Friday 17 June 2022

Johnson is a dangerous man and must go soon

Geidt’s resignation letter wasn’t quite the killer punch I was hoping for but it is certainly another heavy blow and very odd. It seems Geidt just about accepts the conveniently implausible explanations Johnson has provided for his actions over partygate - which takes a bit of doing - and has resigned over something quite different involving trade policy or Trade Retaliation Measures, specifically over steel tariffs. But the PM’s ethics adviser has no competence on matters of trade, or WTO rules which some commentators have suggested Johnson might plan to break.

Geidt's letter HERE says he could have just about "credibly continued as Independent Adviser, albeit by a very small margin" but he was tasked this week to "offer a view" about the government's intention to "risk a deliberate and purposeful breach of the Ministerial Code." This, he says put him in an “impossible and odious position.”   It seems quite a strange thing not to be completely clear and explicit about. 

This we are led to believe is about steel tariffs. Why Geidt would resign over something like that is really strange. He is not a trade expert or a lawyer so how steel tariffs impact the ministerial code we simply don't yet know. 

The former head of the Government Legal Department, Jonathan Jones:

Some are speculating that the government is seeking to re-impose tariffs on Chinese steel imports, due to be lifted at the end of this month, and linking this to political donations made to the Tory party.

I do hope Nigel Adams is implicated in some way.

David Allen Green, the legal blogger, has a nice post about what he also calls Geidt's "curious resignation letter" 

Green says his current suspicion is that there may have been a request for a 'ministerial direction' to do something with which an official did not feel comfortable doing, which then somehow got referred to Lord Geidt. But he admits he does not really know. 

But as he puts is it, connecting the [X] of a steel tariffs issue to the [Y] of an ethics adviser resigning is not easy.

I think it must now be clear, after umpteen resigning matters, no matter what comes next, Johnson is never going to leave No 10 willingly. It will take several burly men with lump hammers and bolster chisels to get him out and possibly the use of explosives.

By clinging on he is doing irreparable damage to the institutions of government.

Resignation is not simply something people do when they’re caught wrongdoing or pursuing a policy the country or their colleagues don’t approve of. It is also a way of continually strengthening and reinforcing the good governance of a country.

When a senior (or junior for that matter) politician resigns it sends a message to others around them and to their  successors about the need for honesty, integrity, transparency or political support. Johnson has broken that system, not just by failing to resign himself but failing to ask for the resignation of other ministers (like Patel or Jenrick). 

It is not even as if he's doing a good job. He is totally incompetent but doesn’t realise it, a very dangerous thing in my opinion. 

I’m a bit of a D-I-Y fanatic, mainly because when we first got married we couldn’t afford to pay tradesmen so it was out of necessity. It helped that I began life as an apprentice journeyman electrician, so I knew how to do a bit of wiring. Over the years I’ve done a lot of things including moving and adding 13A sockets, adding new consumer units, plumbing, moving radiators, installing solid fuel boilers, car repairs, building stud partition walls and so on. I do all the painting and decorating as well.

If something breaks down I usually try to fix it first - and often do. I know a lot of people who do exactly the same.

But I recognise that I can’t do some things. I well know my own limitations. Plastering is one, handling gas appliances (we aren’t on the gas and haven’t been for the last 37 years so it's not important) is another. And cars have got so complicated now, you can't fix them yourself.

I also know that I am not a very good people manager, or public speaker and I certainly couldn't be an MP and wouldn't want to be prime minister.

But Boris Johnson doesn’t see that he isn’t any good at being a husband, father, journalist, MP, Mayor of London, Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister. But even more than that, he actually thinks he’s much better than the ones we’ve had in the past. In my case, this would be akin to watching an experienced brain surgeon at work and immediately thinking that I can do it better. 

So, even as his work is repeatedly shown to be sub standard, Johnson just keeps on going, leaving in his wake a lot of decent civil servants struggling either with their own conscience or with trying to make his increasingly erratic policies work.

He is a very dangerous man and the sooner he is gone, the sooner we can get on with repairing the damage.

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