What Would Britain Look Like Under These Tory Leadership Hopefuls?

The British political system is full of hilarious little quirks – the fact that there's someone called Black Rod, for instance, or the fact that over the next few months, a tiny and eccentric population of crusty old deans, wax-dotted perverts, and creepy undergrads in waistcoats and bow-ties, otherwise known as the Conservative Party's membership, get to choose who runs the entire country. And just look who they get to choose from: despite Boris mysteriously dropping out of the race, the 150,000-odd people holding us all hostage have a full picture book-grimoire of monsters.

So much of the usual analytic frenzy focuses on the personalities of these candidates; their boiling little spats with each other, their likes and dislikes, their competencies and incompetencies. Which is fine, but what are they actually going to do to the country? How will their aggravating physical and sexual quirks echo over the rolling British landscape? Since 2010 the United Kingdom has become a kind of giant David Cameron, all flash and shine stretched taut over damp decay, full of an arrogance and boisterousness that barely masks the general idiocy; over the last six years we all fucked the pig. What will happen to the country, to ourselves, if Theresa May is in charge? How might we twist and deform to match the horrifying features of a Michael Gove? What horrible new worlds will these people create?

The sun rises bright and early in Michael Gove's Britain. Everything rises bright and early. Michael Gove is very particular about these things: he likes things to be prim, and clean, and British, and wholesome. As a cabinet secretary he tried to scrap American literature from school curricula and abolish GCSEs in favour of the old O-Levels, for no bigger reason than that he didn't like them very much; they were messy and modern, too confusing, too newfangled. What kind of sickness is suffered by someone who, when using a false name in emails to avoid Freedom of Information requests, chooses Mrs Blurt? What kind of grim 1970s comedy does he think he's living in? As Prime Minister, his first act was to earmark several million to fully thatch the roof of the Palace of Westminster. And it looks very fine in the cold spring sunlight, with the first cabbages sprouting on Parliament Square, and the MPs scuttling to work in their now-mandatory tweeds. Life is simpler under Prime Minister Gove – instead of high-speed rail we've gone back to good old-fashioned choo-choo trains, wheels spinning with the excitement of a lost age, drivers doffing their regulation bowler hats, smoke coiling in fairytale wisps across the countryside. Instead of all this trendy foreign ceviche and those nasty greasy kebabs, we eat our jellied eel pies, we eat them right up. Instead of killing themselves with designer drugs and texting each other pictures of their genitals, young people are given good honest work down a chimney. Britain is British again. We got our country back.

At the last Conservative Party conference, Theresa May sounded a strange and sour note – while her colleagues were making the most of Corbyn's rise to present the Tories as the true face of washy and meaningless liberalism, May decided that this would be the perfect time to do her famous crush-the-weak routine. Migrants and asylum seekers were destroying the country's social cohesion, she said, and she would send them all home. This has always been a monomaniac obsession of hers (along with a reflexive opposition to gay rights); it was Theresa May who sent the famous "racist vans" screeching around London with their message to "go home or face arrest". But the van was only a prototype. Somehow, she was able to present herself as the friendly liberal candidate for the Conservative leadership, and now when Big Ben tolls over a darkened Westminster it's accompanied by a throaty roar, like a call to prayer issued from the world's most racist muezzin: "Bong! – Go back to your own fucking country! Bong! – You weren't even born here!" Below, the tiny people hide in their alleyways, without papers, without hope. They're afraid. They're right to be afraid.

When Liam Fox was forced to resign in late 2011, it wasn't because as Defence Secretary he'd pushed for a war in Libya that utterly destroyed the country and ended up killing tens of thousands of people, but because he'd invited his friend Adam Werritty to too many of the meetings in which he'd done this. But this is how British politics works: you can kill as many people as you like, you can go on junkets paid for by repressive governments in Bahrain and Sri Lanka, you can stick up for the murderous regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia, but you must not give political kickbacks to your friends. Liam Fox has learned his lesson now: there are no friends in politics, there can never be any friends. He's learned a lot from his trips to the Middle East – with Britain in chaos, the country needs a strongman, a tough leader to guide the idiot rabble through the storms to come. Prime Minister Liam Fox's broad and fleshy face is lined with the toll of a hundred tough decisions: yes, he may have been venal and incompetent; yes, he sold a few cities to large conglomerates – but the people responded with violence, and they should have known what he would have to do. Liam Fox sits at his desk at Number 10, looking pensive. In a giant oil painting hung above him, Liam Fox sits at his desk, looking pensive. On posters at bus stops and in every home, Liam fox sits, looking pensive. In the ruins of Liverpool, helicopter gunships use infrared cameras to sweep for survivors, and painted on every missile they fire are small portraits of Liam Fox, looking pensive.

@sam_kriss

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