The writer is in Australia.
Such are the hardships of life as a regular Spectator columnist that I find myself on a flying visit to London, Budapest and the Italian Dolomites. This trip just happened to coincide with the saga around Boris Johnson and his resignation from Parliament. So here’s my outsider’s take, the favoured vantage of many readers of this, Australia’s best weekly.
Claim one. Boris completely blew his huge 2019 mandate. Elected on a strong Brexit platform that pushed for much lower immigration, lower taxes, big deregulation, standing up for national sovereignty against the EU over Northern Irealand and the like – a policy mix that warms my heart – Boris came into office massively popular. Within months the Covid pandemic hit. Boris’s instincts were against going down the path of thuggish authoritarianism where the public health clerisy, the Pravda-like legacy media and politicians drunk on power imposed the worst public policy fiasco on almost all democracies not rhyming with ‘Eden’. They trafficked in fear not backed up by facts; they imposed picayune and petty rules that clearly would have no effect; they weaponised the police; they made the old die alone; they undercut personal autonomy by pseudo-imposing mandates for a vaccine that was never tested as to whether it stopped you getting or spreading the virus; the list of inroads on our civil liberties going on into the distance and it still makes me white-hot with anger when I recite this list of brutalities. (And don’t forget readers, the Spectator Australia virtually alone stood up against this from day one based on, you know, core liberal values missing from just about all Liberal politicians.)
So Boris instinctively knew the cost of lockdowns would be massively higher than the benefits – a claim that last week’s meticulously peer-reviewed study out of Johns Hopkins University, put on the front page of the London Telegraph a couple of days ago, details to be true in depressing chapter and verse. Alternatively, just check out cumulative excess deaths from the start of the pandemic versus Sweden’s (any country that locked down is doing worse), or the state of the economy (Sweden’s doing better), or debt, or kids who missed years of school and will never recover etc. Boris knew it. He had his chance to be a peacetime sort of shadow of his hero (and mine) Winston Churchill but he fluffed it. He didn’t have the inner resolve and the ability to learn detail of a Ron DeSantis who could front incredibly hostile press conferences every day during the pandemic and explain why the Swedish ‘no lockdown’ path was the right one, with data and detail at his fingertips. So Boris crumbled and succumbed to the thuggish lockdown zealots and their manifestly wrong Neil Ferguson modelling. That meant he also had to oversee a Government that spent like drunken sailors, mortgaging the kids’ and grandkids’ futures to pay people to do nothing (the effects of which are still everywhere; you’ll have noticed Australia’s productivity – the one factor that correlates with future wealth almost 1:1 – has tanked). And of course by going along with the thuggishness he instinctively knew was wrong he opened himself up to charges of hypocrisy and rule-breaking when he went and had a bit of cake and a drink with those in his office.
Outside of lockdowns Boris also let a sort of waffly romanticism (perhaps also of the sort related to the new younger girlfriend and her worldview) push him to buy into the stupid Net Zero religion, nowhere foreshadowed before the election. He poured more money (unconnected to reforms) into one of the worst health systems in the democratic world (and if you’ve lived all over the place as I have you’ll know that Australia’s health system is right up there with the best despite all its flaws and over-bureaucratic insanities). Basically, Boris was a massive disappointment to those of us who fully supported the manifesto he put to the voters in 2019 and which won him a landslide victory.
Claim Two. Despite everything noted above Boris was still miles and miles better than Rishi Sunak. Sunak is leading a McKinsey/Goldman Sachs Government. He has increased taxes to the point that the current Tory Government – I emphasise that this is a nominally conservative Government – is the biggest-taxing and biggest-spending one since Clement Atlee’s Labour after the Second World War. On Northern Ireland Sunak basically threw in the towel and surrendered to the EU, with a few face-saving little trifles that still leave a sovereign part of the United Kingdom under the jurisdiction and rules of the EU. Sunak is overseeing a Government that is allowing the highest immigration ever – and this when the promise was to rein in immigration to well under 100,000 people per year. (And for those inner-city elites sitting over their six-dollar lattes who moan that there are so many jobs the locals won’t do just remember the incontrovertible economic truth that any job will be done if you pay enough, meaning that these elites just want super-cheap cleaning ladies, garden services etc.) On free speech and the culture wars the Sunak Government has done a bit – more than Morrison and the Libs here ever did – but not much and nothing like what you see in Florida and Sunak certainly hasn’t tried to rein in the judges. If you were to stumble across a visiting Martian and ask this alien how he would classify the Sunak Government just based on the policies it is pursuing the Martian would tell you it’s a Labour Government with a willingness to incorporate Green Party policies.
