I’m going to take a few days off over Christmas, so I won’t be blogging. But I do want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I will start again after Boxing Day and carry on the campaign.
If nothing else, I am more confident than ever that Brexit will be reversed one day and perhaps more immediately, the chief architect Boris Johnson is on borrowed time. A new prime minister will be in place by summer I’m sure. Those thinking Johnson will somehow change and become statesmanlike are barking up the wrong tree. He is what he has always been, unreliable, untrustworthy and incompetent.
There will be no bouncing back from his present self-inflicted problems.
What I think it means for us, is that there will be no early election and this will play into Starmer’s hands. The new Tory leader, whoever it is, will want to have time to show what they want to do and set a direction after three years of drift. More importantly, we will learn what the leader will be allowed to do by the ERG. I think this means running all the way to 2024. Every economic forecast points to an economy struggling to see any decent growth. Brexit, with all its dire impact on trade will be hard to disguise.
Three years should be just about long enough for the full extent of the economic damage to become clear to most people and even the most rabid Brexiteer will have difficulty defending it. Moreover, many voters will have run out of patience and be fed up of hearing excuses about the delay in the sunlit uplands appearing on the horizon.
The OBR predict reasonable growth next year but slowing in 2023, barely above one per cent. With soaring prices, most people are going to feel worse off.
Remember, it will be eight years after the referendum and a lot of voters thought things would change for the better immediately. If after eight years all we see is a worsening of the situation, it's hard to see supporters of Brexit at the margin still behind the project.
In the next election, the Tories will be trying to sell a flagship policy which is patently failing to an electorate sick to the back teeth of hearing empty promises. I wouldn’t like to be a Tory campaigner knocking on doors anywhere in Britain in 2024.
North Shropshire may have been a one-off and we won’t see a 34 per cent swing across the board, but it will be a big swing and I can’t see the Tories winning a majority.
And finally just as an aside, I read William Hague, a man I used to respect, writing in The Times the other day about Johnson's troubles and he gives an insight into the fool in Downing Street:
"[Johnson's] career breaks all the normal rules — just like his conversation, which is never sequential, hopping back and forth between issues with intuitive flashes of brilliance but not in any order that most advisers can fathom. He has the brain of a chaotic genius, which helped him to win the votes of a vast coalition that stretched from the socially liberal centre to the nationalistic right."
I think it pinpoints one of the problems with the PM which he will never be able to change. He is far from a genius and so chaotically disorganised that he can't concentrate on one thing for more than a few seconds. I have met people like that before. They are not problem solvers but problem creators.
So, we can look forward to a New Year with another change of prime minister and we will I am sure begin to see Brexit beginning to crumble.
Merry Christmas, keep SAFE,
