Johnson's time is up

 At the weekend The Sunday Times had an article about Johnson's prospects at the forthcoming local elections where he is likely to be trounced.  In it Johnson is said to have told friends that "he has been assured that he will receive only one fine" over the partygate affair. I suspect this is bravado. If he was fined for attending a surprise birthday party it's hardly likely he will get away with others where the degree of lockdown law-breaking is far more clear cut. If he isn't fined and others are, they will be forgiven for feeling aggrieved and it will look like one law for him and another for everybody else.  There would be uproar.

I think the 'assurance' he claims to have received is about the same as the repeated ones he got in December last year about there having been no parties in Downing Street, including the six he personally attended, i.e. entirely in his own mind.

Be that as it may. Today's Times now says that the fines may well be irrelevant because Sue Gray's report is "so damning that senior officials believe it could leave Boris Johnson with no choice but to resign as prime minister." This is  apparently from someone who has actually read the report although the article doesn't actually make that clear.

“Sue’s report is excoriating. It will make things incredibly difficult for the prime minister,” the official said. “There’s an immense amount of pressure on her — her report could be enough to end him. No official has ever been in a position like this before.”

Her report is said to be critical of the PM both for attending some of the events and the culture in No 10 that developed under his leadership.

The narrative being used by fawning cabinet ministers that Johnson is somehow indispensable and so smart we couldn't do without him is mainly if not wholly based on his handling of the pandemic and his response to the war in Ukraine. Both ideas have taken somewhat of a hit in recent days.

First an academic paper has modelled the 'counterfactual' or hypothetical growth of covid cases that would have occurred had measures been implemented one or two weeks earlier. It shows that the number of deaths from covid-19 would have been reduced by 34,000 had lockdown occurred one week earlier.

The paper says:

"In Europe, the first lockdown was imposed in Italy on 9 March 2020, followed by Ireland (12 March), Albania and Poland (13), Spain (14), Serbia (15), and Austria, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania (16). In England, several voluntary social distancing measures (e.g. limits on mass gatherings and social contact) were introduced on 17 March, but a mandatory lockdown (including closure of schools and non-essential shops, public transport restrictions, and limits on time outside the home) was not enforced until 24 March. By 1 June, just ten weeks later, approximately 220,000 people living in England had tested positive for the virus, with 45,000 COVID-19 deaths reported. The United Kingdom (UK) as a whole has suffered one of the highest per capita death tolls worldwide."

"Introducing measures one week earlier would have reduced by 74% the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in England by 1 June, resulting in approximately 21,000 fewer hospital deaths and 34,000 fewer total deaths"

Why were we so late in locking down?  The public inquiry will find out but don't forget that Johnson missed the first five COBRA meetings and in Greenwich on 3 February 2020 he showed an astonishing complacency saying:

"And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other."

And on Ukraine, The Sunday Times yesterday had a long article about the way Britain had let Ukraine down over seven years from 2014 as we refused to send lethal arms after Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas. 

"Britain’s policy of refusing to sell weapons to Ukraine continued for seven years. By the time Boris Johnson became foreign secretary in 2016, Russia had seized the Crimean peninsula, shot down the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, and given military support to President Assad’s ruthless regime in Syria.

"Yet Johnson sought a 'normalisation' of relations with Russia despite its illegal occupation of Crimea, and was a vocal advocate for the policy of sending only non-lethal military equipment to Kyiv."

This is hardly surprising from Johnson who had close ties with Russians, talked a lot about western  'Russophobia' and whose party took millions from Russian oligarchs and allowed billions in dirty Russian money to flood London's capital markets.

So, the two main reasons for keeping Johnson in office suddenly don't look so rosy if they ever did. As for getting Brexit done, that is looking more and more like an unmitigated disaster with every passing day and sooner or later the government will have to admit it. In my personal opinion, I don't see anything else that you might describe as remotely positive on the slate.

When he goes - as he will shortly - it will be because his premiership will have nothing to show for three years in office except a trashed economy and a divided angry populace while the reasons to dump him will be as long as your arm. His time is up.

The lies, the corruption, the incompetence, the sloppiness and his many other flaws, all obvious from the start, will be enough to label him the worst prime minister this country has evet had.

Finally, great result in France last night, but no room for complacency. Marine Le Pen lost but at 42% of the vote she has a worrying level of support.