When the Tory leadership campaign was on sometime around June 2019, I found myself on a pro EU street stall in Selby speaking to a district councillor friend and asking him who he intended to vote for. He has always seemed a decent, sensible sort of chap that I rather like so I was surprised when he told me he supported Boris Johnson. I asked him why, saying he's an untrustworthy liar, something everybody in Britain knew.
"He's very clever" was the reply.
I told him I thought Johnson was one of the stupidest men in England and my friend appeared to be taken aback as if I'd said The Pope was Jewish. Johnson's brilliance was so obvious it couldn't be questioned apparently. Of course, he wasn't alone. The majority of the party and most of the right wing press thought so too.
The parliamentary party, those who knew him, were more divided. His shambolic public persona was not a disguise, underneath was someone utterly disorganised and chaotic, unable even to dress himself or comb his hair. Many of them knew it.
I wonder what that councillor thinks now as he scans the press who have eventually come to the same conclusion as me. The Guardian have an article about the PM sinking without trace and Jonathan Freedland says the government's ignorance is steering us to disaster.
This tweet from David Gauke, a former MP and cabinet colleague, says it all:
It is currently very fashionable to say that Boris Johnson’s performance as Prime Minister is well below what was expected of him. Personally speaking, I disagree.— David Gauke (@DavidGauke) September 18, 2020
His comments come in the wake of a lot of unease, to put it mildly, about Johnson's basic competence and an article in The Spectator by the right wing commentator Toby Young who now admits to being wrong about supporting the MP for Uxbridge. In his mea culpa article for The Spectator he writes about a friend of his who said recently:
"Boris reminds me of a hereditary king — Edward II or Henry VI — who is so staggeringly incompetent that he must be removed before doing too much damage,’ he wrote. ‘I felt the same way about May but Boris is worse."
Mr Young admits to feeling the same. The editor, Fraser Nelson had an article last week asking "where's Boris" not physically but where was "the man we thought we voted for?" The "effervescent, bombastic, energising leader MPs thought they'd elected" was AWOL or being given lessons in competence from Ed Miliband.
This is in the wake of Tim Montgomerie, founder of Conservative Home, attacking him. Most of the Brexit supporting press are now highly critical.
The Times thinks he has stuffed his cabinet with placemen and women:
Are people finally getting the measure of @BorisJohnson ? A poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then (hopefully) is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. pic.twitter.com/SYKLeuuBeP— Graham Simpson (@grahambsi) September 18, 2020
Last night on Newsnight, even Tom Newton-Dunn from usually slavish Sun was finding it hard to defend him. All he could offer was that the government was "tired" from fighting "multiple fires" but failing to point out that Johnson had personally lit most of them.
Most of the attacks come from Brexit supporters and I think it characterises them. They blinded themselves to the difficulties of Brexit and did exactly the same when choosing to put their support behind Johnson. They will soon be asking where is the Brexit we voted for. Like Johnson's capacity for simple competence, that doesn't exist either
His days are surely numbered.
