Hey: Who’s the Toriest-Looking Tory Out of All These Tories?

I have an overarching theory that Conservatism is the only political ideology that truly corrupts the body, coming out in the arms, face, shoulders, through great swathes of back-rash and in the choice of shirts, suits, blouses and ties.

How else can you explain this photo?

Like: not only are all these tories Really Tory; they are also visibly, physically Tory. Even if they weren't Tory: looking like that they would have to contort themselves into a conservative belief system. I don't want to have to be "the guy who quotes Roald Dahl about it", but I am going to quote Roald Dahl about it. Look at this Roald Dahl page, from The Twits:

Right, now look at Phil Hammond:

So, I mean, by extension, we can only assume that Phillip Hammond is constantly, always having pitch-black thoughts about something or other, and it is coming out through his face, brain, through his bones, through his skull. Look deep into Phillip Hammond's blank, cow-like eyes and know behind them is nothing but treacle-dark thoughts. That he is imagining boots stamping on windpipes, factories exploding, their chimneys falling to the ground. That he is thinking about firing a water cannon deep into a kettled group of rioters, their eyes popping in their skulls like ripe tomatoes. Phillip Hammond, half-hard in the gauzy early AM sun, alone in the bathroom mirror, tumescent at the sheer idea of stealing milk from nursery children. Phillip Hammond is so Tory it is creating bone spurs on him, his skeleton is slowly creaking into a more Conservative shape, if he thinks about dismantling the NHS any more and any harder his body might clench and then explode—

Anyway! Yesterday, the Conservative Party – who won the election, they would like to remind you; it was a win so unconvincing history might chalk it down as a loss, but it was, technically, a win, so they are the winners – the Winning Conservative Party put out their annual cabinet photo. There's Big Terry May, front and centre, with her legs slanted over like a bad cat. There's Jeremy Hunt, leaning curiously in and backwards, as though he can escape the camera's glare by weedling away from it. And there's Boris Johnson, looking for all the world like he woke up this morning, fully dressed, on the gunmetal grey sands of the Thames, lost and confused, a purring Uber idling next to him, somehow, ready to take him off to work. Mummy, he says, to no one, Mummy Where My Blanky.

But who is the Toriest-looking Tory out of all of these Tories?

Well.

We're going to run this like a basic intercontinental football tournament: each team (Tory) will get one play at being the Toriest-looking Tory out of all of these Tories; then, after the knock-out stages have concluded, we'll take the seeded Tory-looking Tories and play them off against each other in a series of quarter- and semi-finals, until two contenders go up against each other in the final. Then we'll declare who is the Toriest-Looking Tory 2k17. Then we can go home.

Jeremy Heywood has the face of an ancient, galactic, just-showing-his-evil empire ruler, but the haircut of a 12-year-old boy posing for his school photo on the first ever day his mum let him use hair gel. So it's confusing, isn't it, like his entire skull is some sort of intergenerational mullet: "genuinely using this Lynx Christmas gift set" above, "third prostate check in 12 months" below. A puzzler. 40% TORY

In last year's cabinet photo, Williamson looked half a decade younger and was actively smiling, so he out of everyone here – and possibly everyone in the UK – is functioning as a sort of visual metaphor for what living life under the crushing austerity of Tory rule is actually like. He is at the Wartortle stage of his Tory evolution, here – not a young, spritely Squirtle, not yet eroded into a hulkingly monstrous Blastoise. He's a level 24 Tory. Let's see how worn down and fucked up he looks in another year. 33% TORY

Nobody has sent more airport breakfasts back to the kitchen than Attorney General Jeremy Wright. This motherfucker lives to complain in restaurants. You ever seen a posh dad complain in a restaurant? They do this after they've told the waiter or waitress their problem with the food: they sit, stiff backed, and slowly fold one hand beneath the other and hold them in front of their chin. Blinking slower. Distantly looking across the room and out of the window. And lo, here's the bill: and all the starters are comped, with a free bottle of wine for the table. And Jeremy Wright is harder than he's ever been in his life. Fuck this Harvester. 60% TORY

I absolutely cannot believe this lad signed off on this being his official portraiture pose for the next calendar year. Like he's just walked up a big flight of stairs and seen a croissant. Like he's driven 60 miles to a motorway services where he knows he won't be recognised just to stare at a shelf full of Nuts. "Yeah, great photo, Patrick: could you make it a little less 'dirty uncle has just realised his 21-year-old niece is a woman now and is about to ruin this summer party by saying the word knickers'?" 20% TORY