So here’s the main point. Both claims one and two are true. And that means Boris was, and is, the better option for the Tories in Britain. He’s been taken out by a cabal of other MPs, many in his own party. When Boris complains it is a hatchet job by Remainer types who never wanted Brexit, well, it’s hard to see how he’s wrong. I know that many say Sunak was and is a Brexiteer. But he sure kept a low profile about it. And he’s not yet done a single thing in office to show the slightest willingness to deliver on it. Plus, the Tory Party MPs removed Boris against the desires of the party membership. They then removed Liz Truss whom the membership picked over Sunak and put Sunak in anyway. Good luck getting the membership out to campaign for this man who is running the sort of insiders’ corporate Tory Party that will see all of those Red Wall seats (delivered by Boris and only ever possibly by Boris) vanish at the next election. To be blunt, this Sunak incarnation of the Tory Party deserves to be smashed at the next election. If it weren’t for the awful Keir Starmer as Labour leader it would be. It probably will be anyway.
Oh, and Boris is right that the establishment Remainer forces are doing all they can to undo Brexit. Such is the elites’ contempt for democracy. And Tory MPs’ contempt for the party base.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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Party politics are finished.. its the undisguised uni-party now.. and they’re all in it together. BJ has carried out his mission, and now.. like all CEO’s.. its time to pass through those revolving doors and sit on another perch..
CEO’s can have some influence. Parliament is more akin to actors putting on a show so it’s only fitting when they move on to, or back to, a career in media and entertainment.
When Blair espoused his view of Blair’s Britain in the late 90s, I feared the worst. The event proved to be a portent of the disaster that was to unfold (and continues so to do). En famille, we upped sticks and baled on early retirement 22 years ago. A good move!
The “elites” don’t have contempt for democracy. They’ve ensured it doesn’t exist.
As for the Johnson v Sunak choice: it turned out to be a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Johnson could have been one of the greats: certainly up there with Mrs Thatcher, if not Churchill.
He blew it. Lazy; not prepared to put in the effort to control governance. And ultimately, he was more interested in appeasing his latest squeeze and her eco obsessions than the millions of red wall voters who broke the Labour-voting habit of a lifetime and gave him an 80 seat majority.
I hope the CON Party’s treachery over Brexit and the farce of the last 3 years results in the utter destruction of the party at the next General Election.
Youve pretty much said what I was going to say. The day I heard of his relationship with Carrie Symonds I remember thinking this is a bad day. You would expect a serious politician to follow their principals. This one followed something else.
His cock?
did I say that out loud?
Remarkable that with his dimensions he could find it.
Men have two heads. Too many think with the wrong one. Women know this about men and use that to their advantage.
Delighted to second that.
Even though the farce of democracy in this country has been made clear it would be grand to see the destruction of the party that has birthed the evisceration of this once great country.
“Johnson could have been one of the greats:”
No he couldn’t. That is the myth we are all supposed to buy. I would like to see a list of Bozo’s achievements. At the moment I cannot think of any. Blundering buffoon doesn’t really qualify as far as I am concerned. And that would be an extremely generous assessment. Extremely.
I don’t know, if he had done the same as Reagan and let the people who know how to do things and just be a loveable figurehead he’d have had the acclaim without doing any damage. Many politicians should never be allowed to actually do anything. Have you ever seen Michael Portillo’s train programmes? Nice but useless sums them all up really.
Sometimes a frog really is a frog and not a prince.
Definitely.
Nailed it.
Id stress though that Boris’s obsession with greenism killed the UKs potential energy dominance. More Falstaff than Churchill.
Lets not glorify Churchill.. yet another whose real history has been massaged by the chosen few. He was a warmongering, drunken gambler, who was in the pockets of the bankers who wanted destructive wars. The complete and utter destruction of Germany being among them..
Probably, at some point between the 2nd & 3rd lockdown Boris could have saved some respect & his job, if he’d thrown out Whitty, Valance & Co, brought in Heneghan, Gupta & others. Explained that he’d been captured by the blob during a period of weakness as he was recovering from his stay in hospital but that it had all been a terrible mistake.
