Honest Boris Again, Really?

The radio this morning was full of the most bizarre proposal. Amid all the usual gossip about which of the Tory tribe would take up the mantle of Country Breaker In Chief there was a suggestion it could be one that nobody sane would ever imagine. One demonstrably the least appropriate for high office. One who has shown himself utterly unable to achieve anything other than ridiculing his country. None other than The Ripe Dishonourable Honest Boris the Most Corrupt and Incompetent. There were a number of Tory MPs actively proposing this lunacy. And there were pundits claiming it has wide support in Tory ranks.

Now let’s think about this. 358 Conservative MPs must choose from among themselves their party leader and thus Prime Minister of a G7 country, nuclear power and permanent UN Security Council member. They recently chucked out Johnson because he’s an utterly incompetent lying toad; he made the UK a laughing-stock on the world stage. After this they got rid of Truss because unbelievably she proved more incompetent than Johnson; she broke the economy in a week. This would mean the remaining pool of 356 potentials believe themselves to be less capable than those two clowns.

Tell me again why they’re in office?

Goodbye No.56, What Was Your Name Again?

Ah yes, Trussed. Today the 56th and all-time shortest serving UK Prime Minister gave up the ghost of office. Although in the job 44 days, as The Economist pointed out – when you subtract the ten days of country-on-hold for national mourning she was only in power for 7 before her administration imploded. The shelf-life of a lettuce. Not a very fair metaphor. Lettuces are good for you.

She breaks a couple of records.

  • Shortest serving UK Prime Minister ever. This is not much of an achievement. Anyone can take a job and quit or get fired. The previous holder, George Canning lasted four months in 1827, and at least had the excuse of dying in office.
  • The only known PM more incompetent than Boris Johnson. This is to be proud of. It takes rare effort to screw up so much so fast.

What comes next? This Scotsman believes passionately in democracy and the rule of law. It is essential the Conservative and Unionist Parliamentary Party and members have a considered and thorough choice, and vote on it. That’ll give us another two and a half months they can’t do any damage in.

Truss Approval

It might seem odd, but in a way I have to commend Liz Truss’s speed and efficiency.

We’ve had three years of Boris Johnson drunken behind the wheel, careening about the road, mounting the kerb and central reservations in turn. A swig of the bottle, a laugh and a swerve; little dents and lost wing mirrors just part of the fun. “Sorreee… Shouldn’t have been cycling there you know!”

Liz Truss sat in, shouted about professional driving, put it in gear, and smashed straight into the wall.

Happy New Prime Minister

Much to my displeasure someone subjected me to a very tedious extended BBC news commentary on the weather and London traffic today. There were endless discussions on the likelihood of the rain stopping, the dangers of rain to television equipment, and aerial views of some cars wending their way through West End traffic.

It seems a new Prime Minister spoke for a few minutes at the end, but I’d long hidden in the other end of the flat. Eventually another member of this politically-engaged family found me, and with that clarity of youth summarised our new PM’s public speaking capabilities and indeed content. With a frown said…

“Daddy, Liz Truss sounded exactly like our speeches for election to pupil-council.
But we’re nine!”

De-Levelling Down Liz

I’ve held my tongue so far on the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas spectacle of the Conservative Leadership selection; think bags of truth-altering drugs and disjoint snarling faces. Ralph Steadman could paint it.

There’s a guy who made a fortune in the finance business and a woman on a PR trip. The guy wasn’t much of a chancellor, imagination and strategic vision were in short supply, but there is evidence he can count. After the country spent a fortune on the pandemic he put tax up to pay for it. The woman seems to think numbers are things you pick out of the air. But the Torylectorate who will pick our next head of government don’t like taxes (or logic it seems). She’s the odds-on favourite.

The (former Saint) Rishi has been excommunicated because he put taxes up (although he had to), and was allegedly disloyal to his former boss Honest Boris Johnson. Now it always looked to me that by being a PM’s slightly sensible and competent right-hand man he gave the otherwise chaotic administration a thin veneer of stability and respectability. Sticking with him throughout his shambles counted as the biggest and longest endorsement Johnson could get. But maybe I’ve been taking the wrong drugs.

