I should be floating in a sea of Zen – calm, at one with the Universe, all senses aligned to find the perfect harmony to see off this deadly invader in my body.

And God knows I try, usually when they’re sticking needles into my poor fragile veins, or trying to find one that will hold up long enough to get their usual four test tubes full.

But my zen has been dissipated, my om ommed, and instead replaced by fury and burning hatred.

I don’t normally do hatred – contempt, sarcasm, ridicule, they’re okay…but hatred is so wasteful and extreme somehow, and bloody tiring.

Yet now I see the; yell profanities at the screen; think of him more often than is healthy and fantasise about cornering him and slapping his gerbil cheeks until they wibble wobble.

I want to wipe the pouty, superior, know-it-all, condescending smile off his newly scrubbed up, moisturised, boys’ own face while spitting out “shameless tosspot”.

Yes, it’s little man on the make Michael Gove of whom I speak, although you can lump in the rest of the Tory Cabinet led by that bag of muck tied up ugly, Johnson. (It’s an old Irish expression.)

This cabal of politicians have destroyed any last vestige of decent one-nation Conservatism in treating Government as their personal fiefdom.

They flaunt their own lockdown rules and take no personal responsibility; use their majority to attack and demolish the foundations of parliamentary democracy; and insult global opinion with their rule the world sovereign mentality.

They show no respect for the electorate or the devolved powers and continue to peddle their Trade Deal agenda with the undoubted knowledge that, allied to the Covid crisis, Brexit will plunge the country into a deep pit of recession and opprobrium.

It is hard to put a pin between them – Hancock, a posturing inept; Truss – well, God help her; and on and on the embarrassment goes.

But it is Gove, of the newly even more strangulated English vowels, who is the most dangerous, able to deny his words even as they are shown to him on video.

His hair power-coiffed, his suits tailored to his small frame, he oozes an oleaginous politeness as he ignores all questions in the House or in his round of the TV studios.

Determined never to appear ruffled – apart from when his elbow repeatedly slid off a podium next to the Speaker’s chair and he sniffed in another world – he uses a method of responding that implies the questioner has completely misunderstood the situation.

I wonder if he and Dominic Cummings role-play such encounters. This pair perfected their dark arts in Education with Cummings as SPAD and before Gove was sacked.

They talked long into the night about their grandiose ideas for revamping the political system and, although Cummings is closely aligned with Johnson, the true pairing is with Gove.

Increasingly as Johnson unravels, his haunted eyes peering helplessly from baggy sockets, Gove is grooming himself and being groomed for the job, leaving Johnson the whipping boy.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak now has to be factored into the game plan but he may well have peaked as he tightens the public purse strings.

He’s seeded his Westminster base with former advisers. And of course, he has the formidable backing of his fierce wife, columnist Sarah Vine.

She cleverly injects vignettes of life with Michael into her columns to show the normal, loveable often family baffled side to this highly unliveable figure.

Having watched her work a room on his behalf I’d be inclined to ditch him and go for her – an even deadlier prospect.

God, date nights (I bet they have them) must be a bundle of laughs as they play human chess with the country’s future in their hands.

And now it appears they’ll have another game to play – the war game preventing Scotland’s independence.

Gove is such a staunch Unionist and Englishman manqué that he will no doubt play a leading role.

His take down of Pete Wishart in the House last week was, one has to admit, viciously effective.

This is what his fellow Unionists love and he will have no qualms in using every twisted fact in his Brexit-honed hymn sheet.

I wonder if when he checks his face in the morning mirror if he catches a glimpse of the old Gove who worked his way out of Aberdeen and Scottish life?

I call him shameless but surely there must lurk some remnant of old decency?

Some trace memory before raw ambition closed his eyes to honest dealing?

Actually, unlikely.

We can convince ourselves of anything. Boris Johnson convinced himself he’d make a great PM.

 

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