This will be a boost for Johnson and convince him that Brexit was and is the right thing to do.
We blame politicians for the state of the nation but we don't talk about the people who elect the idiots in the first place. There needs to be an enquiry to establish if a significant majority of voters have actually got the grey matter to make an informed decision.
If ever the old adage about people getting the government they deserve was true, it's now.
To drive a car in this country you need to take a test. But to vote in an election you don't need to have the slightest clue who is standing, what their policies are or even if the party leader is trustworthy. The lower the educational attainment, the more voters rely on getting information from strident newspapers like the Sun, the Express, the Mail or from social media.
The financial crash and the pandemic were not, admittedly, the government's fault but the policy responses have not been particularly good and have hit places like Hartlepool very badly.
More than that the prime minister (the PM!) is struggling to keep his head above water in a sea of sleaze. He is known to be a liar, a serial adulterer, manically disorganised, dresses like a scarecrow and his cabinet is setting new records for sheer incompetence. He has just negotiated the erection of trade barriers with our biggest overseas market which will disproportionately impact the north east, yet Johnson is still incredibly popular.
He seems to have received a boost from the vaccine roll out. But in about three weeks, his former senior adviser Cummings is probably going to launch a broadside against the PM and in particular his slowness to act during the pandemic. We can only hope.
The Hartlepool constituency is incredibly pro Brexit, directing its ire at Brussels for reasons that are hard to understand. At some future time, when Tory MPs can no longer shuffle off any blame to the EU, voters in Hartlepool will realise they have been abandoned but by then lasting damage will have been done. It is like watching a friend slowly knocking their own house down.
The Labour party and others will now be under pressure to accept that Brexit is the will of the people and pursue it with the same vigour as the Tories. It's important they don't. Brexit is a disaster and will be proven to be so, sooner or later.
I think we are going to have to confront the problem of an electorate who are, to put it mildly, too dim to understand what they are voting for. I read on Twitter recently that one man, not sure where, when asked for his opinion about Kier Starker, had never heard of him!
The quality of MPs in the House of Commons is easily the lowest in my lifetime. How does this happen? It isn't as if people like Andrew Bridgen are the odd ones out now, as they once were, he is quite typical - even above average. The place is chock full of idiots isn't it? These are men and women chosen by the establishment to stand in the first place and then elected on the strength of a few slogans plus what voters read in the gutter press.
I mean how did Desmond Swayne find himself an MP? What have New Forest voters been thinking? Not only that, he actually has a knighthood (for political and parliamentary services)! What is going on? Democracy in this country is utterly broken.
The newly elected Tory MP for Hartlepool, Jill Mortimer, says the people voted for "positive change" but every scrap of evidence points to the negative change that delivered the Brexit result will only accelerate over the next few years. The Tory flagship policy of Brexit is set to hit the north east worst of all. What does it tell us? Are the voters masochists?
Who in Hartlepool will benefit from Brexit? The new MP talks of jobs and investment and levelling up but they are just words and slogans of the sort we've seen for decades. The nation's press and commentators deal in slogans (one nation conservativism, delivering what people want, more money for the NHS, get Brexit done, build back better, time for change, back to basics) while nobody ever seems to develop and stick to a strategy to actually achieve anything.
It is as if we have cultivated an electorate that can't cope with policies longer than three simple words.
They have been trotting out the same stuff for years but nothing changes. Instead, training, education, libraries, apprenticeship budgets are slashed as politicians and clever advisers find new ways to make huge cuts look like record breaking increases.
I see this morning a spokesman for Labour is talking about going out and consulting the voters to develop fresh policies. Nick Robinson on Radio 4 accused him of telling voters in Hartlepool they were wrong on Brexit. But they WERE wrong, as all the evidence show. What insanity is this?
The electorate, the vast the majority of which are completely ignorant, don't listen to the news and have no understanding of what's in party manifestos anyway, are being asked to set policies for the nation. Give me strength. I seem to remember a theory about the wisdom of crowds, in this country we have the opposite.
No sooner have one set of politicians failed, another even less able bunch arrive with their own useless three word slogans to further lower living standards with the only uncertainty being about when they and their hare brained ideas will disappear into history.
Harold Wilson talked of the white heat of technology and was worried (with good reason) about the trade unions. Margaret Thatcher came in to 'roll back the state' (which I thought was a good idea at the time) so that we now have the most fragmented utilities in Europe and there is serious talk of renationalising the rail network!!!
Tony Blair told us things could only get better. All the time we have continued on the downward path Britain has followed for at least 140 years. At least the Romans had lead piping to blame, we have no such excuse. The 45 years we have had in the EU saw some of Britain's ailing industries restored and made competitive, now Brexit threatens all that once again.
During 2018 and 2019 I did a lot of anti-Brexit street stalls and knocked on a lot of doors in the GE trying to persuade people to vote for Corbyn, an albatross if ever there was one. It was just as stunning to me to find people in Wakefield or Pudsey who were all for Johnson as it was to find Labour supporters who thought Corbyn was the new Messiah.
Let's be honest, they were and are both absolutely useless, an insult to a modern western democracy. Yet thousands of party members in both main parties thought they were capable of being prime minister! A largely ignorant electorate had to make a choice between two idiots, put there by fools
Sir John Curtice, speaking this morning, seems to believe that Brexit is still the main factor and that the leave voting constituents somehow resent Labour not getting behind Brexit. If so, Starmer has a problem. Labour are a pro-EU party but they are in the awkward position of not being able to convince people - at the moment. They can't (and shouldn't) change and must simply wait for the tide to turn - as it will. They are being damaged by their tacit anti-Brexit position but they don't want to suffer more damage by becoming pro-Brexit when it all goes wrong. It would only compound the party;s problems.
Barnier in his book Brexit, the Grand Illusion about the negotiations, apparently finds space to mentions Raab’s much derided remark that he was surprised to find the UK was “particularly dependent upon the Dover-Calais crossing,” Barnier writes: “I don’t even want to smile but there is definitely something that is deranged in the British system.” How true.
