This year ends with Johnson embroiled in yet another scandal, covid cases soaring once again and new customs controls decorated with swathes of costly red tape set to be introduced tomorrow morning. Bad as things have been over the last 12 months, I can only see worse next year. Nothing on the horizon looks remotely promising. Tax and price rises coming down the track are bound to slow the economy and lower living standards.
I think Johnson knows this. At least if he doesn’t he is even more of a fantasist than I thought.
Last night the FT revealed the PM is set to be exonerated by Lord Geidt once again. This is over the money from Lord Brownlow for the No 11 flat refurbishment.
FT UK FRONT: @BorisJohnson to be cleared of breaking rules on Downing Street refurb, reports @SebastianEPayne #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/bVALhIfr5b
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) December 30, 2021
We will get Geidt's report next week and a series of letters exchanged between him and Johnson. I am sure we’ll see an unbelievably convoluted tale of the kind you hear in criminal trials as someone seeks to explain a series of perfectly clear events which point directly to their own guilt. Let’s be honest, you or I could have got to the truth in about five minutes. But Geidt has taken weeks.
This is not because he is being thorough, but because of the time taken in trying to come up with plausible reasons for Johnson’s own conduct as an alternative to the actual ones which drive a coach and four through the ministerial code. This takes a bit of doing, because, as most of us learned as kids, if you start off with one lie, you have to keep inventing new ones to explain obvious clashes with the facts or your own previous lies.
The process goes on until the whole thing looks utterly absurd. This is why Geidt is taking so long.
Johnson’s reputation could hardly get worse but I suspect Geidt is going to come out of this equally damaged or looking like a gullible fool. Whatever happens we can assume from now on there are no circumstances where Boris Johnson will ever be found to have broken the ministerial code. It will give his opponents a lot more ammunition.
Fancy having an adviser whose sole task is finding far-fetched excuses for your own conduct.
The Tory party is fed up with Johnson. The last poll on Conservative Home puts him down as the least popular member of the cabinet - even lower than Nigel Adams and all the other useless low wattage dead beats hand picked because they seemed even less competent than the prime minister. Imagine that.
Johnson filters out anyone who might seem semi-able before they ever reach the cabinet and now he is seen as lower than Priti Patel!!!!
He is on -33 while Liz Truss (Liz Truss!) is on +73. What have we come to?
So, he’s not going to last much longer. The newspapers will go apoplectic at the latest attempt to cast him as honest but slightly bumbling and misunderstood.
I really don’t know what will happen or who will take over and couldn’t even hazard a guess. We have reached the bottom of the barrel, gone through it and are now scraping away at the ground below.
But I think we are coming to an end of the nightmare. The Tory party cannot survive what’s coming intact. It must split into the swivel eyed UKIP nationalists and the moderate centre right. It will be a bloodbath but a necessary and cathartic one.
And that will surely be a good thing.
In the meantime I wish a Happy and Safe New Year to you and yours.
