Saturday 23 July 2022

Johnson: I'll be back!

There are credible reports that the utterly disgraced Johnson doesn’t really think his career is over. He is telling aides that he will be back within a year. This is bad news for Sunak. Liz Truss is Johnson’s anointed successor, not because she is any good but because she’s so bad, and in twelve months the party will have removed her and be begging him to return. This is truly Trumpian levels of ego and self delusion.

Here is a tweet by Conservative Home founder Tim Montgomerie:

Now have a look at this tweet from Telegraph political commentator Christopher Hope:

There is a gathering momentum behind a petition to try and get Johnson’s name on the ballot which goes to party members in a few days time, along with the names of Truss and Sunak. I don’t see any chance of this happening because it’s against the rules but it says a lot about the mindset of Tory party members. They want a 'confirmatory' vote before Johnson is actually deposed.

Some non-Tories think this makes sense, after all the members are the ones who elected him and they should be the ones to de-elect him. The system does look wrong in that members can put someone in place who can't actually lead his or her MPs because they haven't got confidence in the members' choice.  

Be that as it may, members seem to prefer Johnson, a known liar, mired in sleaze and corruption and the first prime minister in history to break the law (his own law!) whilst in office, and want him back as leader.  Amazing or what?

Sunak is widely seen as being disloyal because he registered his leadership campaign website ‘Ready for Rishi’ in December last year and was too quick to resign, being the second after Javid started the recent ministerial avalanche. Sunak (I didn’t see him in the House for the PMs last PMQs) is hated by Johnson and his team and they will be doing all they can to see Truss in No 10 so she can make an absolute mess of it.

I think this shows just how low the party has sunk. It’s hard to see any sort of redemption for it while we are still wrestling with the impact of the insane policy which is Brexit.

Sunak doesn’t help himself or the party by telling The Times the nation "is facing a national emergency over the economy, NHS backlogs and illegal migration."  Voters might ask themselves who is responsible after 12 years in power?

Truss and Sunak are falling over each other to make ever more inflated offers to Tory members and the wider country. Sunak has promised to scrap EU laws which are slowing the economy by the next election. Truss has now pledged to do better and scrap or reform ALL EU derived law, whether they’re slowing us down or not, by the end of 2023. 

Neither of them identify which laws might go, let alone suggest how they might be repealed or amended in a few months when the party has been searching for these stifling EU laws since 2010, with twenty or more initiatives, and hasn’t actually come up with one substantive regulation worth scrapping! 

The Guardian report that:

"Hundreds of laws covering employment and environmental protections could disappear overnight if Liz Truss becomes prime minister after she promised to scrap all remaining EU regulations by the end of 2023.

"Despite warnings about the scale and complexity of the task, Truss launched her leadership runoff campaign by promising a 'sunset' for all EU-derived laws within 15 months.  Attempting to position herself as the self-styled 'Brexit-delivery prime minister', Truss’s proposed timetable is notably accelerated from that given by Boris Johnson’s government."

It will never happen, trust me.

Dover

The chronic delays at Dover that started yesterday are continuing today. This is despite the French border authorities fielding a full complement of staff to man the 12 border posts to carry out passport checks and stamping. Yesterday about half of the border officials were delayed for about 75 minutes in the tunnel and the result was massive 6 hour delays or more to get into Dover. The whole system is now on a permanent knife edge.

It seems that this is not just a lack of French staff but the new normal on busy weekends. The BBC's Simon Jones said a few minutes ago there were 3,000 lorries currently parked on the M20!!

This morning Radio 4 reported the comments of Lucy Morton, an officer of the ISU - the union representing border officials - who said when it was put to her that Brexit was responsible, that we hadn't taken back control of the border and had actually done the reverse, and I quote, "This is democracy, there was a vote, some people voted for it, some people voted against it, this is the answer, this is one of the outcomes that was reasonably predictable and this is the time it's chosen to bite."

Quite.

The problem is that people were lied to, they did not vote for Kent to be permanently gridlocked and this brings me to another tweet which I think is fascinating. Have a read of this small extract from the autobiography of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood written in 1939:

It's interesting that he references The Daily Mail which he accuses of being the first English newspaper to treat 'news' as being something to 'amuse' people rather than being a source of information telling him how to act.

I would argue it is now much, much worse. The Mail (and plenty of others on the right) now deliberately spin and skew the 'news' in order to further the aims of their proprietors. A lot of the stuff you read is either plain wrong or designed to misinform and mislead.

This would be bad enough but now we have leading politicians like Johnson who are doing exactly the same and by their example forcing all of their colleagues to lie on their behalf.  And his party members want him back!

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