Politics: end of days

By Richard North - February 5, 2022

There are dark stories afoot of a video being prepared of a “false flag” operation, showing “graphic scenes” of explosions and corpses, with actors taking the parts of aggressors, all to be used as a pretext for moving in.

Personally, I don’t think the Conservative Party is that desperate to recover Downing Street – not yet. And it may not even come to that. According to Juliet Samuel, sage of the Telegraph, “The cloud of chaos around Boris Johnson has killed his premiership, whether he knows it or not”.

She marks the departure of Munira Mirza, his head of policy, as finally tearing the guts out of the cadaver that is now his premiership. “He may try to hang on”, she writes, “but these are the actions of a man driven by sheer will to power and adrenalin, before he notices the fatal wound and drops”.

This scribe, however, asks how it came to this, and then seeks to explain why – taking us back two years and charting the train-wreck that is the Johnson administration.

She then observes that, back in 2016 after the Brexit vote, when Johnson’s leadership bid was torpedoed by Michael Gove, it was because he had proved incapable of seizing the moment and appeared terrified by his own victory, hiding instead in trivialities and offering no leadership.

But, she says, Theresa May’s incompetence (to say nothing of his own disloyalty) gave him another chance. And, in her view, the right pieces seemed to be there, second time round: “his own charm and creativity, Mr Cummings’ fierce intellect and focus, and the loyalty and huge talents of advisers like Ms Mirza”.

The sub-heading of la Samuel’s piece points to the outcome: “Two years of misery and ineptitude have taken the Johnson ministry from shining hope to utter shambles”, leading her to conclude that “it has all come to nothing”.

In her view, this is “a terrible, terrible waste” yet the only thing remarkable about her piece is that she – or anyone else for that matter – ever thought it could be any different.

Blood will always out and, from the very start, Johnson has been a wrong ‘un. Given a bigger canvas on which to fail, it was inevitable that he would simply deliver a bigger failure. Only the terminally delusional could have convinced themselves that his tenure as London Mayor was an apprenticeship for a brighter future. It was simply a rehearsal for the train wreck that was to come.

And, if there was even the slightest, residual doubt that it was over, today’s crop of newspapers have dispelled that. In the lead is the Daily Mirror with a brutal front-page headline which proclaims: “Cops handed pic of PM with lager at No 10 Party”.

This the Cabinet Room birthday bash in June 2020, where he was famously “ambushed” by a Union Jack cake presented by Miss Carrie. Sources tell the Mirror that the photograph – taken by his official, taxpayer-funded photographer – shows Johnson raising his can of Estrella beer towards the camera in a toast. “Ambushed by a beer too?” the paper asks.

The look isn’t good for multi-millionaire Fishy Sunak either. According to his own account, he just happened to be in the room waiting for a meeting to start, and took no part in the celebrations. Yet he is pictured standing next to the prime minister, holding a soft drink.

The picture is one of the 300 passed to Scotland Yard by Sue Gray, the set believed to include photos taken at parties and those from security-system cameras showing when people entered and exited buildings. Multiple images taken by Andrew Parsons, the official No 10 photographer, are also believed to have been handed over.

This story has been picked up by the Guardian, which is also doing its best to spread the merd with its front-page lead headed: “PM ever more isolated as he attempts to rally team”, the online edition noting that Javid has joined Sunak in rejecting the “slur on Keir Starmer” as “two more MPs call for PM to go”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Times has “Civil war in cabinet as PM told to sack Sunak”. It cites a minister saying: “I think it’s pretty sly of Rishi. Yesterday was a massive earthquake for Boris and the Government, he should have supported him”.

Apart from, Juliet Samuel, the Telegraph gives space to former minister Nick Gibb, who has an authored piece to say that, “to restore trust we need to change the prime minister”, as he submits no confidence letter.

Gibb, an ex-schools minister who served under three prime ministers, writes: “My constituents are furious about the double standards – imposing harsh and, to my mind, necessary restrictions as we and the world sought to defend ourselves against this new and deadly virus, while at the same time flagrantly disregarding those rules within the fortress of Downing Street”.

From the fanboy gazette, this is virtually a declaration of war, from which there can be no rowing back. And even if, against all the odds, Johnson could ride out this storm, he will never see glad confident mornings again. If this doesn’t bring him down, there will be something else. And we haven’t seen the Sunday papers yet.

The real killer though is the seeming consensus across the political divide that the party’s over – so to speak. Not only do we have Juliet Samuel on the Right, bringing down the curtain, we have Rowena Mason in the left-leaning Guardian writing under the heading: “Boris Johnson’s ministers watch and wonder as MPs sense the ‘end of days'”.

Although Mason suggests that the PM “needs to replace his lost team quickly as some in the cabinet start to pull away”, this is her going through the motions as she writes of a vacuum at the heart of Downing Street and cabinet ministers beginning to distance themselves from Johnson’s leadership.

The uncomfortable truth for Johnson is that the “magic” doesn’t work any more and the Teflon is peeling off in sheets. “A day trip to Ukraine”, Mason writes, “was set up to make him look like an involved international leader, and there was the launch of his flagship policy on levelling up. MPs appeared temporarily boosted by the news that Sir Lynton Crosby, his elections guru, would be back giving him advice”.

But, she says, “on closer inspection, each of these events only served to make him look weaker, as he ran shy of the press by taking just a Sun journalist with him to Kyiv, and failed to take the lead on the white paper, sending out the cabinet minister Michael Gove instead to do a statement and media interviews. It also became increasingly clear that Crosby’s involvement would be at arm’s length only”.

Mason takes the view that, should Johnson manage to cobble together only a weak and insubstantial team over the weekend to replace his losses in No 10 – and it is hard to see him doing anything else – “then MPs may begin to lose the faith even before the conclusion of the Met police investigation and full publication of the Gray report”.

In this situation, she says, they will increasingly be looking to the cabinet heavyweights and potential leadership challengers to give them the nod that now is the time to start submitting letters in droves. That moment has not yet come, she concludes, but MPs and Downing Street are on tenterhooks.

And yet, we’re less than three months down the line, when I wrote of Matthew Parris and his column in which he declared that “Flight Bojo2019 has begun its final descent”.

Johnson’s premiership, he wrote, is now in terminal decline. It may prove fast or slow, and the time he has left may be years or only months, but it’s now only a matter of time. All we have left, it now seems, is other writers playing catch-up. The writing was on the wall last November.