perspective for you, Mark.

But, you know, but delivering it, that's not getting it done, is it?

That's, you know,

being present while it delivers itself.

And also, you know, you've then got to bring it up.

And that seems to be with Brexit.

That's all people wanted was just its birth, and then it will be allowed to grow up feral in the woods.

And also, I guess, you know, like my son Johnson did have input in the process by which Brexit was eventually born.

I certainly have one very little input in that process.

So he leaves intensely disliked disliked by a huge proportion of the public, which is never a problem under our first past the post electoral system.

But what became a problem for Johnson, who did have, you know, and still probably has, intense support from

a core of Johnsonian loyalists, was that, you know, unluckily for him as Prime Minister, you have to do more than just whiter on, which is really his one core skill.

Obviously, it is still a part of the job.

But people tend to take a little more notice of your whiterings and also you then have to actually do stuff, which is where the whole whole thing falls apart.

So, who will follow Johnson?

It appears to be gearing up to be something like a 12-cornered shit fight between various

candidates from different parts of the Conservative political swamp.

Liz Truss, you mentioned, who, according to the Daily Mail, is going to pitch herself as the female Boris Johnson,

which is

not something

anyone

wants to think about.

It's going to take a fortnight to whittle down the long list to what the Tory members of parliament conclude are the least unelectable

two.

And to put in context the nature of this field, Dominic Raab felt that he had to announce that he's not going to be in the running rather than everyone just safely assuming it.

And I think that revealed quite a lot.

Could they all stand and vote for themselves and it's just one, they all get one.

Well, what a system.

What does this look like from outside, Alice?

If you're sort of from a...

As an Australian, we roll over our politicians incredibly quickly.

So I'm not so much surprised at the fact that he's out as surprised by the fact that it's taking so long.

I mean, in Australia, you can have eight prime ministers between breakfast and lunchtime.

I thought they lasted.

How long was Morrison in?

I mean, that's different.

Yeah, he was the longest for a while, wasn't it?

He was the longest for a while, but that was because they had to prove that they weren't stabbing each other in the back constantly in order to regain the trust of the public before betraying it again.

It was

a whole thing.

Right.

It's

a broad choice between proven incompetence, flagrantly inadequates, and delusional egotists.

And in those terms, if you think about it, Boris Johnson was a kind of unity candidate for the Conservatives for

those qualities that they often look for.

Also, some backbenchers who've never held cabinet positions up against cabinet ministers who've paraded their failings for years.

It could be quite an

interesting choice.

Home Secretary Pretty Pretty Patel may be running.

She might find out that saying you're going to catapult people to Rwanda doesn't work for all areas of politics.

Jeremy Hunt, former health secretary and marmalade exporter, he could be in the running.

What a marvellous sort of populist touch he got.

He made like doctors,

junior doctors.

These people are known for their extraordinary ability to be calm and happy under all you go people.

They have got people going in, they're going, I don't know who I am.

I'm going to fire

and all that.

Okay, if you just like to sit down, that's it.

Just let's have a look at this.

They stay calm under all situations, and Jeremy Hunt managed to make those people go, You fing evil piece of doshit!

Why aren't you catching my fingy disease and die, you scum?

Okay, if you'd just like to bring it in.

So that's that's not good.

And he's one of the sensible ones.

Yes.

And the whole thing is all gets chosen.

This is the thing.

So for people listening who aren't British,

I mean, you must think, what is this system?

A hundred thousand members of the Conservative Party will now choose the Prime Minister.

And that the average member of the Conservative Party is 86 and lives in a village and wants to get India back

and thinks that

lesbianism has been conjured up by the devil and these people are going to choose the concert, these these people who think that rice is something evil and foreign.

I choose the prime minister.

I'm going to choose the prime minister.

I remember

when Johnson took over from Theresa May,

delving into the stats.

And it was, I can't remember exactly, but it was something like only eight or nine of the last 35 prime ministers since politics sort of took its modern form have come to power for the first time, having won a general election.

There's been a lot of people taking over midterms.

I think I included, you know, coalition formations and things.

But it's quite rare, actually, for a new prime minister to come in by winning an election.

They

subsequently win.

Yeah, Thatcher and Blair were two and Cameron.

Yeah, Cameron came in, but in coalition.

But they actually haven't been that many.

So we do have this great tradition of defenestrating leaders midterm.

Another candidate, Penny Mordant, former cabinet minister,

was listed as favourite in

the betting.

You can bet on anything these days.

And the Times newspaper and its kind of collective profile of potential leaders chose to use a photograph of Penny Mordant in a swimming costume from a TV show called Splash that she did in 2016,

despite there being copious quantities of photographs of Penny Mordant wearing things that are not swimming costumes.

Because why miss a chance to demean women in politics when it is there for you?

It was a curious piece of

editorial choice from the Times.

Elstridge Hardley Barkslade could be standing, the junior minister for distracting from the real issues.

He's set to throw his extremely top hat into the ring.

He's pledged to act as a continuity chaos candidate, boasting a long record of administrative uselessness and a complete inability to concentrate.

So that could be one for

Johnson loyal Easters.

Frobisher Prantleburn, the MP for West Snuttershire, promises to get Brexit done every day for the next hundred years by signing a daily declaration of taking back control at 9 a.m.

every morning.

Bunty Clack, the sub-minister for uncosted promises in the Treasury, is thought to be ruminating an exploratory campaign.