How much better off the country would be now. As it was he doubled down on lockdowns & the rest of the nonsense with a 3rd, & if he’d had his way a 4th lockdown.
He deserves a kicking. But I can’t see anyone any better having into view.
It was too late. After the first lickdown the population had been frightened to death, drunk on time off and generally enthusiastic for more lockdowns. Not all but enough.
The time to stand up and resist was at the outset, together with Sweden.
That would have changed everything and Johnson may now have been the most popular leader in the world.
He bottled it like the spineless idiot he ultimately is.
Doris is a criminal. The Fascism was unrelenting and deep. He bought into it, called himself Fuehrer. 630/650 MPs are likewise criminals. Net zero will lead to the same ends as Rona. Doris like all these criminal muppets craves power but he is a psychopath like the majority of them. I hate him. Everyone should hate him.
1-Never delivered on Brexit
2-Rona Fascism implemented albeit with a ‘heavy heart’
3-Net Zero fascism
Screw Doris. If that is the best this country can do than screw this country. I don’t want to be ‘led’ by retards, criminals, fat fascist half wits like Doris.
Good article but it refers to a “pandemic”. There was no pandemic. Please do not use the corrupted language of the enemy.
Hear, hear tof. Although I have been advised that as 80% of the population believed there WAS a pandemic then there was a pandemic. It is a logic wholly lost on me.
Remember how the msm printed pictures of all the faces of the pandemic dead? Why not do the same with the faces of the excess dead? And ask why?
The so-called “pandemic dead” are increasingly looking like the pandemic murdered.
Indeed
Ask them to prove it and they will not be able to
IFR of 0.3%…same as the flu. Twas never a pandemic, just a Plandemic. Fake test cases are not an epidemic. None of the sheeple idiots I asked could explain to me how the fake tests worked, or why they were the ‘science’. My response was simple – end the fake testing and the scamdemic stops. And guess what – it was thus. Once the fake free testing was stopped, it all ground to a halt didn’t it. And we can thank Putin in Feb 22, when Rona magically disappeared and the Uketopia and the US proxy war was the new thing.
Absolutely there was no pandemic.. I get so tired of people referring to it!
Yeah and 3.
He almost single handedly prevented a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that may have prevented 100s of thousands of deaths casualties and untold destruction. And then proceeded to flounce about endlessly with that craven POS Zelensky.
So a plague on all their houses and May they all rot in the depths.
..yes..it’s amazing how much people forget how wrong BJ has been on so many things…I have always thought that he squandered the goodwill and huge mandate he was given from the country..and I’m not convinced by any argument..both here and in the MSM ..that yes he’s a useless/narcissistic/twerp but a better useless/narcissistic /twerp than anyone else!?
They forget he was also at Davos recently, and in the USA last month, drumming up more death and destruction for Ukraine…no doubt plugging himself for the NATO job when it comes up in September…..?
They are a den of snakes….and there seem to be no good snakes in the offing…..
I don’t care about any of them..I’ll fight as much as I can against whichever one rears its ugly head next….
Totally agree Mrs Gums.
I’m so glad to find that I am not the only one who thinks Saint Mother Teresa Zelensky is a POS of the highest order. If a Tory had done what he has done in Ukraine the Government would have fallen long ago.
How many billions are missing from the endless US war funding to Jewlensky? How much real estate has he bought? How deep is that corruption? Fake News has nothing much to say about it.
Problem is, I don’t want a pathological liar in charge…
Wow! Your in a quandary then! That’s all there is to vote for! They’ve just got different heads and names!
Boris is a weak, vain, narcissistic, amoral liar and a coward. So pretty much par for the course when it comes to politicians.
I think Boris getting a bad case of Covid didn’t help. Does nobody find it suspicious that he was hospitalised and apparently on the emergency ward with it?
That nurse that supposedly treated him disappeared back to NZ pretty quick.
Now Boris was always carrying a bit of excess weight, but he does excercise, was he really so vulnerable based on what we know now? No other major public figure other than Trump got seriously i’ll. Funny that.
Probably poor reporting, but I never heard of a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (be they never so superannuated), with so much as a runny nose.
Or north Korea! Not a single dose of vaccine (the lucky bas#%rds) and no spike in deaths I’ll wager!
Bozo going to hospital with C1984 does not hold water for me. I firmly believe he received a severe warning from the Davos Deviants or some re-progamming. Actually, I suppose they amount to the same thing.
