Tuesday 21 July 2020

The Russian report and Johnson

The Russian report is out later today and is eagerly awaited by the media. I suspect it will be a damp squib with nothing new revealed but it will be politically embarrassing for Johnson. However, since he is a man without shame, hardly likely to cause him much of a problem - although I hope I'm wrong. It may also cause Nigel Adams, my MP a bit of bother. He was the recipient of about £33K in donations from Alexander Temerko, although he certainly wasn't alone.

I am old enough to remember when this sort of thing was a problem for the Labour party. Donations in the millions from Russia would have wiped them out in the sixties or seventies. This says a lot about Russia itself which went from hard left to hard right in the decade or so after the fall of the Berlin wall.

But it also says much about the modern Tory party too. We shall see what the report brings.

Still on Boris Johnson, can I point you to an excellent piece by Martin Fletcher in The New Statesman?  Mr Fletcher is an important man in Johnson's back story. He followed Johnson as a Brussels correspondent, but for The Times rather than The Telegraph and wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on 21 June 2016 forecasting a Brexit victory and placing the blame squarely on our PM's shoulders. He wrote another excoriating piece in November 2017 again for TNS HERE.

Fletcher's latest tilt at Johnson is a summary of his first year as PM (not very good) and ends with this:

"Johnson appears a shadow of his previous self – his ebullience punctured, his delivery flat, his humour worn thin. His trademark optimism and berating of “doomsters and gloomsters” seems vacuous, reckless even, in this time of crisis. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, exposes his bluster and obfuscation, his inability to master detail, in a way that Jeremy Corbyn never could. The Prime Minister is increasingly seen as Cummings’s puppet – a narrative that will be hard to reverse given how hard he fought to keep his aide post-Durham. Johnson’s net approval rating has plunged from plus-40 in April to minus-six now.


"Conservative backbenchers are growing restive and uneasy. Previously sycophantic newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are becoming markedly more critical. Thus, a mere year into Johnson’s premiership, there are already mutterings about Rishi Sunak, the able young Chancellor, replacing him before the next election."


I have also asked myself what he has actually "done" since becoming prime minister to improve the lot of the left behind, the struggling, the communities desperately in need of something to make their lives a bit less wretched, and you have to admit it is almost nothing.

What he has done is to make the possibility of improving lives and reducing inequality that much more difficult. We need more inward investment - mainly because we can't do it ourselves, we simply don't have the expertise - but Johnson has made Britain less attractive, less welcoming and less open. Long term this will have a disastrous impact.

But even more than that he has trashed our reputation as being honest, trustworthy and respected. He has made us a laughing stock.

Anyone who relies on such a nasty piece of work as Dominic Cummings doesn't deserve to succeed and he won't. Cummings is piling up enemies in Whitehall and the Tory party in parliament. Even members of the ERG like Steve Baker want him gone, and go he will sooner or later.

Yesterday, MPs voted to deny themselves the chance to have powers to reject trade deals negotiated by government ministers:
This is amazing. Earlier, Holger Hestermeyer retweeted a comment from John Redwood saying the UK parliament never had the chance to vote against EU trade deals in the past. Hestermeyer, a reader in dispute resolution at King's College, found it odd given that other member states gave even regional parliaments the power to block trade deals.
I assume Redwood voted against giving himself a bit of democratic power.  What is it with us and democracy?  We shout loudly in favour of it but those on the extreme right consistently vote against giving it teeth.


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