She was behind the very popular COVID campaigns in the wake of Eat Out to Help Out, including Free the Tiple,

which offered a free drink in any pub, the sub-campaign Have a Stout for Now, and of course, Cows on Credit, encouraging people to start their own self-sufficient micro farms with the offer of a free cow in exchange for a pint of milk donated to a local charity at some point in the next 20 years.

Other candidates include A Void,

which, I mean, I think, you know, I've said this many times before: an actual void

could be.

I've got at least three people listed in my phone contacts as that.

Could be something that brings the Conservative Party together, detoxifies the brand.

Margaret Thatcher, the Tory spiritual medium, Lord Glockenrod, claims to be able to communicate with the former Prime Minister.

And, well,

rising in the betting quickly, Queen Elizabeth II.

Well, we are at a point where, especially when, as soon as Prince Charles said that

it's rumoured to have said that the Rwanda policy sending people people to

immigrant asylum seekers sending them to Rwanda is said to be appalling, appalling, ghastly.

And that means that

when you think about that, that's where we're at.

360 years ago, there was a civil war in which

we moved forward after a mighty battle in which there ended up being a compromise so that the royal family didn't have absolute power.

They had to sort of share it much more with parliament and 360 years later we're now at a point where if the royal family took power away from parliament that would be a move to the left

the um

uh yes but she should i mean she must she can't like him can she she must have i bet she now sits there going you know we'd have been better off with corbyn

i mean that's awful He's probably a plus.

What do you imagine what's going to come out now?

Now that all the gloves are off and there's not been enjoyed her own jubilee, let's be honest.

She's no, she was probably terrified of it, but he's probably that.

What the reason she was sat in the corner on her own at Prince Philip's funeral is because he's probably gone up there and gone, oh, Your Majesty's sorry for your loss and all that, but if you want some hanky-panky now, you're in the red line.

We're there during the weekly meetings.

Well, Operation Save Big Dog, a previous effort to

keep Johnson in power.

Well, inevitably, when you have a Big Dog, there's things that you need to clear up, and that's essentially the situation this country now finds itself in.

There are no more fridges to hide in.

The game is up.

Well, I realise we didn't even do the section in the bin, which

is, I think, dignity in British politics.

Or indeed, the

anniversaries.

Well, let's just go with yesterday.

was the north anniversary of a lifetime of bullshit-infused egomania finally catching up with our soon-to-be former Prime Minister.

So, that's it for this week's

commemorative bugle, Cut Out and Keep.

Mark, thanks very much for joining us.

Anything you'd like to plug?

Oh, well, people want to be, oh, yes, yes, well, I'm doing another series of Mark Steele's in town, which I'm just sort of in the middle of at the moment, and that starts on the BBC on August the 22nd.

But these days, of course, that's irrelevant because it's going to be on BBC Sounds and the longer version, and they'll be all around, they'll be out here all around the world in Australia and everything.

Yeah, so they are.

You can listen to those soon from August.

And your podcast?

And the podcast is called What the F is Going On?

And

yeah, you can listen to that every week and I'm getting near to an answer.

But every time I get close to it, it just slips away.

Alice, you are soon heading to the Edinburgh Festival.

I will be at the Edinburgh Festival with my show Cronus.

I'm doing it in a few places before then.

Look on Twitter at alliterative A-I-T-R-A-T-I-V-E or Instagram under the same address, or find me on patreon.com slash AliceFraser.

It's one-stop shop full of my stand-up specials podcasts, blogs, as well as the winners of the Dancy Lagarde Literary Tribute Competition, which have just been announced.

Also, if you enjoyed this audio newspaper for Visual World, I am the host of the Glossy Magazine, the sonic glossy magazine, that is the sister podcast to this one.

So have a listen to that.

It's all of the news, none of the politics.

Oh, that's exciting.

Have you got any listeners?

Oh, yeah, I think I should name it.

Listen to all the podcasts until you stumble onto my one.

Oh, no, I've listened to nine about badminton, seven about growing radishes.

I'll get there in the end.

It's called the gargle.

Right.

Do you got any listeners in France, do you think?

There's a few.

They tend to be, there's listeners dotted along.

We've had emails in from Antarctica.

Wow.

Yeah, there was someone in the North Korea delegation who was wearing bugle socks.

Did you not see that?

What?

Yeah, there was someone in a delegation to North Korea who was wearing bugle merch socks.

Oh, not from the North Korean government.

No, no, not from the North Korean government.

No, they

a delegation to North Korea.

All their policies are in accordance with the bugle.

I mean, that could be real or it could be a lie.

I definitely saw a photograph of someone in the North Korean delegation with Bugle Socks, but I don't know where I saw it or if it was true, and I didn't verify it.

But you can verify it.

Sounds like a fact.

Let's call it a fact.

Yeah, so you can verify this for me.

I saw this on a meme today, and I'm resentful that you, with your classics education, have not told me this already.

But that

the Iliad, I mean, it is because the Ilium is another name for Troy, and the ad means the story of.

So, actually, the Iliad means Troy story.

Right, yes.

That's true.

That's true.

That's so great.

And actually, the word shithead comes from the term shithiad, which was an epic about non-requestionable people.

Okay, excellent.

Anyway, the reason I asked that question is because

we're doing a Masters in Town show in Paris.

I don't know when yet, but about the end of August.

So I'm

doing it in English and French.

Well, they go, Buglers?

If you are in Paris?

I'm doing it in French despite speaking no French.

No, I do speak French.

Do go along.

Anyway, France-based buglers.

Until next week,

goodbye.

Hi, buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.