This was the signal to pop off on their hols now he’d finished playing whack-a-mole with public services and outsourced just about every public contract and asset he could lay his hands on.
Deciding it would be daft to waste a bottle on Damien Green MP (after he moaned about Dom’s emergency purchase of a super Mojo lorry park in Kent), he necked it. Had he expected him to dig up the whole of Nige’s old Euro constituency instead?
He looked in the mirror. He knew a lazy s*d when he saw one and it was high time all the lockdown-loving plebs were back at work, including the over-75s hippies who he’d make pay for their TV licences. That’d teach them to download the No Wetherspoons app instead of his world-beating covid tracker app.
He was mighty keen on apps these days. He knew there were apps for weight loss, but doubted any of them were spiteful enough to curb pleb porkiness. Personally, he favoured a Boris Bunter ‘keep fat’ app – just as food supplies dwindled, inflation soared and his 35p per week rise in child benefit no longer covered the cost of a tin of baked beans. Genius!
Lord Dom of Mordor would be ecstatic. It would take his mind off Matty being sued for covid care home deaths, as well as the rotten test numbers, rising unemployment, misleading police figures, contracts for pals, G4S, his weedy attempt to get Foxy appointed WTO director general, and the no-deal ‘cost of customs declarations per consignment not per truck’ row.
Dom was even less pleased by the sarcastic reception Govey’s statement to the Commons on Brexit readiness #CheckChangeGo propaganda had got.
In fact, if Lord Dom’s corrective re-education app worked, he rather thought he could adapt it to get his blame-the-plebs-for-everything app off the ground, to save himself the bother of ever thinking about covid or the disintegration of the Union again.
Stuffing his mask down his shorts, he headed for the sun-lounger. His fave comic – the Russian report – was underneath his rubber ring and would be safe in Grayling’s hands. He’d blacked out all the words he couldn’t understand, leaving a psychedelic tome of black and white squiggles unsuitable for an app and worth less than an Antiques Road Show trinket.
Affecting the Moggathon slouch, the PM beckoned Gove over to oil his limbs in readiness for the test-run of the new ‘adult party’ pandemic survival scheme for the rich and wealthy. He’d had to scrub Govey from the posh-party app, because he’d stood on Larry the No 10 cat and was directly responsible for the Killing Kittie’s ear-worm now bugging him.
True, Govey could stand in for him or Rishi-Tishi-Tavi at PMQs, but until he too could grin like a cocktail besotted crocodile, he could jog on and console Liz Truss, his “bestest friend” (caned for the leak of her £705m gotta-tell-the-truth-letter about Brexit border readiness).
But the PM suspected Govey’s motives with his ill-timed promise that he’d build “the world’s most effective border by 2025”. Was he out to scupper him for saying “lift restrictions on EU care workers” just when Priti had boasted of denying the right to appeal to the one in ten EU citizens refused settled status by the Home Office?
He suppressed his wish to scrub the 3 stars Dom’s re-education app gave Priti for loyalty. He could see that her insistence on electronic identity ‘documents’ uniquely for EU citizens let the government go on rolling out a universal electronic identities app for smartphones without anyone noticing. Dom loved her blame-the-council app which was a hit with Leicester sweat shops and deflected the media from the 1800 per cent price hike of a life-saving med to the NHS.
If only there were an app for governing while dozing. All Johnson-the-jester wanted was a quiet life playing Candy Crush, but the runes weren’t good. Guy Verhofstadt had reminded MPs that in 1988, Madame Thatcher had removed barriers to trade but now the Tories were re-erecting them and hauliers were getting agitated about the end of cabotage (the system that let them pick up and deliver goods anywhere in the EU). Worse, Frances O’Grady from the TUC had called for pay rises for low-paid key workers and for a national recovery council; the Scots and Welsh were ganging up on him over state aid; pressure for compensation to Northern Ireland businesses facing Brexit red tape and disclosing the work of the Brexit joint committee had been leaked ; and the all-party group on a rapid covid inquiry was prepping for a fight as experts fear up to 120k deaths in wave 2.
Scrolling through his apps, he decided to vent his spleen on Marxist Govey for telling Sophie Ridge that he was “old-fashioned enough” to think parliament should have a role in decision-making. A crown-me-quick-and-bury-democracy app was urgently needed. Lord Dom’s King of England would have to slay the dragon.
