Johnson: dead man walking

By Pete North - December 8, 2021

When Brexiteers backed Boris Johnson, they backed a loser. His capacity to win elections (at the time) was never in question given the state of the alterative, but his capacity to accomplish anything in office was always my greatest reservation. He was and is a man of no substance, with wholly interchangeable principles, and at heart, was never a leaver. That would require conviction.

Johnson’s rise to Number Ten was the result of a grubby little deal cooked up between the ERG and Johnson, being that they had no obvious candidate among them who could secure Brexit (of the flavour they wanted) for them. That deal was to set the tone of his entire premiership. Johnson would do whatever his ambition dictated.

One of Boris Johnson’s first acts was to stuff the government with cronies from think tankery and Brexit friendly media. It was a feeding frenzy for all the darlings of the Tory right, long kept at bay by Cameron. The first taste of real power for the right since Thatcher. Brexiteers believed this was the revolution they’d been waiting for.

With Johnson having no vision or agenda of his own, he appointed Cummings to give direction to an otherwise valueless administration. There was no plan for Brexit, nor did the ERG have any specific changes in mind, but Cummings was their favoured assassin to take care of what the ERG saw as embedded resistance to Brexit from deep within the civil service. This was more about revenge than reform. Revenge for the ERG and personal revenge for Cummings who has long held a grudge against the civil service and had scores to settle.

This played well with Brexiteers who viewed it as a much needed draining of the swamp, failing to realise this was really just a restocking of the swamp with a new breed of pondlife.

It was only a matter of time before Cummings created enough ill will to alienate himself and run out of road. He was never going to see out a full term. It should have been further obvious that with Cummings out of the way, and no coherent demands from the ERG, that a rudderless administration would become a power vacuum. That Ms Symonds and her media handmaidens would be the one to fill that void shouldn’t have come as any surprise either.

With so little integrity at the heart of government, nobody should be surprised that the rules set for the rest of us to follow would not be observed by Downing Street staffers. There is a prevailing sense of entitlement and presumption. They take their lead from the example set by the prime minster.

It’s now looking increasingly likely that Johnson won’t see out a full term, which isn’t really a surprise either. Johnson wanted the position, the prestige and the place in history, but didn’t actually want to do the job. It demands too much of his gnat like attention span and means taking responsibility. Something the man has never done in his entire career.

When he leaves office, there will no doubt be yet another clean sweep of all his ministers, cronies and advisers, to reveal a Tory party in a similar state of intellectual disrepair as Labour, with nobody who can command the confidence of the whole party. Whoever follows will have to safeguard Brexit, but aside from that, will be free to break with current policy, or worse – doubling down on Net Zero and Cameronesque detoxification measures, putting the right of the party back to where it was in 2010. The Brexit revolution will be dead and buried.

What we needed of a Brexit government was a rethink of the green agenda, a rethink of the hierarchy of human rights laws, an all out war on the NGOcracy and a major reform of the immigration system. Instead we got the ineffectual Priti Patel, and some marginal measures to tackle the symptoms of deeply embedded wokery, which will emerge largely unscathed by the whole Johnson episode and expanded under a Labour government.

Much of this has not gone unnoticed by those who supported Johnson. If that wasn’t enough to wake them up, then his maladministration during Covid have certainly incurred their wrath. The latest round of winter Covid restrictions coming just hours in the wake of Partygate, including talk of compulsory vaccinations, will be enough to have his most ardent fans calling for his removal. The game is up. Mr Johnson has entered the tunnel toward the end of his political career.

As far back as 2014, I worried that a movement to withdraw from the EU without a coherent plan and an explicit set of objectives would ultimately end up a cul-de-sac. That, sadly, became a foregone conclusion the moment leavers consented to Johnson as their leader. We may have secured our EU departure, but that’s all we get and that’s as far as it goes.

With no vision behind it and no leader of conviction driving it, it will be quietly brushed under the rug and forgotten about, and the insurgency that once threatened to topple the establishment is back where it was in 2006. Nowhere basically. The remaining fragments are left to fight over the scraps. Johnson succeeded in defeating Brexit where remainers couldn’t. Destroyed by the very cronyism that spawned Vote Leave to begin with.