Lookatme Truss is another Johnson. She’s trying to play a Thatcher character, rather than Blackadder III Prince Regent, but behind it is just ambition.

Marketing herself as the Change candidate, Truss is actually the continuity one on international relations as she proposes to keep offending everyone. Her economic plans are… interesting, but no great change from Conservative orthodoxy. If Johnson – who thought money grew on trees – is considered an aberration, then Truss is just more of the previous on steroids. This is interesting as it displays an utter inability/refusal to learn.

In 2010 Osborne and Cameron introduced their Austerity Programme, which meant radically cutting back public services. The results of this were manifold, but never good: public dissatisfaction which led to Brexit and support for Scottish secession; an overstretched health service which proved woefully unprepared for a pandemic; a struggling education system failing to deliver a skilled workforce. The effects linger.

For example…
We now have the second lowest per capita health spending in the G7 and – funnily enough – the longest queues in fifteen years. The number on waiting lists has been rising steadily since about 2012. Whether there’d been a pandemic or not we don’t provide the resources to treat all that need it. And then there was Covid: all UK nations’ excess deaths beat our comparable neighbours quite comfortably (Lancet figures here).

According to an Institute for Fiscal Studies study in real terms education spending in 2024 will remain 3% below 2010. This is shocking.

Lookatme Truss’s sales pitch is cutting taxes. Eh? How do you pay for the missing public services? There is a valid argument that less tax means more for business to invest, which leads to economic growth. But it has to be researched, considered and targeted. Truss is to targeting as a H-bomb is to marksmanship. (And Thatcher’s principle was to balance the books first.)

And then, and then…
And then this morning I thought Monty Python had taken over the news. Truss was proposing to save money by paying less to public servants in poor parts of the country. She expects this to save £8.8bn (I estimate about 3% of the current wage bill).

So, what she is saying is that the Levelling Up policy (making poorer places do better) will be revoked. Future government policy will be to:

  • Cut wages. Is the so-called Cost of Living Crisis over now?
  • Actively discriminate against people from less successful parts of the country by lowering incomes. The state can be a major employer in some places, and thus dictates the base wage
  • Encourage migration to successful ones. If you were offered the same job at £X here or £X+10% in the Big Smoke which would you pick?
  • Refute all previous Conservative orthodoxy on State is Bad, Market Forces are Good. Such a strong and immediate lever on society and economics in the hands of a Parliamentary Committee would be a Jeremy Corbyn fantasy

Interesting.

[03/08/2022 update]
Truss denied ever saying such a heinous thing yesterday. Her proposal had been “wilfully misrepresented” (although commentators had been quoting the figures from her press release).

This is a great example of democracy and free press in action. Policy gets reviewed because expert economists, lawyers and social scientists observe in advance. Because there’s clearly none of those advising Truss.

Dovermergency

The Port of Dover today declared a “critical incident”. A shortage of French passport police caused six-hour queues and tailbacks through Dover and up the motorways.

The government blames France. Lookatme Truss, UK Foreign Secretary, is concentrating on vowel adjectives: “appalling”, “awful”, “entirely avoidable and is unacceptable”.

This is the same government that caused the Brexit that required the passport control.

Goodbye Boris, We’ll Miss You

Whatever my feelings on the man, I thoroughly enjoyed the three and a half hour radio comedy this morning of ministers popping up and dropping out. With a tally of about thirty ministerial resignations the denouement finally came and the most self-serving deceitful and incompetent UK Prime Minister of all time quit.

His replacements are now lining themselves up. If you’re a member of the Conservative Party there are a couple of things to remember here (apart from the obvious Don’t let anyone know if you’re in my country). Sadly, in finding his replacement the issues are still Honest Boris Johnson.

First, almost all the possible replacements will be coming from the Cabinet or senior Government roles. It makes sense that the most competent should have reached the highest places. But the lying and stupidity that brought him down in the end wasn’t news. He has a record. Johnson has been lying through his teeth for as long as he’s been a journalist and public figure – i.e. all his professional life. He’s always had a reputation as deceitful and untrustworthy in political circles. And he’s been making a hash of running operations for as long. Just look at his stint as Foreign Secretary if you need a reference from high office. Anyone who chose to work for the lying charlatan inherently endorsed his administration, and should thus be excluded from the running. No such person is fit to run the country.

