Perhaps there’s cause for some optimism when a newer generation of Tories is ready to take over the reins. The current crop of self-serving, fossilised inertia occupying the front benches of an exhausted, clueless government can’t last forever and some fresh faces and new ideas on the conservative side can’t hurt. Can it?

Well, imagine a room full of Young Libs – a bunch of Tristans and Felicias discussing their stock portfolios and au pairs over canapes and Moet in the Grand Reception Hall of the Friedrich von Hayek Memorial College For Tiresome Tory Twats. I’d rather have my teeth filed by a cack-handed proctologist than be within a bull’s roar of them. The young fogies, hoorah henries, wannabe Gordon Gekkos, rugger buggers, offspring of the squatocracy and vapid socialites in Burberry cardigans, all with the ability to bore for Australia. This is the future of the LNP?

The private schools and churches provide a gene pool of stick-up-their-arse born to rule sociopathic elites, parasites and feudalists with a cloistered life experience centred around wealth and privilege, many of whom have attended the IPA masonic lodge of archaic Milton Friedman capitalist dogma. These are the LNP anointed ones – the future “leaders” whose vision is formed through a rear-view mirror not a windscreen.

The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don’t know what they are conserving. (Robertson Davies. Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor).

The neo-cons have at least challenged that gendered description from Davies with a slew of female fogies ready to join Sophie Mirabella, Bronwyn Bishop, Michaelia Cash, Sussan Ley and Melissa Price in the sisterhood’s hall of horrors.

The prayer circle of L-platers pissing on our biscuits includes some well known and some more obscure personalities:

Josh Friedenberg, touted as a future PM, the chubby Joshie is on a mission to prove that he can fuck an economy more comprehensively than his predecessor Sloppy Joe Hockey. Joshie’s the type to buy a frame and then look for a picture to fit it.

Matt Canavan. If Gautam Adani’s dick is freshly free of coal dust then you’ll know that young Matteo has just paid him a visit.

Tim Wilson. Freedom Boy is a fan of deploying water cannons to dispel dissent. When Timbo talks freedom he means his, not yours.

Andrew Hastie. Hands up for Hastie – now there’s an idea for a bumper sticker.

David Littleproud. Evidence that nominative determinism is really a thing.

Gladys Liu, whose racism offset her gender handicap in the eyes of the Tory pre-selectors.

My personal favourites however are these shockers:

Amanda Stoker, another fully credentialed del-con crazy having qualified at batshit level on the Personality Defects Honour Roll at the Ayn Rand School For The Irredeemably Obnoxious.

A typically hypocritical look-at-me-I’m-a-Christian this reincarnated Maggie Thatcher is from the LNP religious nut cluster Anglican branch, Old Testament division. Mandy’s victims of choice are the poorly paid – poorly paid means paid too much according to Mandy to whom gruel and a stale crust is sufficient recompense for 12 hours spent at the workhouse forges.

James Paterson, the face that invites a slap. The Germans have a suitable term for it – backpfeifengesicht. He’s Spanky The Tadpole playing adult dress ups. It’s very easy to imagine a lederhosened James with an Aryan Youth Of The Year rosette pinned proudly to his pigeon chest selling inflatable Peter Dutton sex dolls from a trestle in front of his mum’s house – any money raised to be used for a new night of the long knives putsch to rid the Tories of any remaining bed-wetters. Unfortunately for little James he’s only allowed plastic cutlery and he still needs his own mattress protectors but once he’s graduated from toast soldiers and water pistols this odious little munt will be touting the economic advantages of slave labour and invading New Zealand.

I had expected Georgina Downer’s plummy-vowelled daddy, Alexander Curly Downer, to be found trouser-less one day hanged by his fishnets beneath a London bridge with a feather duster up his clacker, pasties over his nipples and his tackle taped to his thigh. Tory toffs have a penchant for accessorised auto-erotic asphyxiation and they don’t come toffier than Curly, but alas, it did not come to pass.

Curley’s spawn Georgie bears an unfortunate close resemblance to her pallid, purse-lipped, pinch-faced pater. She is continuing the Downer dynasty (emphasis on the ‘nasty’) signature disdain for the hoi polloi, having a fixed snoot of sour condescension, with her nose in the air and a sense of six-fingered entitlement that would embarrass a bishop – none of which will deter this free-marketeer from seeking to get her pampered arse onto the public payroll. She could however improve her prospects by wearinging her stockings over her head to disguise her trademark look of a goblin licking piss from a nettle(1).

Bridget McKenzie is a gun nut and deputy leader of the Frackers and Miners Party who may one day fill the deputy PM shoes once occupied by the Barmy Barny Joyce. Barmy’s not proven to be the leafiest shrub in the hot-house, misinterpreting biblical references to “thy rod and thy staff” for instance but he has added colour to politics. Purple.

That vivid, puce ponce pops up on our screens on a regular basis as the Purple One pontificates on the issue du jour but his ludicrous delivery lacks cred – this man thinks gravitas is what stops the sheep from floating away.

Back to Bridget – like the good and faithful Nat that she is she has consistently voted against any and all action to address climate change. And also in line with her party’s practice she’s quite adept at spending tax payers’ money in her own interests whether it’s $500,000 to move offices, $20,000 for a private plane to attend a hockey game or $74,000 for touring the mini-bars in hotel rooms across the country. Bridget has a bright future in the Frackers.

* * * * *

These are the would-be architects of our future. Impressed by their own self-importance and imagining themselves as Winston Churchills or as jet-setting oligarchs surveying their extensive property portfolios from an RAAF VIP aircraft these stultifying, gormless dullards only get creative when it comes to diverting public monies to themselves, their families and their mates.

Continued exploitation of the environment, erosion of rights, secrecy, inequality, rampant authoritarianism, avoidance of scrutiny, shifting public assets to private mates and their peculiar brand of publicly subsidised capitalism – it will all continue as the Tories shift further and further to a fully blown kleptocracy under the Tory Youth Brigade, unobstructed by a timid and cowed Labor Party. We are fucked.

(1) Adapted from a great sledge by Malcolm Tucker, The Thick Of It, BBC TV.

Fun reading for young fogies:

Cory Bernardi, impresario: fostering the new generation of young fogies – Jason Wilson, The Guardian 17 March 2016

Young Fogies – The Washington Post. Hilarious put-downs of the breed.

This article was originally published on The Grumpy Geezer.