Grant Shapps

Grant Shapps, Ladies and Gentlemen. Grant Shapps. Graaaaaant Shaaaaaapps. Drink him in. Revel in his presence. Grant Shapps. Grant fucking Shapps.

As I have, at times, attempted to point out, my politics are largely of the left. This does not, however, preclude me from liking the odd Tory on a case by case basis. I have reasonably sane friends who are conservative. We can disagree wildly, but we’ll rub along.
However. Grant Shapps. Graaaaant Shaaaapps. The Shappinator, the Shappmeister. Cap’n Shapps. No, no, I don’t see he and I getting along. There are people who are conservative because they’re traditionalist, there are people who are conservative because they’re already quite wealthy and they’d quite like to stay that way, thanks. There are people who are conservative because they live in a jolly nice town and everyone else in their jolly nice town is. There are people who are conservative because well, that’s just what one’s family does, in the same vague, unthinking British way that the Monarchy trundles on. I can live with these people. Then there are people who are conservative because the party is a giant machine for making money. Venal, amoral fuckpigs who believe in nothing but their bank account. The antithesis of the bastardised phrase “conviction politician”.

Graaaaaaant Shaaaaaaapps.

Y’know, it’s not that he had a second job. Perfectly legal, perfectly above board and within parliamentary regs. Fine. It’s not even that he lied about it, brazenly and repeatedly. It’s not EVEN that he sued someone who accused him of lying. It’s more what it was.
As his alter ego “Michael Green” (lame, lame, lame, if you’re going to have an alter-ego at least call him something like Monstro McCormick or Dirk Handlebars), Cap’n Shapps was (oh god, I can barely bring myself to type it), an “internet marketer”. A what? You might well ask. Precisely. He was one of those people who try to make money by doing precisely fuck-all. He didn’t make anything, he didn’t provide a service, he didn’t produce anything of value. He marketed something which looks remarkably like a pyramid scheme, he set up fake blogs with bots to copy and paste content and then rake in the Google Ads revenue, he peddled get rich quick schemes to other cash obsessed dicks. He was basically a timeshare salesman. And that’s the depressing thing, this bottom feeder is at the fucking heart of government. He doesn’t believe in anything. He is the human equivalent of a sales conference held at a Travelodge just off a ring road, where the coffee is perpetually sour and the sandwiches are curling. He’s just so LAME. He’s a powerpoint presentation on how you can make £££s selling shower curtain rings in your spare time made flesh.

So let’s gloss over the whole lying thing, let’s bypass the pretending to be other people on the internet (including, hilariously, attempting to pose as Lib Dem candidate in a by-election but forgetting that he was still logged in as himself). We’ll even gloss over the bingo poster (remember that?). What cannot be forgiven is the fact, the stone cold fact, that Grant “Fucking” Shapps is as monstrously useless a money-hoovering waste of a skin as has ever disgraced public office in the country. An incompetent, stupid, avaricious, malicious work of dark art. And he’s a minister. Somehow. Kind of calls Cambo’s judgement into question, but that’s a whole other post.