Grant Shapps’s rail-strike blame game joins fellow ministers’ absurdities in a vision of Tory Wonderland

theguardian.com:

“A vision of Labour’s Britain”, tweeted the reliably dim Tory backbencher Mark Jenkinson. This was about the rail strikes. Someone should let him know that there’s been a Tory government for the last 12 years. Who knows, maybe Dopey Mark will find a food bank in his own constituency and blame the opposition for that too. If only Labour had done more to have got elected in 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019 (delete where necessary) then there wouldn’t be so many people living in poverty.

There again, maybe one shouldn’t be too harsh on Dopey Mark. After all, many in the cabinet are also suffering from similar delusions. Not least Grant Shapps, who had been sent out on to the airwaves to say that the strikes were everybody else’s fault but his own. When he found out who the transport secretary was he was going to give him a piece of his mind. It was totally irresponsible for Labour to have allowed the strikes to go ahead … Er.

Shapps had been at his insufferable worst – for comparison, Michael Gove has to take a line of coke to be that awful – during the previous day’s Commons statement, and he was just as bad today. Not just pleased with himself, but absolutely delighted with himself. Smuggy McSmugFace. He too still somehow believes that forcing the unions into days of planned strikes is going to play out well for the Tories. That people won’t say to themselves that it would have been far better if the employers – which includes the government – could have reached a resolution before the unions called for industrial action.

So what we got was more of the same. It wasn’t the transport secretary’s job to try to settle transport disputes. But just suppose it was, then he would have been happy to get stuck in if there had only been a one in