The last word on the Tories

The BBC political sitcom The Thick Of It recently concluded its fourth and final series. The first three series were a satire on the media-driven short-termism of New Labour. The fourth series satirised the coalition government and Labour opposition in equal measure, with all three parties wallowing in the same hollowed-out politics.

One character in particular had the bullshit dial turned up to 11, and that was the Tories’ blue-sky thinker Stewart Pearson. In the final episode, he was fired and, as he walked out, abandoned his customary jargon to deliver this parting shot on the futility of trying to detoxify the Conservative Party:

Changing this party has been like renovating an old building. You can remove the odd racist beam here, the odd homophobic roof tile there, but at the end of the day you realise it’s been built on a solid foundation of c***s.