Monday 24 October 2022

Johnson drops out

Johnson pulling out of the leadership contest became ever more likely yesterday as time ticked on and his team failed to get more than 59 nominators to publicly admit to supporting him. He may have had the 102 nominations required although I doubt it, but even if he had, I think some of them were not really confirmed or were flaky. He couldn't allow himself to get to the final deadline on Monday and find he only had 98 votes or less. It would have meant the humiliation of failing at an ‘election’ and something his ego could never accept. So, he did the obvious and went.

He finally withdrew just after 9 pm last night. His full statement is HERE.

Barring a last-minute and literally incredible surge of support for Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak will become the leader of the Conservative party and the new prime minister this afternoon. There will be no vote of the membership. He will be the first Asian PM and there's nothing wrong with that.

It will never be known if Johnson ever had more than 59 nominations but if indeed there were a few more albeit unwilling to acknowledge supporting him, the reason for their reluctance became clear last night. Nadhim Zahawi had a piece in The Telegraph published at 9 pm, he tweeted a link at exactly that moment in time:

This coincided almost perfectly with Johnson pulling out of the contest, leaving Zahawi looking like a total idiot (which he is but let's ignore that for the moment). This is probably why some other supporters didn't go public, it was the fear of looking like they’ve been duped.

Twenty-nine sweaty minutes later, Zahawi tweeted again:


The article by the way has now disappeared from The Telegraph's website.

However, Sunak's premiership will very soon become the second shortest in history, only Truss would have served a shorter period. He will lose the next election by a landslide, Johnson will lose his seat and the Tories will be out of office for at least ten years. 

For Johnson, I think it marks the end of his political career. One of his deluded stooges, NI secretary Chris Heston-Harris left Johnson’s campaign headquarters last night saying, “He’s a great man.” 

Just how mistaken can you be?  How many times do you have to be humiliated yourself to see through Johnson's fake charm and intellect and see the Shambolic, Narcissistic, Arrogant, Incompetent Liar (SNAIL) that he is?  CHH and his other sidekick Nigel Adams deserve to be humiliated.

It’s not clear what will happen on NI. Elections are due to be called by the SoS on Friday and Heaton-Harris may not be even in post. The whole NI issue will be up in the air once again.  There are rumours that the former NI Secretary Julian Smith may take over. He was well respected and capable (and hence sacked by Johnson) and could step in quickly.

However, any Conservatives who think things will settle down under Sunak shouldn't be too sure. The new PM has supported Brexit since he was at school and before the word even entered everyday usage.  He appears to have bought all the Kipling myths about the British empire wholesale.

Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England told the BBC that the UK faces a "more difficult" era of austerity than the one after the 2008 financial crisis in order to stabilise the economy and said the average person could face "significantly higher taxes" to fund public spending.

It would be hard enough for anyone to impose yet more austerity on a population fed on a diet of it for twelve years but for a man who is richer than the King, it is going to be nigh on impossible.

Writing in The Telegraph, Jeremy Warner says Truss' economic plan with its smaller state, lower tax, deregulatory ambitions, was at least some kind of an attempt to articulate what a post-Brexit economy might look like. But he adds:

"With its demise, we are once again left floundering around wondering what was the point of Brexit in the first place.

"All the economic downsides of leaving the European Union are still with us – not least thanks to the deeply flawed nature of Boris Johnson's Withdrawal Agreement, which seriously impaired trade with our near neighbours – but with little if any countervailing economic benefits.

"Even among die-hard Brexit supporters, the disillusionment is palpable. After six years, just what have we got to show for it? Seemingly nothing beyond economic, fiscal and financial chaos."

Sunaks big post-Brexit idea is freeports and he's also keen to scrap 2,300 EU retained laws which British industry desperately wants to keep. It will drive uncertainty, cut inward investment, slow growth and divert tax revenues when he is trying to do the opposite. 

Good luck with that.

Warner's Telegraph piece cautioned against comparing us to Italy, we are actually worse because for years it has consistently run both a primary budget surplus (that is before debt servicing costs) and a current account surplus, signalling greater exports than imports. This isn't true of Britain, which has plunged ever deeper into the red on both counts.

We have lived beyond our means for years and Brexit is doing nothing to help and everything to hinder. Well, I say nothing to help, as Warner points out at least out of the EU we have nobody else to blame.

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