UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reshuffled the deckchairs on the Titanic. That is, he has promoted some of his Cabinet ministers and demoted others, in a series of moves which will make no difference either to the future of Britain or the survival prospects of the Conservative party. The ship is going down regardless.

Among the Big Beasts punished with demotions are former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, and former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for Bangin’ Choons Michael Gove. The most obvious promotion is that of Liz Truss, who moves from Trade Secretary to Foreign Secretary.

I like and admire Liz Truss. She is the only Cabinet member not to have been tainted by the Johnson administration’s relentless drift towards biosecurity state fascism. Her cunning ruse (which shows she’s not stupid) is never to have spoken out on contentious issues like jabs for children, lockdowns, masks, vaccine passports and so on. Always, relentlessly, she has talked about all the apparently amazing trade deals she has secured post Brexit.

But being promoted to one of the four great offices of state is a poisoned chalice for Truss. Yes, it means that she will now have the heft and senior ministerial experience to become a plausible contender to replace Boris Johnson one day as Conservative party leader. Really, though, this is a bit like being Admiral Karl Dönitz in April 1945: who wants to be head of a regime which is destined, sooner rather than later, for total annihilation.

The Conservative party is moving by inertia, rather than under its own power. There is nothing it can do to save itself now because, while the deluded grassroots may still be loyal to the brand, the parliamentary party has abandoned Conservatism altogether. When, for example, the government raised taxes to their highest since the War, only six Conservative MPs voted against the measure. On environmental issues the Conservatives are indistinguishable from the Greens; on fiscal, economic and social issues the Conservatives are no better than Labour; and on healthcare, the Conservatives are the worst of the lot because they have made the corrupt, inefficient, incompetent, bloated, chippy, borderline Communist National Health Service their Golden Calf.

By next year, Chancellor Sajid Javid has warned, healthcare will devour 40 percent of government spending. Britain is destined to become a withering economy with a giant, leech-like NHS attached to it, draining it of every last spare drop of blood. One day, people are going to wake up to the fact that the price of kept alive by Britain’s glorious, ‘free’ socialistic healthcare system is so high that frankly they’d all be better off dead. At that point, the party that has decided it wants the letters ‘NHS’ running through it like a stick of rock is not going to win any brownie points. It’s just going to look as stupid and irrelevant as it is and has been for quite some time.

The NHS is a loathsome, greedy behemoth which will not be content until it has — ironically enough, given what it’s meant to do — bled the nation dry.

The Conservative government is entirely devoid of principle, interested only in the pursuit and maintenance of power, utterly indifferent to the needs or wants of the British people whom it treats as brainwashed idiots who can be relied on not to take their votes elsewhere because Sir Keir Starmer’s opposition party is at least as bad, if not worse.

All this will become a lot clearer by the end of this winter, during which I predict there will be a succession of increasingly severe lockdowns and viciously authoritarian clampdowns on anyone who dares to complain.

If I were Liz Truss, I’d be making my exit plan.