There is something truly satisfying in watching Johnson twisting in the wind at the moment. Each day brings at least one new scandal. Yesterday we learned he had a birthday party for himself at No 10 in June 2020 - specifically against lockdown rules - and Lord Agnew resigned over the 'ignorance, indolence and arrogance' that saw £4.3 billion lost to fraud in the government's covid business loan scheme. The PM's excuse about the bash in the cabinet office is that he was only there for 10 minutes, as if that was absolution.
If among the 50 million or so adults over the voting age in this country the Tory party could have chose anyone less suited to be prime minister than Boris Johnson, I would like to know who they are. He has displayed just about every human flaw and frailty you can name over and over again during his 57 years. If someone told me he was a thief or racketeer into the bargain I would have no hesitation in believing it.
I listened earlier this morning to Grant Shapps on the Today programme on Radio 4 and he struggled to find any excuse for Johnson having a birthday party when they were expressly forbidden. It was the old 'they were working extremely hard' and it was 'just for ten minutes' and 'they all worked together' - the last one challenged when it was pointed out his interior designer was there. Ministers, even perhaps the hopeless Shapps might be getting tired of being made to look stupid on a daily basis defending the idiot in Downing Street.
It is as if the scales have begun to fall from the eyes of his cheerleaders in the pro Brexit press who seem to be pursuing him with as much vigour as his enemies. The Times is particularly active.
In the Spectator, the literary editor Sam Leith, who I won't accuse of ever being a supporter of Johnson's but he doesn't appear to have attacked him previously, has an excellent summary of where we are now. The good ship Boris is sinking, Leith says, in the way that ships pounded by successive waves eventually succumb. He quotes a passage from a book:
"The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an acceleration of catastrophe that is almost impossible to reverse... If there’s enough damage, flooding may overwhelm the pumps and short out the engine or gag its air intakes. With the engine gone, the boat has no steerageway at all and turns broadside to the seas. Broadsides exposes her to the full force of the breaking waves, and eventually a part of her deck or wheelhouse lets go. After that, downflooding starts to occur. Downflooding is the catastrophic influx of ocean water into the hold. It’s a sort of death rattle at sea, the nearly vertical last leg of an exponential curve"
We are long past the tipping point and it is now just a matter of time before he sinks out of sight.
On that point, Martin Fletcher, who followed Johnson as The Times' Brussels correspondent, has an article in The New Statesman suggesting that the PM is never going to do the honourable thing and resign. He will need to be forced out kicking and screaming and clinging by his fingernails to the door jambs.
Fletcher thinks the recent policy announcements are simply a smoke screen to save him and nothing to do with the national interest which never figured very high on Johnson's personal aggrandisement agenda. He says rather than respecting “the will of the people” and stepping down, Johnson will use "all possible forms of political skulduggery to cling to power." I think he's right.
Fletcher says:
"Gray’s report may be so damning, so unequivocal in its conclusions, that not even the fabled “greased piglet” can survive. But if she leaves Johnson any possible escape route, the narcissist in No 10 will surely seize it. As a 'friend' of Johnson’s told the Times: 'He wants to outlast Dave (Cameron). He won’t accept the last Etonian MP having survived longer than him'.”
I think we can safely say he is not going to last another three years - he'll be lucky to last three more weeks. Thank God.
It's difficult to see how Ms Gray can produce a report that does not point to Johnson's flagrant and persistent breaking of the rules - or laws as some keep pointing out - that he himself announced. We have all seen pictures and video footage of him without a mask or boasting of shaking hands with everyone inside a hospital. Partygate hasn't come as a surprise. It is simply confirmation of what we expect from him. He was exactly the same as a thirteen year old at Eton and hasn't changed in the slightest - because he cannot.
So, if she produces a whitewash it will make no difference because nobody will believe it. There can only be clear and unequivocal evidence of wrongdoing. Nothing else is remotely believable.
Johnson's political career is over. He has eaten his cake and cannot have it again.
