This morning it's a Sunday Times article which is grabbing the headlines - certainly on social media - with many forecasting the beginning of the end for Johnson. It is a damning critique of his disastrous and cavalier handling of the coronavirus epidemic - Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster. The sub-heading gives a flavour of the 5,000 word article: Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives.
What comes across is a story of monstrous complacency, Johnson's well-known idleness and his total inability to be across any sort of detail on any subject.
It speaks to his whole attitude to life and work. Nothing is taken seriously, all warnings of risk are scaremongering. Urging caution is pooh poohed. Everything's a doddle isn't it? Except when real decisions are needed and he is revealed as a hollow showman.
Who is to blame? The MPs who supported his campaign and those who voted for him. The KNEW what kind of a man he was but were prepared to sacrifice the nation for their own advancement.
There are growing calls for a public inquiry. Some peers were calling for just such a thing in the last day or so. If the government thought they might avoid it, The Sunday Times has ensured we will have one.
If so, Johnson's words from his Greenwich speech will come back to haunt him:
"We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other."
This was well over a week after the first COBRA meetimg on January 24th where coronavirus was discussed. Needless to say the PM did not bother to attend it.
And in the middle of March in a conference call he was joking about "operation last gasp" as the government kicked off a farcical process to get British industry to knock up 10,000 ventilators - just like that.
Anyway, if you don't have a subscription to the Sunday Times, do read the article. It's the beginning of the end of Johnson.