Liz Truss is really Tory-looking because she has the exact vibe of that village woman in every gentle British murder programme who keeps telling the police off for taking too long to investigate the murder ("Oh come on now, officer, it was one silly little hooker! Surely the children can go back to school now!") and keeps being seen shiftily holding her dressing gown tight around her and making little 5AM trips to the place where they found the body buried because, of course, it turned out she did the slaughter all along, and when they finally get her in prison about it she's all like "and I'd do it again", heartbeat not even rising one bit, truly truly chilling, and the murder was motivated by, like, the sale of some land – something Tory like that. So yeah 79% TORY

Andrea Leadsom, the guest choir leader on an episode of Songs of Praise who drew a record number of Watchdog complaints for "not fucking blinking enough" 80% TORY

On one hand Brandon Lewis is 0% Tory-looking because he instead looks like a cheery dad who keeps getting turned down for extra work in the Italian-New York mafia ("Ey, I get it! I gotta face like a cheery bologna!"), but on the other hand he also properly looks like one of those evil countryside I-have-an-empire buy-to-let landlord types who owns like 18 properties and a load of Jags and has his own personality-free new-build pub where the burgers cost £18 and once a month like clockwork he fires some 17-year-old glass collector kid for slightly wearing his uniform wrong (all of which is 100 percent Tory), so we're going to have to split the difference here 50% TORY

Still looks like she got kicked out of The Apprentice the first week she led a task because she tried to market "Water… For Women!" and Karren Brady had to do that "I'm actually really disappointed in how you've all behaved" speech when they play back the pitch meeting where three of the other contestants ended up crying.

HAUNTED MARIONETTES ARE ONE THOUSAND PER CENT TORY 1000% TORY

Substitute teacher who had a now-legendary breakdown in front of that class of Year 9s because they kept saying he looked like "a fucking cornflake" when he was trying to teach them Geography 55% TORY

I know she's a baroness and all that but to me Natalie Evans still has the sly look of the woman at your weekly church hall dog-training meet-up who made up a story about your puppy attacking her Labrador that turned into this whole legal battle that you finally conceded by having Archie put down 90% TORY

The sad and desperate eyes of a man who knows his carpet centre is failing and he's going to have to sell the Audi but can't quite bring himself to tell the wife they can't go to her sister's wedding this year because it's in Florida 10% TORY

Torn over Greg Clark because on one hand he seems very "keen-but-dim community allotment organiser who says 'GRAB A SPADE AND DIG IN!' a half-second too late on the local news segment about how they're planting some strawberries in the garden of a primary school" (0% TORY), but he also looks like he complains on commuter trains when people without first class tickets sit in first class (1,000,000% TORY), so all-in-all I'm going to call it a solid 30% TORY

So Tory his eyebrows are growing into his eyes, the Toriest eyebrow hair trend in Christendom 95% TORY

"Hark, my pretty little dumpling, hark and what do we have here: ah, ahah, why it's a handsome 18th – is it 18th? Yes, I think it – a handsome 18th century sideboard, here in lovely Derbyshire. Ah, ahah, but I bet you are wondering what this soft-handed curiously sinister Antiques Roadshow expert has to say on its value, don't you? Well, hark, my pretty: I would value this at the grand total of one lovely kiss on the lips from you, or one MILLION POUNDS—!" 100% TORY

Mate, how can you be in government when it looks like your face is held in place by a Snapchat filter 60% TORY

3AM - 5AM local station DJ famous only for a series of YouTube clips where stoned lads from the area hijack phone-ins to call him a "TOSSPOT" and he keeps apocalyptically losing his rag 70% TORY

"Hiya! We're setting up a weekly karaoke night in the pub beneath your flat, and if you don't like it– you can fuck off!" 1% TORY

"No Officer, I have no idea how them boys drowned. Goodbye."

