Johnson’s last PMQs yesterday was a typical barnstorming Johnsonian performative clownshow full of finger pointing, jumping up and down while pumping out a series of absolutely barefaced lies and personal insults aimed at the opposition leader. At the end, his party, the MPs who had forced him out a few days ago because of his dishonesty and lack of trust in him, gave a standing ovation! Only Theresa May refused to clap.
The leader of a party that has taken millions from Russians and wealthy donors and behaves like an animated scarecrow, said this about Starmer:
"I can tell the House why the Leader of the Opposition does that funny wooden flapping gesture—it is because he has the union barons pulling his strings from beneath. That is the truth—£100 million."
Where the £100 million figure comes from I have no idea and I suspect Johnson doesn’t either. It was just another lie lost in a blizzard of them.
The worst one was that he had “restored our democracy” which is I assume a reference to Brexit and fulfilling the mandate of the 2016 referendum. When we marched for a second vote, we were not trying to overthrow the government, we only wanted a second, confirmatory referendum. This is not damaging democracy but reinforcing it.
The fact that it was won on lies (as was the 2019 election), the vast majority coming from his own desperate ambition to either get into or stay in No 10 is slowly becoming clear and has damaged democracy almost beyond repair. His government's attempts to avoid scrutiny by parliament or the courts has reduced public trust in politics to an all-time record low.
In fact I can’t think of anyone who has done more to undermine democracy than him. And let’s not forget, he’s still under investigation for misleading parliament and he has an even bigger shadow hanging over him after he admitted meeting a former KGB office in Italy without officials in 2018 when he was foreign secretary.
They will certainly miss him. Being a total psychopath means nobody can get close to Johnson for lies. Sometimes I think that’s all the party has left. There are rumors that his final words - Hasta la vista, Baby (which means see you later) - are a reference to a comeback at some time in the future when everything has gone pear shaped under his successor. I can see it all going pear-shaped but asking the man who caused it to come back and save us is truly delusional - even if he's not serving a jail sentence for treason.
Sunak by the way, is pitching his offer on him being a Thatcherite. He also claims to be a conviction Brexiteer which rather undermines his claim. She would never have pulled out of the EU.
However, all the polling points to Truss winning the Tory membership vote handsomely.
One of the reasons why the party will lose the next GE is in the figures published about an hour ago by the ONS showing the interest payment on the mountain of debt accumulated under Johnson reached £19.4 billion last month, the highest amount for a June since records began.
And the difference between what the government spends and what it raised in tax hit a tad under £23 billion, £4.1 billion higher that last year. In other words not only are we adding to our debt by an increasing amount, but because of inflation the amount we pay in interest is also increasing.
To put it into perspective, £20 billion is the total amount spent by the Welsh government and four times DEFRA's annual budget. We are now paying that much in interest on our £2 trillion debt per month - and it's likely to rise further.
Sterling dropped below $1.20 about two weeks ago and is struggling to get back above that level. This is creating a vicious circle of adding to the cost of imports and therefore inflation, which means higher interest rates and therefore higher interest payments.
So Truss (if it is her) will face an economic crisis which her Northern Ireland Protocol Bill that cleared the Commons yesterday, will only make worse by precipitating a trade war with the EU. Public sector unions are all flexing their muscles and I expect to see a wave of strikes looming over pay.
The Tory government has lost control over the economy and it will take years to recover any sort of reputation for sound financial management, the bedrock of Conservative governments for the last century or more.
Truss will soon be looking like Jim ('Sunny Jim') Callaghan in 1978.
