The Decade in Tory: An Inventory of Idiocy from the Coalition to Covid

A masterly account of the further degeneration of the Conservative Party over a decade in office and its direct influence on declining standards of ethics and probity in Government.It accounts with amazingly detailed reference and facts how our nation has been broken by a cabal of liars, narcissists, spivs, xenophobes, ideologues and egotists, many of whom whould sell their own mothers down the river for a few bucks.Brilliant, incredibly detailed, humorous, ironic,compelling, incredible and numbing. How did we end up here? …read this book!

Many of us who've bought this follow Russ on Twitter and have (clearly) enjoyed his regular evisceration of the Tories, in this case, the period between 2010 and 2020.I had long admired his patience in stringing together countless incidents per week - sometimes per day - into a coherent thread, complete with ascerbic observations of character and behaviour. Some of his comments are genuinely laugh out loud funny - well, they are to me as a member of the tree hugging, lefty, tofu-eating Wokerati. Some of them are just plain damning and make you gut-wrenchingly angry, much like living under the Conservative government for almost 14 year.His descriptions of the likes of Rees-Mogg, Gove et al are spot on (and you know exactly why he chooses the words he does); incidents are recounted with varying amounts of anger, annoyance, and disbelief but always with humour.I thoroughly enjoyed reading this although my husband claimed that some of the laughing is likely to be due to hysteria. (I can confirm that the hardback version of the book is large and heavy enough to cause bruising when used as an offensive object.) In the period since this book ended, Russ has continued tweeting and those of us following him obviously hope that there'll be a volume two - we thought things were bad in 2020 but the past three years have definitely provided a wealth of material for observation and publication.

I like to keep my mind open politically because it's essential to understand where people come from on various issues. However, this wonderfully entertaining book shines the light on how unscrupulous, vacuous, and egocentric the Tories are. Some of the contents of the book I was unaware of, but it has definitely opened my mind to the chaos and ideology which cost people their lives. Furthermore, I was aware of how ludicrous Johnson is, but this book, and his final 12 months in office demonstrate how he is shameless, work-shy, and a charlatan. Please read it; it's funny, entertaining, and informative.

Those of us who have followed Russ Jones on twitter and his acerbic "The Week in Tory" threads will be familiar with his accurate skewering of our current government's frankly treacherous hypocrisy and incompetence.In The Decade in Tory, Jones gives us a magnificent tour of misconduct in public office and venal malfeasance on a scale the country should have a collective nightmare about. As Jones points out It's absolutely fine to scream occasionally whole reading this book.It is perhaps the British way to laugh and brilliantly satirise the moral and practical weaknesses of our political "masters" rather than - say - take to the streets in protest to overthrow them. We are after all, a nation concerned with propriety and not breaking laws or causing a fuss, unlike the Tories. That may be a failing on our part, but one can always appreciate Jones way with words, for example when he described Theresa May's awkward angular strut onto the stage at her last Conservative conference as leader as being like Vogon poetry in motion.However, while my notes and highlights are filled with "lol" or even "lol lol lol" I often had to qualify this with "sad lol" or "angry lol" because to read this catalogue of conservative iniquity is to be enraged at what the bastards have got away with - and continue to get away with. One of humour's powers is how it lowers the traditional barriers of established thinking (like lowering the shields on the Enterprise) and gives a brief opportunity for the photon torpedo of truth to get through (I may have overworked that analogy), so it might be tempting to give copies to any right leaning people in your circle?!The strength in Jones's account is that he gets to do something the mainstream media so rarely have done. He can juxtapose every ministerial pronouncement and policy initiative with the exactly contradictory message they gave last month/last week/last minute. He can also highlight the blatant conflicts of interest, party political bias and cronyism to the point of corruption in the awarding of contracts and allocation of resources. For example Jenrick awarding his own markedly undeprived constituency more deprivation funding than the whole of Birmingham.The media's failure to present the obvious counterpoints to government lies may be to do with the speed with which Johnson and his acolytes spewed out the outrageous and absurd statements, or it may have to do with their unwillingness to hold the friends of their media bosses/owners to account. But here Jones is able to fact-check each statement and action with its appropriate repudiation, in ways which had me highlighting and noting "abso-fecking-lutely" and "unbe-fecking-lievable" all over the place.At the centre of this decade of disaster lies the Brexit vote, not so much the nadir as the point of inflexion at which the collapse in government competence, honesty and standards in public life abruptly accelerated. As Jones puts itWe are trapped, victims of a scam perpetrated by spittle-flecked fanatics and implemented by vapid, overpromoted schoolboys, playing at politics until they've made enough wealthy contacts to let them cash in."and later"The last decade has been indistinguishable from a rollercoaster drawn by M. C. Escher, composed entirely of nauseating descents."This is not a short book and the chapters covering each year get progressively fatter as the deluge of country-destroying democracy-undermining treachery intensifies, but what swells it to 827 pages are 228 pages filled with over a thousand references to evidence the biting statements Jones makes.We know that information (let alone truth) is not enough to win an argument. Libertarian think-tanks, billionaire media owners and politician owning corporations have deliberately caked our democracy and critical thinking in populist bullshit. If they can only persuade people that all politicians are the same, then (enough) people will overlook the venality of the likes of Johnson and Gove and fall back on emotive tribalism, base notions of "them" and "us", to decide who to vote for and so keep their exploiters in power.But Jones' book shows that - while no politician is likely to be perfect - they most definitely are not all the same. Nearly 75 years on from Nye Bevan's Manchester speech, his words ring as true as ever What is Toryism but organised spivvery? … No amount of cajolery can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory PartyAnd if there was anything wrong or unjust in how Jones describes his many Tory targets (over half of Tory MPs who served in the years 2010 to 2020 are named in this litany of failure) I am sure they would come out to refute his claims......I'll wait

What an author, don’t miss it . It’s a diary of mismanagement. Ten stars wonderful

Hilarious and terrifying in equal measure,this book will one day, I hope,