Last night's interviews with the two prime ministerial hopefuls starkly revealed why Boris Johnson has been kept away from any serious media questioning by his minders. He appeared as a shambolic, scatter-brained, slightly dotty Colonel Blimp type figure. He continually chuntered away over the top of Andrew Neil, refused to answer questions, went up blind alleys of irrelevance, lost the thread of his own argument and didn't seem to understand the details of his own 'plan'. The Daily Mirror called it a car crash (HERE) and it was.
Although Hunt was far more like a prime minister is expected to be, serious and measured, even if he wasn't exactly impressive. In any case it won't do him any good. Boris is the runaway favourite, but if he didn't lose a lot of votes last night I would be surprised.
The man that the Tory party is about to saddle us with is an empty vacuous windbag, not unlike Neil Kinnock but without the intellectual underpinning. He's handy with overblown verbosity but nothing else.
On Wednesday, George Walden (a former diplomat and Tory MP) had a mockingly contemptuous piece in The New Statesman (HERE) about the 'English ship of fools' about to set sail under Johnson and I encourage you to read it for some of his insights into our present parlous political state. Walden says in a couple of weeks time, "the man least suited (along with the leader of the opposition) to be
prime minister will settle with his suite of cronies into No 10".
A few extracts from his lengthy article:
"The interaction between Rees-Mogg, Johnson and their kind in today’s
party with pantomime figures such as Mark Francois – a natural for
Farage’s party who would never have passed a Tory selection board in the
Thatcher years – is suggestive less of democratisation than feudal
regression. In such fag-like relationships the court tumblers sock it to
the media on behalf of their betters, and BBC Newsnight and the rest fall for it".
"Farage, an estate agent manqué, is another private schoolboy gone rogue.
Michael Gove is a commoner, and smarter, though another clever/silly
former columnist who can run you up an idea in a twinkling and defend
the indefensible with an Oxbridge Union debater’s brio. Such fun – but
he too lacks the bottom of common sense the Tory party is supposedly
about".
It is, for all it's excoriating criticism of our modern politicians, a serious, practical analysis of how we got where we are although it doesn't offer any solutions, probably because there are none. We will have to suffer the fate that our own ignorance has in store for us. The old adage about the people getting the government it deserves was never so true in Britain.
If there is a chink of light as we enter what could be a long, dark tunnel Walden identifies it as fear:
"In what Johnson describes as “the best country in the world” (Trump
would have added “ever”) the smell of fear is encroaching:
parliamentarians’ fears of losing seats to Farage or being deselected
for their moderation. Fear of trouble on the streets if we stay in
Europe, and of economic collapse – houses included – if we crash out.
Fear of social violence and ethnic confrontation. And fear of discussing
things I have alluded to here. Even if Johnson stands on his head,
pushes through a May-type deal with bells attached and defeats Corbyn,
there can be no good Brexit. All we shall be left with is the Johnsonian
smirk.
"In a fortnight the ship of English fools, captained by an egomaniacal
amateur, will sail, with Seumas Milne cheering incognito on the
quayside. There is much talk of Johnson’s force of character, though it
depends what you mean. I know him, and can confirm what canny observers
have begun saying: that as he gets closer to No 10, this man, too, is
afraid. Not for his country, of course, but for himself."
I too believe Johnson is afraid. And it is this fear of being the person found with blood on his hands perhaps, from a return to the Irish troubles or medicine shortages, or at least traces of the explosive that he used to destroy the kingdom under his fingernails. When it all goes wrong, the buck will stop with him.
His task will be, not to oversee some great transformative event as he dreamed of, but to minimise the damage.
He was the mad architect of Brexit, sketching the earliest designs way back when he was a Times columnist, he was the over-hyping marketeer and salesman as well as the jerry builder and crooked developer. He is Brexit and Brexit is him. When it goes down he will go with it. So, when it comes to making the decision to leave without a deal he will chicken out because he's a weak man and because the Brexit he sold simply does not exist.
Finally, David Yelland was on Newsnight last night reviewing Johnson's (and Hunt's) performance in front of Andrew Neil. BoJo defended himself over the Sir Kim Darroch affair by suggesting his comments about it had been 'misrepresented' but Yelland pointed out that Johnson had made an entire political career out of misrepresenting Brussels and the EU.
It was truly ironic.
