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The five-knuckle reshuffle

Ah, here we are, cabinet reshuffle day. Kind of like transfer deadline day for nerds.

Nope, not going to go into the ins and outs of the World King's swings and roundabouts, though I will note (as I did earlier elsewhere, recycling one's own remarks is, I feel, very much in keeping with the spirit of a thrifty age, and if Ant and Dec can make an entire career out of one joke, I see no reason why I shouldn't recycle a tweet) that Leadsom and McVey getting shown the boot is something that can only add greatly to the gaiety of nations. I thought about it, but I can't be arsed. Since the election, and the subsequent nodding thorough of the withdrawal bill, I've felt a political ennui settle slowly on me, indeed, almost a sort of grim satisfaction. Fine, you've got what you wanted, let's see how you like it.

I'll snap out of it at some point, I imagine, but not even the red meat of Sajid Javid resigning can really rouse me to take much interest in the current bout of ins and outs. It's a British political tradition that I've always found slightly mystifying, this habit of putting people with no relevant experience into the most important job in their field in the country. As to why Brandon Lewis, who's been quietly pootling away at the Home Office, is better qualified to be minister for NI (bafflingly, no-one from NI ever seems to get the job, you'd think that someone from there might have a better grasp on the region's complex politics than *checks notes* a bloke from Great Yarmouth who co-hosted a radio show with Eric Pickles) than the previous incumbent is a mystery to me, and, I suspect to everyone who struggles to divine what reasoning lurks behind World King Alexander Boris "Spaffing" de Pfeffel Johnson's perpetually gurning visage.

Because it's bollocks, isn't it? This is the greatest lie of the cabinet reshuffle: that it matters. That it's a strategically important bit of planning on the part of a PM who's a master tactician, putting the right people in the right places to forge a cabinet that can thrust forwards vigorously into the sunlit uplands of our glorious Imperial future. As opposed to a petty overgrown schoolboy rewarding yes-men and getting rid of people who've knocked him off their Christmas card list whilst leaving Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock inexplicably in a job. Not to mention Jacob "Grenfell thickos" Rees-Mogg, who's also somehow survived, possibly by pretending to be a hat stand.

(In this, at least, he's learned from Theresa May, amongst whose lengthy catalogue of grievous errors the inclusion of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel "Bumboys, Piccaninnies, Letterboxes" World King Johnson in her cabinet must rank fairly highly. She reasoned that she'd rather have him inside pissing out than outside pissing in, but unfortunately he came in, pissed all over the sofa and then tried to shag a table-leg, before nicking a couple of bottles of malt and fucking off to Evgeny Lebedev's house to try and sell them to Putin).

Oh, alright, I do still have a passing interest, if only because I'm hoping that one of the junior ministers he's promoted turns be one of his innumerable unacknowledged children, what a reunion THAT would be .

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