Pinter never created a comedy as dark as the Brexit party
“I had a unique touch. Absolutely unique. They came up to me. They came up to me and said they were grateful. Champagne we had that night. The lot.”
No, this was not Prime Minister Johnson speaking of the now notorious birthday party that was in breach of his own lockdown rules that we in the rest of the country were observing. This is Stanley, the character whose birthday it is in Harold Pinter’s macabre comedy The Birthday Party.
During his subsequent party, Stanley has a rough time. In my view, Johnson should have been having a rough time for a series of episodes that have been well covered in the media, even if, like Stanley, the prime minister affected to be surprised by his own birthday party. Let them eat cake …
Let’s face it: what the Conservative party is now tying itself in knots over is how to handle the realisation that the leader they did not trust, but who gave them a resounding election victory, has been found out as an amoral scoundrel by a largely law-abiding electorate – to say nothing of the rest of the world, in whose eyes he is a laughing stock.
Our so-called leader has besmirched the reputation of this once widely admired nation. I know I am far from alone in finding the daily spectacle of this grotesque government’s antics sickening – yes, sickening.
Winning that last election was not quite the Johnsonian triumph it was held out to be. Frankly – and I know this will offend many Labour voters, who saw lots in the Corbyn programme that they liked – it was to a very considerable extent an anti-Corbyn election.
Indeed, one of the great ironies of recent politics is that the victorious, low-tax Johnsonian Tories have been racking up public spending, not least on account of Covid, to levels only dreamed of by
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