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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