What Friends Are For

Approximately the only policy from which Tumbledown Tessie has neither retreated nor deviated, either during her six years as a vicious, skittish and authoritarian Home Secretary or during her two years as a skittish, authoritarian and vicious prime minister, is of course the instinctive, doctrinaire and unrelenting racism. Now that this particular British value has become a bit of an embarrassment even to the Parliamentary wing of UKIP, it is only to be expected that all the professional racists, opportunistic racists, casual racists and just-a-bit-of-fun racists in the Conservative Party will feel obliged to distance themselves from the ideological racist at the head of the trough. Unto which, it appears that the first to embrace the new and enlightened régime annunciated by Javid of Grenfell under the thrilling rubric of "compliant environment" has been the jobsworth racist Amber Rudd. Somebody or other, at any rate, has rushed to a glistening little chum of hers who happens to have a toy newspaper, and has accused Tumbledown Tessie of endangering the public's health by blocking the admission of immigrant doctors. Happy as always to drop a spider down the scolding Headmistress's knickers, the London Evening Osborne has gone full-splurge, conjuring poignant memories of better days when the NHS was in the care of the bursary-slashing, doctor-bashing Bullingdon Club and its much-missed Secretary of State for Privatisation, Jeremy Rhymes-with-Hunt. Still and all, it is encouraging to find that even in the modern Conservative Party one can still use a transparently feigned concern about public health to stab a colleague deeply and sincerely in the back.