I should maybe subtitle this “in which I spend an entire evening obsessing about how scary our current cabinet ministers are so that you don’t have to”. There are thirty of the buggers, so you’re getting ten per post. Enjoy?
The Rt Hon David Cameron MP: Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service
I am increasingly concerned that our esteemed Prime Minister is in fact turning into a Marvel supervillain. You’ve all seen that image of a recent quote of his Photoshopped into a couple of frames of Dr. Doom, right? I saw it before I read about Cameron’s remarks, and my initial assumption was that it was a real Dr. Doom comic that someone was comparing to Cameron’s remarks as a sort of entertaining allegory. Sadly, I was wrong. I fear that Call-Me-Dave’s transformation will soon be complete. Just look at this glare+fists combo.
The Rt Hon George Osborne: First Secretary of State, Chancellor of the Exchequer
I’m not sure how much I need to say about Osborne, either; this is a familiar face and his is a familiar evil. His politics are responsible for so many illnesses, mental health crises and suicide attempts that even the Daily Mail admits it. Cameron has left him in charge of the money, which strikes fear into my heart, and let him have William Hague’s shiny honorary title to boot.
The Rt Hon Baroness Stowell of Beeston MBE: Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Privy Seal
Privy Seal is an honorary position these days; it’s pretty much the same kind of deal as a Minister Without Portfolio, which basically means “we’re not putting you in charge of anything but you can still have a special Cabinetty vote”. She’s…alright, actually. I mean, maybe there’s just something I don’t know, but I really quite like her; she was a proper northern working class girl who joined the Civil Service in a general making-the-tea sort of capacity and rose up right from the bottom to be literally the leader of the House of Lords. She’s never been married or linked to any kind of relationship, and quite often says things I’d call “feminist”. She’s also a huge supporter of GBLT rights, and was *highly* influential in successfully getting the equal marriage bill through the Lords. If I was ever going to fangirl a Tory peer, it would be her. I have no idea why she is a Tory at all, really. I expect she currently feels a bit like her entire party have suddenly turned as one to face her while hissing “WE HAVE ALL LAID ASIDE DISGUISE BUT YOU”.
The Rt Hon Theresa May: Secretary of State for the Home Department
Fuck Theresa May. Her entire job as Home Secretary seems set to be devoted to metaphorically waving around brushes loaded with bright red paint while screaming GO HOME at random passers-by. Her immediate reaction to finally shaking off those pesky Liberals was to immediately revive the massively unpopular Snooper’s Charter they squashed. I’m also a bit worried that she’s currently trying to sneak in the introduction of thoughtcrime through the back door created by Islamophobia. This woman is an old-fashioned Nasty Party-style Tory of the highest order, and I can barely even summon enough of a sense of sisterhood towards her to be pleased that she’s boosting the number of women in this Cabinet.
The Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP: Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Blah blah Foreign Secretary blah blah “the promotion of British interests abroad” blah: basically, this is the dude who is in charge of all the spies. That’s what’s cool about this job, right? I wish it was all he did, actually, because he’s a determined Eurosceptic whose job it is to look after our relations with Europe, and that does not ring hopeful to me. To make matters worse, he has a massively homophobic voting record – he voted against equal marriage, against adoption by same-sex couples and against equal age of consent. He was in the news a while back for saying that he was “disappointed” the Conservative party were discussing equal marriage, because it is “too controversial” and would be “damaging” to the party’s values. The Shadow Foreign Secretary put it best in the Pink News last summer, but the last paragraph of that article makes me so sad: there she was hoping this man would uphold basic human rights, and little did any of us know he’d be part of a shock movement to scrap them.
The Rt Hon Michael Gove MP: Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
Having noted that Gove has done everything in his power to fuck up our schools, Cameron has clearly now decided he should be set to the task of fucking up our courts and prisons instead. He was honestly probably the worst Education Secretary this country has ever had: he was eventually given a vote of no confidence by every single teachers’ union, something that is I believe utterly unprecedented. Interestingly, he seems to have been a real human being once – I have no idea what changed. My assumption is that he plans to bring the sense of corporatisation, red tape, bullying and fear with which he flooded the nation’s schools into the penal system, though this has yet to be proven. Here’s a fun fact, though: he is genuinely in favour of the death penalty, which is a remarkable extreme even for a Tory. Yes, folks, you read that right. The minister in charge of the justice system is pro-capital-punishment. Well done, everybody.
The Rt Hon Michael Fallon: Secretary of State for Defence
Interestingly, Cameron has picked someone for Defence Secretary who has a strong history of being all for the European integration of the UK – which could give those of us who would like to remain within the EU a faint glimmer of hope. He has, however, never made a single vote that would be of help to a poor person, seems to be alarmingly pro-our-soldiers-hitting-stuff and is generally kind of a dick. So, you know, there’s that.
The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP: Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade
This guy is the local MP for a friend of mine who is generally a bit left of centre, and this mate told me he was one of the good guys. I was all set to have some time for him, then, only for him to completely fuck the unions over within three minutes of being given his job. I feel somehow betrayed. I suspect that we’re reaching the point where unions are going to need to start instigating mass illegal strike action just to remind the bastards that the balance of power is not as squarely with them as they seem to think it is.
The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP: Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Oh, Iain: I doubt that I would piss on you if you were on fire, and I’m usually the sort of person who tries to be vaguely nice to almost everybody. I’m not convinced it would be all that hyperbolic to call IDS a murderer. Cameron has seen fit to let this particularly nasty piece of work continue his reign of terror over the DWP, for some reason that nobody can work out. It’s not just that his policies are evil, it’s worse than that – they’re also incompetent. Universal Credit is a fucking shambles and it’s apparently now looking like it was rolled out so cack-handedly that they might not be able to implement it properly after all – thank heavens for small mercies, I suppose. I’m still baffled and appalled by his vile assertion that another £12bn can somehow be cut from the welfare system – not even the Financial Times understands where he’s going to find all of it. Both The Mirror and The Independent have put together terrifying run-downs of why there is such a lot to loathe about this man, and I suggest you read them if you fancy a good scare. Not even his own party’s supporters like him.
The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP: Secretary of State for Health
Take a good look at that photo, people, because you might very well be staring at the face of the man who is going to systematically undermine and destroy this country’s single greatest asset. As far as I can tell, Jeremy Hunt basically hates the NHS or something? This is a subject particularly near and dear to my heart because I adore our NHS: I have often said that I am “actually very patriotic, in my way” and the National Health Service is the first thing I’ll mention if you press me to talk about that more. Hunt is particularly bad when it comes to mental health, which he seems to mostly think isn’t a real thing. That’s not even the scariest thing about him, though: he seems to want to reduce the abortion time limit to twelve weeks, a point at which many women don’t yet even know they’re pregnant. His are not a safe pair of hands in which to leave something as precious as our healthcare provisions.
This post contains public sector information, including images, that is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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