Let Shame Come When It Will

In a realm of such political Britishness that Tumbledown Tessie can express disapproval of a hostile environment, and Jeremy C Hunt babbles about the virtues of the NHS, and Gordon Brown once wrote a book about courage, it should come as no surprise that the National Johnson has undergone a belated conversion in the matter of sexist, misogynistic tripe. Reaction to the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday's smearing of Angela Rayner has brought forth a Shakespearean efflorescence of righteous fury, along with a doubtless robust commitment to the sort of standards which the Johnson dismissed as "humbug" when some filly on the opposition benches suggested that he might care to moderate his language. Apparently the Conservative Party's parliamentary enforcers are shining lights in eyes and applying electrodes to testicles in hopes of exposing the offensive member, and the Johnson himself has promised that "the terrors of the earth" shall descend upon anyone he finds it expedient to blame. As befits a Shakespeare scholar of the Johnson's depth and subtlety, the threat is a quotation from Act 2, scene IV of King Lear, in which a politically inept, clapped-out and humiliated leader proceeds to denounce and threaten some women who are stronger than he is.