That Was The Reshuffle - That Was!

Esther McVile McVey

Last week saw Prime Minister David Cameron reshuffle his cabinet and with it we were predictably bombarded by the Tory supporting right wing press about how dramatic it all was and how many women were going to be put into so-called big jobs.

Wirral West MP and nonentity minister for employment Esther McVey (better known as Esther 'McVile') was tipped for one of the 'big jobs'. You may recall that not so long ago McVey was preaching to us all how tough it was for everybody (her included) and how we all must cut our cloth accordingly and share the 'necessary' pain. In the event McVile McVey took her own advice literally and got designer Vivienne Westwood to 'cut' her a £585 'cloth' outfit for her much looked forward to sashay up Downing Street in front of photographers where she was eagerly looking forward to being told what her new big job was going to be. I wonder how much her matching shoes and clutch bag cost? (Bet they didn't come from Primark!) Wondering if McVey actually paid the full  cost of her Vivienne Westwood outfit and designer unknown clutch bag and shoes or has she claimed for the cost on her £170,000 per year parliamentary expenses? You know those expenses she is able to claim on top of her MP's and currently ministerial salary?

Certainly her 'pain sharing' gives us all 'foodbank' food for thought and perhaps it's unkind to the pain sharing Esther McVile McVey to indulge in a spot of Schadenfreude in which turns out to be the one bright spot of the entire boring reshuffle farce, but what the heck?! I confess I am reduced to a hearty smirk if not an outright chuckle at the thought of Esther staging a sit-in inside Downing Street after being told she wasn't going to be promoted after all, she was going to stay in the underling role of her junior ministerial post as minister for employment. She threw a major hissy fit (just like Iain Duncan-Spit the Pensions secretary once did) and threatened to resign, because no way was Esther going to face the embarrassment of Sky's Adam Boulton asking her what 'big job' she got and did not want to publicly 'flagellate herself by 'sharing her pain' on emerging from number 10 on the famous steps. That'll teach Esther for believing David Cameron, after his advisers briefed she was going to be offered a major port folio, we keep telling her that Cameron's lies so much he would find it impossible to lie straight in bed!

Seems that Cameron and his politically motivated reshuffle and blatant electioneering from number 10 (paid for by the taxpayer) is wise to the fact that McVile is actually detested by a large part of the electorate namely the disabled, the unemployed, and those adversely affected by the bedroom tax etc. Having got rid of one political hot potato (Michael Gove but not his two right wing maniacal mates Jeremy cHunt and Iain Duncan-Spit who definitely should have gone with him) he wasn't going to promote a new one which may cause him electoral embarrassment, female or not!

Apparently Esther's 'sit-in' inside number 10 caused the weak and dodgy PM David Cameron a headache, what was he to do? He had just managed to calm down Iain Duncan-Spit. Apparently the grossly misleading, disingenuous and downright lying hypocritical Spit didn't want a knighthood just yet (the offer to try and bribe him to go quietly), he is having too much fun being vile to the disabled, poor, unemployed etc. So Cameron decided that Esther would keep her current job as planned but be allowed to sit around the cabinet table as long as she had no voice. She can join the Deputy PM Nick Clegg who also has no voice, they can both make the teas and coffees and provide the choccy biscuits! Esther's not too proud apparently because she has accepted this role which must be excruciatingly embarrassing because not only is she still a junior minister without a proper port folio, she is now a junior minister without a voice as well as without a proper port folio! Apparently the only thing she isn't without is the cabinet minister's taxpayer's funded pay rise, (she still gets one of those), so will she still be telling us all that we 'must all share the pain' after her hefty non port folio non voice non cabinet promotion/promotion pay rise? How will she look the electorate in the eye and say the unemployed must work for their benefits as it is unacceptable to do nothing for them when Ms McVile herself is in receipt of a cabinet mister's salary which she doesn't earn? Does the fact that she has no voice around the cabinet table prevent her from doing the decent thing and refusing this pay rise? Or will she (as ever) along with this corrupt, hypocritical, incompetent, misleading and much reviled Tory government just 'take the [pay] rise' and put her middle finger up to the electorate and add it to her large taxpayer funded salary while claiming for all and sundry on her taxpayer funded expense account while preaching to us that we 'must all share the pain'? After all she went to a lot of trouble to choose that Westwood outfit for her big day, which could have kept a family of four in food and away from the foodbanks for at least five weeks!

Meanwhile Nicky Morgan the new Education Minister who does apparently have a voice around the cabinet table (she thinks), becomes the female version of Michael Gove, holding almost identical views takes up her position, not because she may be good at the job, but simply because she is a woman and Cameron wanted to decorate his front bench in the House of Commons with females in order to stop Ed Miliband drawing attention to his previous all male front bench!

I think Cameron must be quite pained that he couldn't use Esther McVey, her being a woman AND possessing a Northern accent (and all that), the fact that he didn't must mean that he is more terrified of the result of the 2015 general election than we realise!

Meanwhile the Tory right on the backbenches are being appeased by Cameron turning the Conservative party into a pale imitation of Ukip - whatever happened to Cameron's 'compassionate Conservatism'? And old Guard like left leaning Ken Clarke are leaving active party politics and are starting to dish the dirt on Cameron and Osborne. He went off-message when he revealed that Margaret Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS and he persuaded her not to do it, appeasing her only with introducing private companies and the market into the NHS, which of course leads us to where we are today with the NHS. Labour having saved the NHS from the Tories during their 13 years are now seeing Cameron trying to finish the job that Clarke's appeasement allowed Thatcher to start!

Of course these are just a few of the great many examples of how the Conservative party is actually imploding and is split asunder, but don't expect the right wing Tory supporting newspapers to report anywhere near the truth (and forget the Guardian who doesn't know its political right or left arse from its elbow these days) also don't expect the biased broadcast media like the Tory BBC and Murdoch owned Sky News to inform you of the truth, they won't they are far too busy obsessed with bacon sandwiches and  personally attacking Ed Miliband to report the truth!

They keep saying that voters are not convinced about Ed Miliband, well how can they be when they are forced fed a diet of rancid right wing fat Tory lies on a daily basis? The papers are doing the Conservative Spin Machine's bidding on behest of right wing lobbyist and finger in all bent and twisted pies Lynton Crosby. They are desperately trying to divert attention away from David Cameron and his daily flops and failures, his appalling lack of judgement and gross incompetence by pointing the finger at one of the few honest men in politics - Ed Miliband! Odd really as Miliband has had more success in forcing this atrocious government to act than any other opposition leader in history, but don't expect to be told this!

Electorally, Cameron has been an abysmal failure, in 2010 despite having everything going for him and up against a deeply unpopular PM in Gordon Brown (who the Tories blamed for the GLOBAL recession and what the greed of their Tory banker mates did to this country)  he failed to win a majority and had to crawl to the Liberal Democrats to form a government. In flattering Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg's ego giving him the Deputy PM's job, Cameron was able to manipulate a change in parliamentary terms making them a mandatory 5 years so he couldn't be ousted from his job. All the indications are that Cameron is going to be a loser in 2015 yet again as the polls still stubbornly indicate a Labour majority or a Labour largest party hung parliament. This is unprecedented in British politics for an outgoing government who lost so badly at the polls to be able to get themselves back in just one term, but the right wing press and the Tories do not want us to know this, they want to paint the picture that Miliband is a failure, when really he is not, he is a success, against all the odds, Miliband is a success and it's David Cameron who is the failure and I cannot envisage Cameron's token cabinet females, so placed for election purposes only is going to make much difference to that!