New rules about being unable to vote without ID have deterred a lot of people and many arrived without any form of identity check and were turned away. The Electoral Commission has launched an investigation with the aim of producing an interim report by June. I can't see the rule surviving in its present form. Thousands, it seems were denied a vote in order to solve an almost non-existent problem of voter personification.
The result will be nothing less than the party deserves and a lot of the blame must go to the members themselves for picking Boris Johnson in 2019. What seemed like a triumph at the time has turned out to be the party's worst decision - possibly ever.
I think I mentioned before that in the summer of 2019, while on a street stall, I spoke to a Conservative councillor that I knew, a man I had previously thought to be sensible at the very least. He admitted he had voted for Johnson and said: "He's very clever."
I told him I thought he was the stupidest man in England and he looked quite shocked. Yet, reading the published excerpts of Anthony Seldon's book: Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, it is clear that I was much closer to the truth. He comes across as a fool. There have been several reviews and one of the best is by former Tory MP and Justice minister, David Gauke in The New Statesman. He sums it up here:
"It is tempting to focus on Johnson’s dishonesty (both personal and political) and his lack of principles – and, as a consequence, the damage he has done to our political institutions. And our international reputation. And the economy. What can be neglected and may be less obvious to those not close to Whitehall is quite how extraordinarily inept he was at performing some of the basic functions of being prime minister. Seldon and Newell have done a service to us all in setting out this reality in unsparing detail."
"Based on interviews with more than 200 witnesses of Johnson in office, his weaknesses are exposed again and again. His thinking is “shallow”, he lacked “focus and grasp” and had a “chronic inability to initiate difficult conversations”. Described as “woefully inadequate at governing”, he “would chair meetings chaotically” and had a “short attention span”; he was “biddable” and “often unserious… and lacking any kind of grip on the machine”. He was “hopeless at understanding how to convert his woolly dreams into substance” and “could not behave as a grown-up, nor trust other people to do so”. Johnson had little knowledge of Whitehall, policy, parliament or the Conservative Party. He was impossibly ill-equipped to perform adequately the role of junior minister for paperclips, let alone prime minister."
"The chapter on Covid is particularly damning. An official observed that it was “astonishing how hard he found it to grasp the finer points of Covid policy… he couldn’t process the volume of information”. Another official noted that “in one day he would have three meetings in which he would say three completely different things depending on who was present, and then deny that he had changed his position”. When he insisted he hadn’t made a decision, officials had to show him printouts of what he had agreed earlier that day.
"When the official enquiry into the handling of Covid eventually concludes, the government’s approach taken in September 2020 in response to the second wave of infections is very likely to be viewed harshly. This will be an uncomfortable moment for Johnson and, to some extent, the lockdown sceptic Rishi Sunak. Yet it is all too apparent that throughout the first months of the crisis, earlier that year, the country was without a properly functioning head of government. “No 10, in the absence of a prime minister rising to the occasion, needed a figure with the intellectual capacity and influence to grasp the scale of the problem and focus activity,” write Seldon and Newell."
This is the person foisted on us by Tory members like my councillor friend and subsequently by a gullible public who believed the lies. And his congenital mendacity wasn't a defect as far as the party was concerned, it was the main reason they wanted him. He could lie and make it appear truthful, that was, is and always will be his singular talent.
Meg Russel in Prospect Magazine points to the Privileges Committee that is due to report into Johnson's Partygate lies, something which could end his parliamentary career, but concludes "while his dishonesty over Partygate is serious—really serious—the legacy of his dishonesty over Brexit goes far deeper."
The Brexit issue is going to last for decades and Johnson is at the very heart of it. Anyone who thinks Brexit might survive should take a look at the polling carried out recently for ITV News:
Time and demographics alone will see the UK back in Europe eventually.
The damage from Brexit is already colossal and yet, many in the party still want Johnson back in No 10 and are ferociously attacking Sue Gray, Starmer's proposed new chief of staff, for somehow colluding with the Labour leader to get him out last year. There is an insane belief that if they can smear Gray, it will pave the way for a triumphant return of the idiot from Uxbridge. This is how far the party has sunk.
Even when all the evidence is obvious, they still can't see it.
I honestly think we're looking at the end of the Conservative Party as we knew it. The legacy they are leaving behind, the corruption and the sewage, the gerrymandering and naked self-interest as well as the economic catastrophe will damn them for years and years. They are surely finished. And rightly so.
