Only this government could lose the open goal of free school meals | Marina Hyde | Opinion

WNobody thinks about the prime ministers? Everyone has a history of deprivation that has stuck with them during this pandemic, and mine is one of a selection offered by “friends” of Boris Johnson, who were so concerned about their household finances a month ago that they turned out. to the Daily Mail about that. We pick up the scene in a private gathering for some of these friends at the prime minister’s field retreat, with Johnson in court: “’Enjoy it,’ he said before yelling at the long dining room table at Checkers: ‘Eat every leftover. I have to pay for this, you know! ‘”

Like me, your tears may have spontaneously liquefied from multiple such reports in recent months. If you lost them, let me summarize: a man who applied for a job that pays almost £ 160,000 a year with enormously substantial benefits apparently feels unable to manage almost £ 160,000 a year with enormously substantial benefits. However, this is only half. “The food wasn’t even very good,” Johnson’s friend told the Mail, “but the real tragedy is that Boris can’t afford to entertain on any kind of scale. I am not going to accept another invitation because it seems unfair to me that he spends money to feed me when he has no money.

Take a break. I know I just did.

And so the whole spectrum of the bullshit show about free school meals, now criticized by everyone from the government’s own social mobility commission to its own MPs, though not enough for many of them to vote against. The sight of Marcus Rashford circling any number of cabinet ministers is so painfully Manichean it has the flavor of a Nike ad, like the one at the Coliseum where Eric Cantona had to score the winning goal against Lucifer.

At Rashford’s age, 22, Johnson’s main interest in food distribution was limited to which muffin to throw first at a pleading restaurant owner. As a member of a college food club that routinely vandalized food establishments for the fun of it, Johnson was arrested along with other Bullingdon incompetents for breaking a restaurant window with a flowerpot. One can only imagine the conviction, probably at the ministerial level, that these days would mark the path of football if a 22-year-old player were found to have done the same. And yet this and many other incidents like this have shown absolutely no impediment to becoming prime minister.

If it weren’t for something so deadly serious, there would be a profound comedy in the now daily show of conservative politicians struggling to find the right words to unfold about an immensely impressive young black man whose day job is to be extremely good at something that people in I actually like it. Rashford scored an impressive 87-minute goal against Paris Saint-Germain last week and then came straight off the field to tweet about child poverty It feels like a conservative anxiety dream, the kind of psychiatric hazing exercise you have to go through before you greenlight a crooked property deal or fuck a troubled 18-year-old investigator.

Boris Johnson says he “says hello” to Marcus Rashford. Nadhim Zahawi, who just voted against the work Marcus Rashford is doing, says that “Marcus Rashford is doing an incredible job.” Matt Hancock says he is “inspired” by Marcus Rashford. Which is good. I mean, Charles Manson was inspired by the Beatles. It’s always important to remember that Matt Hancock started this pandemic by using Downing Street podium heights to declaim some cheap, easy, and ridiculously irrelevant points about how Premier League stars needed to take a pay cut. Hancock, who should have received a 100% pay cut months ago, is now terribly reduced to playing well. His interviews are so battered it’s like he’s had trials for the Liberal Democrats.

There is increasingly vocal and widespread resistance to the school meal policy and the effect of the government’s response to the coronavirus in already disadvantaged areas of the north, including from the new generation of Tory MPs, many of whom did not expect to win in the general of last December. choice, and consequently appears to have received the kind of rigorous investigation that one might expect to have been lavished on a UK councilor or a children’s television presenter from the 1970s. And yet Downing Street would like it to be known that they are very relaxed about it. According to what a figure 10 told Politico, the new deputies have simply been spooked by the negative coverage and will soon “toughen up.”

Let’s hope they reach the toughness of serious old men like Mansfield MP Ben Bradley. I find Bradley quite mesmerizing. He appears as the government’s dating coach, denying voters while wearing a smile usually seen on guys who can explain how, technically, paying for a nightclub entry counts as consent. In real life, Bradley spent the weekend accepting tweets that suggested free school meal vouchers went straight to the “crack den [and] brothel ”, adding“ that is what the FSM vouchers did in the summer ”.

He somehow belatedly deleted this tweet on the grounds that “the context was not as clear as he thought.” Maybe someone in Downing Street reminded Ben that they’re supposed to look like they care about mental health these days? Addictions are not the most incomprehensible response to a variety of despair exacerbated by these times, and making fun of them in this brutal and rude way is a useful reminder of the difference between what some politicians agree and what they mean in practice. “This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and it’s really important that everyone feels comfortable talking about their mental health,” Ben said at the right time last year. “I am proud to be part of a government that has equated it with physical health.” An absolute badge kisser, there.

Where will Johnson’s latest unforced error go? Some people store toilet paper or hand sanitizer, this government accumulates U-turns. Most of their policies have the half-life of a particularly unstable radioactive isotope. It is explicitly a government of super forecasters who cannot see until next Friday. The courier is now so Dadaist that, in the same week they are fighting Rashford, they leak the story that they plan to abolish the quarantine for city negotiators and hedgefunders, with a government source reasoning to the Sunday Times: they are coming. to the UK for five or six meetings in a day and then they fly they are forced into quarantine, especially when most of them come in private jets and have a chauffeured car. “Hate to surprise you with another spoiler, but is that what that really seems ridiculous?

One hopes that politicians have been elected last for football and there is no shame in that. Our problem is that this group of politicians was last elected to politics. This cabinet is not the reserves or even the thirds: they are the ninth or the tenth or something like that, having been chosen solely for their loyalty to Brexit, a project that successive governments have spent the last four years demonstrating that it is like deliberately relegating you to League One. That the music of the pandemic has stopped with a team of this caliber in charge is truly the cruelest moment and, based on current evidence, is likely to get crueler.

• Marina Hyde is a columnist for The Guardian