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It all came down to a case of “For God’s sake, go”. After scandal-plagued months, Boris Johnson has finally accepted the inevitable and resigned.
Johnson should be applauded for two things: keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of No. 10, and delivering Brexit. Which are, of course, precisely the things for which the Establishment left, especially the media, absolutely loathe him for. In a very real sense, Johnson’s resignation is the left-Establishment’s revenge for Brexit.
By proxy, they are punishing the hoi polloi, who voted both for Brexit, and for Johnson to get it done after Theresa May’s shameful betrayal of the referendum result.
But Boris also betrayed the very people who voted for him, with not just some of the harshest lockdowns in the world, but by clearly holding himself and his cronies above the very rules he imposed on everyone else. Conservative supporters may mutter into their beer that the feral media went after Johnson in a way that they wouldn’t have a left-wing leader. This may be true — to an extent, but the British media are always feral — but the fact remains that Johnson deeply betrayed the British peoples’ trust by holding drunken parties at No. 10 while the rest of the country was under virtual house arrest.
But Johnson betrayed his Conservative principles in many other ways.
Whatever Boris planned for the country when he deposed Theresa May just three years ago, his premiership will be defined by the Covid crisis. Unprecedented restrictions on liberty and freedom were put on the population by a ‘freedom loving’ conservative who once said he would ‘eat’ his ID card if they were rolled out. That soon changed though – thanks to aggressive lobbying from his scientific advisors – and during the second lockdown Britain had the harshest restrictions in Europe.
If nothing else, Johnson should have summarily sacked, if not pressed for charges against, Prof. Neil Ferguson, who is behind the utterly wrong modelling which led to lockdowns. This was not the first time Ferguson had been utterly wrong, yet blighted millions of lives with his ludicrous “modelling”. Yet, he was allowed to quietly resign and carry on as if nothing had happened.
Like Scott Morrison in Australia, Johnson talked a big deal about conservatism, yet spent like a drunken socialist with a lottery ticket.
All of this – furlough, the vaccine race, business bailouts – had to be paid for and Boris was not a man prepared to rein in spending elsewhere. Instead he borrowed at a record rate and hiked taxes to a level not seen since the second world war.
Public debt has increased to the highest amount of any modern prime minister. Boris borrowed some £596 billion – nearly £100 billion more than the loans Gordon Brown took out after the financial crisis.
Spectator Australia
Johnson also, apparently under the whip of his ditzy green missus, endlessly pandered to the lunatic climate lobby. No small upshot of that was that Britain was plunged, every winter, the last few years, into the sort of energy crisis that is currently gripping Australia and starting to hit New Zealand. The UK’s own energy regulator estimates that thousands of people — mostly poor and elderly — die every winter because they can’t afford heating.
Even on Brexit, Johnson initially backed Theresa May’s shocker of a Brexit deal, which effectively left Britain a subject state of the EU, with no voting rights. As PM, instead of simply backing a no-deal exit as he should have done, and bugger Brussels, he negotiated a revised version of May’s deal. A huge improvement, to be sure, but still far from perfect.
The truth was that Johnson was elected to do things: see off Corbyn and deliver Brexit. He achieved one in spectacular fashion, and half-arsed the second. Then he completely stuffed up everything else.
