Johnson is a dead man walking

By Pete North - August 2, 2021

Tory sleaze is not a new thing. It’s not even new to this prime minister. It’s not new to this government either. And it certainly isn’t new to the public. That’s why I’m reasonably convinced this latest sleaze story won’t carry the weight it should. The rich being able to buy privileged access to the top of politics is about as big a revelation as “water is wet”.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that the newspapers are not setting the agenda any more. They are still influential but people have their own priorities which don’t always align with newspaper editors. My corner of the internet is rowing over the Dover dinghies. Nobody is talking about stories hiding behind paywalls.

It could still turn into a major problem for the Tories though. The “access capitalism” story isn’t enough on its own and the Tories could get away with it if they were at least doing what they were elected to do. But that’s not happening. Whether they realised the complexity of the immigration issue or not, the Tories said they would send illegal immigrants back but they’re not doing that and every day they’re escorting even more over the Channel. That makes the Tories fair game.

I can’t pinpoint exactly what happened, or on which particular issue it turned on, but in the last few weeks confidence in the Tories has collapsed. No self-respecting conservative can condone the current trajectory of the party. Johnson has gone all in on climate lunacy, the nannying and hectoring is getting worse, and the less said about Covid the better. There is nothing about this government I presently recognise as conservative and it’s barely a Brexit government. For a while the Tories have enjoyed the advantage of not being Labour but the difference s now marginal.

Though I didn’t vote at the last general election, and I certainly didn’t endorse any party, I was vehemently opposed to Labour and concentrated my fire on them. Now, though, the Tories aren’t even owed that. They got themselves elected on a false prospectus. I can’t say exactly what it was that Tories did vote for but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an eco agenda devised by Allegra Stratton and the court prostitute. It’s open season on Boris Johnson. If he’s weak on sleaze and the Tories are enriching themselves while the country implodes then he can have both barrels.

From here it doesn’t get any easier for the Tories. Inflation is creeping up while all the same structural problems that existed before Brexit and Covid still exist. Though Brexit soothsayers are still calling a Brexit a macroeconomic non-event, the ONS is three months behind with its trade figures, so we don’t even have the first six-months of the year (which would only be five months post-Brexit). Any figures are going to be complicated by the Covid effect, and a complex of other factors which will take time to unravel and for a clear trend to emerge. But we can reasonably assume that the metrics aren’t going to look very good in the near future. It could soon be the case that Boris Johnson is popular with no one.

Though Covid has been a major distraction since the Tories came to power, there are still plenty of things it could have been doing with an eighty seat majority, but beyond Brexit, it’s hard to bring to mind a single thing the Tories have accomplished with it. There are any number of lessons that could have been learned from Brexit and many opportunities to rethink how we do things, but instead the Tories are accelerating some of the worst aspects of EU policy and lack the talent or imagination to do anything with the powers we reclaimed.

Though Labour is unlikely to shape up between now and the next election, Johnson has bigger problems. The Tories took power with borrowed votes. Voters who could just as easily stay at home or drift back to Ukip. Meanwhile the Lib Dems can eat away at the Blue wall in the Home Counties. I’ve seen estimates he stands to lose at least nineteen seats, but there’s a way to go yet and it it could turn out to be substantially more. By then Johnson could even have achieved Theresa May levels of unpopularity.

The left often insist that voters were duped by Boris Johnson. They might be right – though for the wrong reasons. Johnson’s flaws were a known quantity but all the same, it did look like we were finally getting a right wing government. That didn’t even last a year. Johnson is a becoming a fat Tony Blair but without the political nous. Even when Blair was hated his core vote was still getting something they wanted out of him, but the people who put Johnson where he is get nothing. The only way this government listens is of you get your chequebook out and only if you’ve got the £250,000 to slosh around.

The last two Tory leadership contests exposed the Tory party as a rudderless empty husk and the of the reason Johnson filled the void is because there was no obvious alternative. When he is inevitably forced out, if not by the party then by his financial circumstances, then that becomes a problem once more. Rishi Sunak has been groomed for the role but he comes over as Ed Miliband in a sharper suit. He might have been an ideal 2010 prime minister, but he has no pedigree. He’s a complete nobody. Meanwhile the darlings of the Brexit right have since exposed themselves as inept and self-serving. The next election could be a landslide for the apathy party.

By the next election Britain will have more problems than it knows how to handle on top of those it already had, with a broken political system and shattered political parties that represent nobody. Whatever happens, whoever has the power won’t deserve it, and won’t have the backing of the country. From there we’re in a downward spiral toward a collapse of politics. And at this point, that might not be such a bad thing.