anyone but johnson
Boris is the man for the hour! He delivered Brexit, masterminded the vaccination programme and is singlehandedly winning the war for the Ukraine! He gets things done! Notwithstanding my blatant overuse of the abused exclamation mark, this remains the opinion of many a tory voter and even in the eyes of Conservative MPs there’s still a pragmatic case for sticking with what you know. Instead of the corrupt, inept chancer that many recognise, they see a PM that can deliver another election victory and keep them in the position they have perversely grown accustomed to.
Within two years, there will be another general election. This month’s local elections highlighted that it will not be an easy one for the Tory party. Even without spin, it lost seats to Labour and especially the Lib Dems and ceded hard-won ground north of the border. The party showed itself as a ragbag of loose, volatile alliances between minimally-overlapping rival factions, and those rivalries, as we know from the massively-differing strategies, start at the very top.
As wags often have it, the definition of a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, so it was significant that the former health and foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, found it particularly difficult in stating his support for the top-seated incumbent, or even that he considered his party leader to be an honest man, earlier this week. Moreover, he gave us a glimpse of a slightly different style of governance in acknowledging the scale of the task his party now faces. Mr Hunt explicitly drew a direct connection between cuts in public spending and both the tragedies this lead to and the legal actions it now faces.
And yet I will concede that,whilst the evidence is strong that voters are making the break from this administration, it is obvious they are not yet fully sold on the alternative. It remains pertinent that governments lose elections, rather than oppositions winning them. However this is a two-stage process: first the electorate moves away from the incumbent, and then it searches out the alternative that most suits. Should our serially-lying, #10-squatting charlatan remain in situ until the next general election, a message will go forth to all that seek to succeed him: that corruption and dishonesty is no longer cause for either disgrace or resignation. For the Tories to resist his removal and to continue to defend the indefensible is to invite their democratic pummelling sometime very soon.
