Adonis' piece is a bit of a diatribe against Eton (he calls Johnson the Prime Etonian) and for what seems like good reason.
But as Enoch Powell once said, all political lives end in failure and it would be unthinkable surely for the most useless, venal and incompetent prime minister in history (by a long shot) to leave Downing Street in triumph. We may be in for a longish wait for him to go anyway. The 2023-24 election looks like it's already over given the Tory lead in all the opinion polls.
However, between now and next year he has to weather many more storms and one wonders if he can continue to survive unscathed. I cite three big tests for him.
Firstly, the NI protocol is providing a few dark clouds and distant rumbles with ITV reporting on "a month on the Shankill: Inside Belfast's loyalist community after NI's worst violence in years." The rising anger among unionists should worry us all. The report quotes a younger generation of loyalists who have noted how setting a few buses on fire gets attention at Westminster far better that a few posters.
Meanwhile The Derry Journal, which reflects nationalist community thinking, has an editorial: Time for those who delivered us Brexit and the Protocol to start recognising the backstop's advantages. The NI protocol is the new sectarian divide, something to disagree and argue about with identity deep in its core. It is not difficult to see where this might end up, with violence once again stalking the troubled province.
Next, a post on the LSE blog, outlines the problems inherent in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement which the authors argue "falls some way short of establishing ‘free trade’ and that the combination of Brexit, wider secular societal and industrial trends, and the pandemic are creating a perfect storm for British exporting companies."
It is an explanation of how the TCA is effectively a no deal Brexit for services (80% of the UK economy and where we enjoyed a surplus with the EU) and has erected substantial barriers to trade for UK goods exporters. These are permanent, structural issues, not teething problems and we have not even implemented checks on EU imports yet so much more to come.
I think many companies have already stopped trading or have moved operations into the EU. Others have struggled to continues. Big companies have coped better but it may take a few months or even a year or two for some to review sales into the EU market and recognise the amount of effort needed against the margins returned and to make decisions about the future. We have certainly not seen the last of Brexit in the trade figures and this will be a drag on UK PLC for years to come.
Finally, the pandemic. I don't post that much about coronavirus because the epidemiological statistics are complex and I am not confident about using or quoting any of them. But it does seem to me that Johnson, in opening things up from next week, has taken a massive gamble as new cases are rising exponentially.
Where I live it has been obvious since the first lockdown, with strict laws in place, many people (including me) didn't always know what the constantly evolving rules were, or where they did, they just ignored them anyway. My daughter who lives a few miles away, recently came in to our house for first time since March 2010. But I saw relatives cars parked outside the houses of neighbours at regular intervals over the last sixteen months. I wonder what they were doing?
If the rules are relaxed but people are simply 'advised' to be cautious I think it's safe to assume most people will go back to normal behaviour and take no precautions whatsoever.
The virus will spread more easily this winter and although the numbers in hospital won't reach the levels seen in earlier waves, the understaffed NHS will still come under huge pressure.
So, this autumn Johnson could be facing three huge storms converging on Downing Street, all of which have been man-made by him personally. This also assumes no black swan events come up.
Of course, he may scrape through all of this, proving that you can fool most of people most of the time. But he will still find eventually you can't fool them all of the time.