It is amazing what older men will sacrifice in order to get a young chick into bed. In Bojo’s case his principles have never been that strong, so sacrificing them was no great problem for him.
As an aside, I wonder how all these new children fit into their new green principles where people are seen as the problem with the world, or is it just that he can’t be ar*ed with precautions, just like his slap-dash approach to everything else (except, possibly, acquiring riches).
Boris’s downfall was his inherent laziness. He’s very bright, probably very charming, and because of that he’s been able to get away with doing the bare minimum and ignoring the boring detail of the job, relying on others to do that. He got away with it as editor of the Spectator, and as London mayor. But he was out of his depth as PM. He delegated to ‘the scientists’ and the green campaigners, with the results we’re now all suffering from.
You can only delegate to people who have the competence and commitment to do the job properly. What Bozo did was abdicate to ‘the scientists’. He was too busy with getting his end away with Princess Nut Nuts to worry about anything else
An excellent article, but I fear like so many commentators that point out the failures to society the politicians of the world inflict on their people, they miss the point that they don’t care, they have drunk from the cup of power and are intoxicated by it. Their actions are a means to their end we are just the collateral damage in their pursuit of power.
We see the drive to social equality through a pseudo socialism that is levelling down every facet of human spirit and aspiration, which will culminate in society’s inevitable destruction. That time is getting close
“We see the drive to social equality”
There is no drive to social equality unless you consider impoverishment and enslavement of the masses to be “social equality.”
Quite right; this drive for social equality is not unlike any other revolution in history, where the success of a revolution inflicts greater controls, poverty, enslavement than the regime that it replaces. This present revolution will produce, not only poverty, and enslavement but a complete breakdown of the culture which founded our recent civilisation. I infer recent as it is already, heavily, in decline
Indeed.
I suggest James Allan’s otherwise excellent piece is awry in one respect.
Carrie can’t be entirely blamed for Boris’s GangGreen enthusiasms.
True, there are several witnesses to the fact that he not infrequently opined that the Green agenda is “bollix”, just as Dave Boy Hug-a-Husky Cameron had done before him.
In both cases probably adverse to being banished to that old sofa in the attic.
But it shouldn’t be forgotten that Stanley Johnson, whose moral compass seems lower even than Boris and who hurried to get French citizenship after 2016, was and is a staunch GangGreen supporter. As is Boris’s big chum Zac Goldsmith and several others.
Anyone whose IQ score exceeds their hat size should be able to see that Ruinable Energy is even more pathetic (and fantastically expensive) than needing a mask to visit a pub lavatory. But there are many who are very keen to collect fat brown envelopes, irrespective of the cost to society.
Stanley Johnson is a staunch Gang Green supporter but more disturbingly he is also an out and out eugenecist who believes that the correct population size for this country is ‘about 25 million.’
..yes..he was a weak insecure vile (put in your own description) man way before Carrie Antoinette came on the scene……it’s called the YOKO effect !!
I know we are all seeing the same things..no one that I can think of, except maybe Orban and a couple of others, have any principles by which they govern…they chop and change with the ‘newest thing’….they actually believe in nothing…I don’t doubt that if money was going into the Anti-Green lobby, and Blackrock were giving out ESG’s for fossil fuel use, they’d change tack in an instant…
Whether you like Boris’ brexit or not, I think that but for BJ we would still be in the EU. He helped win the referendum. Then when he became PM he stuck to his guns despite intolerable pressure, won a landslide majority and got us out. OK he was useless as a PM, but he should at least be remembered for that.
He got us partly out. Now we’re not stuck IN the EU; we’re just stuck TO it.
That’s a bit of a problem with these continental shelfs. They’re still attached to continents. Declaring all Europeans who had moved to Britain in good faith, naively trusting English promises illegal immigrants and erecting a spurious trade barrier bureaucracy was the easy bit. Actually cutting off all trade with the richest area on this planet is going to become considerably harder.
Spot on.
A bit like Purgatory.
Or, to use another comparison, like being born without anyone to cut the bloody umbilical cord.
When you can’t legally take your pet cat to Ulster without permission from Brussels.
Johnson like all other ‘Western’ leaders was happy to take his thirty pieces of silver and dance to Larry Fink’s ESG & DEI tune…. Or else!
Look what happened to Kwarteng and Truss when they tried to add some dynamism to the UK economy.