Your mate's dad who knows you had one of his beers when you were all over to play Mario Kart one night when you were 17 and has never forgotten it, never even for a second, that was a special beer that he bought back from a business trip to Belgium, it was six quid a bottle, you little cunt, you little— fucking— cu 85% TORY

"We don't like to do this to you, darling, it brings me no pleasure to do this to you, I get no joy out of doing this to you, but we are cutting you off and I'm going to buy a boat instead. Well, you shouldn't have done a humanities degree then, should you!" 90% TORY

Your mum's friend who, every year, organises a charity bake sale and, every year, claims expenses from the take for time and sugar bought. "Well, if you work out my hourly rate at the consultancy firm, the six days I put into organising this comes out at about eight grand," she says, "so frankly the Hospice should think itself lucky for the cheque we write them out of the rest of it. They nearly got £160 this year." 65% TORY

Local headteacher who every year sets curiously specific uniform rules and always ends up excluding a boy for turning up with his head shaved 100% TORY

No hard evidence for this but I am convinced Theresa May's perambulation can scientifically be classed as "scuttling" rather than "walking" – I just feel very much that the sound of her taking a jacket off is like a hundred beetles squeaking across a well-polished floor – i.e. I am not 1,000 percent sure our PM isn't just a haunted mountain of insects and not an actual viable human at all 150% TORY

I just feel like he reads a lot of badly-cited articles about cranial size and intelligence and knows what it sounds like when a dog dies 105% TORY

Mad how someone with a 2:1 from Oxford and who used to hold the office of the Mayor of London also very much looks like he's the only adult alive who still needs regularly burping by a big burly nanny 100% TORY

"Hi, is your mum in? I lent her a lasagne dish three years ago and I now very urgently need it back. If she's not in can I go through the cupboards? It's actually very rude of her not to bring it back immediately, you can tell her that from me." 60% TORY

Looks like one of those ruddy-faced dads who's always in the audience on Question Time who loudly goes "ohhhh, come ON!" whenever someone favourably mentions immigration, I can't actually believe this man is in power 100% TORY

In another lifetime he's on his second hearing in five years explaining how he ended up having an affair with one of his Masters students, but for now he's deliberately running the engine in the garage of the NHS, hoping it'll collapse and die on itself so he can retire on a series of salaried five-day-a-year positions and British walking holidays 200% TORY

In a battle to see who is Toriest-looking out of Theresa May and Michael Gove, Gove just about takes it, because he looks like a wooden ostrich from a 70s kids TV show that they can't repeat nowadays because it says the W-word too often, whereas Theresa May – though every expression she makes does strike you like an animal painfully trying to emulate a human before being found out and destroyed – is just a very grey woman who can't smile. GOVE WINS

Both of them look like they have been fiddling the same multi-national bank from a position of high power for 20 years now, so their Toryism almost cancels each other out, but Fallon just takes it because he looks like it would take about eight hours to explain what each character in the acronym "LGBTQ" means to him, whereas with Lidington it would only take about an hour-and-a-half. FALLON WINS

Davis didn't turn up to his quarter final because he was too busy reading the Telegraph while forgetting to take his heart medication, so Hunt edges it. HUNT WINS

Chris Grayling is the most sinister-looking motherfucker alive – OK, imagine this: you are driving, though the edge of the Midwest, through all those straight roads for miles, and minute desert towns and cacti and trees that fade to nowhere, and your car (your car is an ancient old banger but it's the best you've got: you've been avoiding the MOT on it for years) finally starts to splutter and cough, and bang, and you can just about idle it over to that house over there yonder, it sort of looks like it has a garage next to it, maybe the guy who lives there is handy; and just as the sun starts to dip below the horizon and the sky goes blue through orange to cold grey, you get there, and gun the engine off, and head up to the creaking screen door on the outside of the building, wooden shingles and curiously un-twinkling wind chimes, and then, just when you start to turn to head back to your vehicle, bang: Chris Grayling is there, beckoning you in.

"Oh of course," Chris Grayling is saying, "No shh shh shh: stay here, stay the night." Chris Grayling says he will fix your car in the morning, Chris Grayling was just setting down for supper, won't you eat?; and the question I suppose I am asking here is: i. do you go into the house and eat the cornbread and sleep in the stiff single bed in his mother's old room and be absolutely fucking murdered to death by this dude; or ii. do you just thank him but fake a phone call from the AA and sprint into the desert, hoping salvation will find you before Grayling does? Exactly. But Hammond takes the Tory-looking prize for looking sort of like a vulture who learned how to be a librarian.

Yeah, Hammond is the Toriest-looking Tory out of all of these Tories, taking the Toriest-Looking Tory prize for 2k17. He looks like he's made out of bats. Anyway: well done Philip Hammond.

@joelgolby

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