They we’re unceremoniously chucked under the bus by the euphemistic ‘Bond Market’ which really means institutional investors like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard disapproved of the UK offering higher yield gilts.
Pretty Polly will come by in a minute and correctly remind us of Soros and Gates.
I seem to remember Bozo spouting:
‘It’s time we in this country had a conversation about mandatory vaccinations.’ (paraphrased)
That’s the icing on the cake that condemns this traitor.
In his farewell speech the other day he patted himself on the back for the ‘vaccine roll-out’…so not only all the things we call him..deluded as well…!!
They all prattle on about the vaccine ‘roll out’, which conveniently glosses over the fact that the jabs don’t work, make things worse and have an appalling side effect profile. The ‘roll out’ was nothing more than a logistical distribution exercise.
Couldn’t give a crap, he’s dead old meat, move on to real leaders!(of which in the UK and Ireland there are precious few)
Precious few! D64, I hope you are slipping in offering such generosity in terms.
I know, I try to be fair but it’s increasingly difficult!
And the Daily Mail – that bastion of pro-lockdown reporting that hid photographers outside of B&Q to say ‘Does this look like essential shopping?’ – has now hired ‘Boris’ as a columnist.
Decisions in Government are ultimately edicts from the likes of BlackRock.
Doris knows which readership will best fall for his spiffing new line in snake oil.
The day before he was elected, him and Cameron called it the “GREEN CRAP”. The day after he wanted to “SAVE THE PLANET”. ——–It just shows that once you get elected you no longer can pretend to serve the people. You now serve the UN and WEF.
….. and Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs etc.
One can pontificate on all sorts of theories but there is one inescapable fact: the 2019 vote was a massive condemnation of Socialism. There literally is no way that anyone can argue it was not. Johnson then ignored his own manifesto and turned into Jeremy Corbyn.
It wasn’t cake, it wasn’t parties, it was betrayal.
‘See you next Tuesday’ is the most appropriate and curt, if lenient descriptor for Bozo.
“the stupid Net Zero religion, nowhere foreshadowed before the election.”
Apart from the Conservative manifesto of course, which promised (page 55) that
“We will lead the global fight against climate change by delivering on our world leading target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”
Sure, nobody bothered to read the manifesto, least of all our useless journalists. But it was there in black and white.
In fact, ever since “Call me Dave” Cameron promised “vote blue, go green”, the Conservatives have been firmly committed to this scam. And let’s remember that it was Theresa May, not Boris, who “enshrined net zero in law”.
We need to resist this myth that it was Boris who pushed the net zero nonsense. The truth is that net zero is a core part of the programs of both our main political parties, and that has been the case for many years.
Absolutely correct.
And when the Bliar/Brown/Veggie Benn/ Millibands pushed through the 60% (then increased to 80%) version of this suicide note into law in 2008, just five rational MPs (all Tories) refused to support the proposal.
I doubt that there are enough “rational MPs” even today, to fill a minibus for a decent piss up, even if you include odd-balls like Graham Stringer (Labour) and Sammy Wilson (UDP).
This article is absolutely on the money. A great laugh and commentator, but he couldn’t run a bath. De Santis looks the real deal and just hope the Republicans can wake up and smell the coffee and forget Trump who is a loser with floating voters even against the geriatric Biden.
I voted for the Boris who I thought was a believer in Great Britain and a champion of personal freedom and free speech and who had a reasonable level of common sense and intelligence. This was the image he conveyed during his election promotion. How false that was. He ridiculously removed so many personal freedoms, contrary most of the time to the scientific data that he distorted at every opportunity to justify what he had done. And he dumped our country’s pre-arranged pandemic plan, which was much closer to the successful Swedish approach. All the time he was doing this, he was following a net-zero agenda that will cripple our country as much or more than the crazy lockdowns that he imposed did. Real scientists with accurate knowledge about climate such as William Happer and the Canadian Patrick Moore have made it clear to anyone who would find out that there is no climate emergency and CO2 is not a pollutant or significant contributor to global warming, but ignorant people like Boris Johnson and thousands of others ignore this just as they did about the Great Barrington Declaration over Covid. I never forgave Boris for not having the courage to go for a no deal Brexit rather than removing Northern Ireland from being an integral part of the UK. Now, our overseas car identification can no longer be GB for Great Britain, but must be UK for the United Kingdom. This is when, with the Irish situation and a king who due to his political views and badly researched environmental opinions has limited popular support, is less united than it has been for many years.