It’s a shame that Johnson got the long knives out and culled the Tory competent and experienced when he took office. He didn’t want internal opponents. It’s funny how the Venn-diagrams of Competent and Anti-Johnson had just one circle. The shame is that this leaves the pool of Next UK Leaders to be a ragbag of useless halfwits. Tugendhat and Hunt might be the exceptions here. Wallace seems to do his job OK, and is definitely popular with Tory party members, but fails magnificently on this test.

The second consideration is who will be choosing the UK Prime Minister. Not the UK Citizens or UK residents. It’ll be a tiny sliver of them, a demographically grey/English-weighted sliver. There is a shred of democratic fairness in letting Conservative Party members pick the next Conservative Party leader, but look to history here. Last time round Tory MPs, knowing his character, had not much interest in picking Johnson to lead them. Once he was on the ticket Tory members swept him to the top. This clearly shows these people are not qualified to choose national leaders.

I argued here that Johnson was a great asset to all other political parties, it’s too long to the next election and he should be left to stain the Conservatives for as long as possible. Well, he’s gone now. There’s no chance what’s left of the Tories will pick a responsible, open-minded progressive we’d be proud to have leading us. Probably the best we can hope for is they find someone fairly useless (not a big ask), who’ll fuel internecine Tory divisions, but hopefully not embarrass the UK as much on the world stage as the previous three have.

Roll on the next election.

Pincher By Nature

I’m not a fan of farce. I can savour Oscar Wilde, but not too regularly. Carry On films I run a mile from. This week’s Johnson/Pincher palaver is definitely in the latter camp. Somehow however, I’ve been addicted to every new drip of nonsense in the Carry On Chris and Boris saga. It’s a watching-the-car-crash thing.

Chris Pincher is a Conservative politician with a penchant for feeling-up men. Nothing strange there. Apparently his reputation’s been around long enough for Honest Boris to state “Pincher by name, pincher by nature”. There have been complaints about him in the past, but our illustrious PM ignored them and appointed Pincher to the Chief Whip’s office: making a known groper deputy party policeman. How Carry-On. Pincher got bevvied and let his hands wander far enough to end his career last week.

End of story? You’d think so. Even the crass stupidity of his whip appointment could have been put to bed (so to speak) with a bit of honesty and apology.

The Downing Street response has been to keep drip-feeding transparent lies. Gently blowing on the kindling. As each lie has been found out they’ve floundered with a damper tissue-story and someone more authoritative has stepped forward to refute it.

Now, that Honest Boris and his cronies lie automatically is no news. It’s a Dog-Bites-Man story, and won’t surprise anyone. What is fascinating is around the competence. The political industry is about news management, running stuff comes second or third. If a Prime Minister’s Office with its professional media support can’t come up with a story and run with it for a week, for God’s sake don’t let them run a bath, let alone a country.

Good News! PM Gets A Kicking, But Stays Safe

Regular readers might be surprised to hear this Scotsman expressing genuine relief the Tories held their vote of confidence in Honest Boris a couple of weeks ago and he survived. The survival was by his short and curlies only, a negligible margin that would have caused any but the most shameless leader to resign. Luckily Johnson is The Most Shameless.

Even for a Club of The Regicidal like the Conservative Party his result was awful, but think how much worse it could have been. If the few honourable but impetuous Conservatives had a little tactical patience at the start of the month they might have waited until their party had crashed and burned in yesterday’s two by-elections. There’s a good chance Honest Boris would be out on his ear in Tequila-time.

But – I hear you say – don’t you want this loathsome selfish bloated incompetent to be taken out, flailed, and hung from a lamppost? Naturally. Doesn’t everyone with sense? But the important thing is the country. To fix that we need rid of this government, who were a car crash to begin with and have gone steadily downhill ever since. That is more likely when the Conservatives are swimming with Anchor Johnson around their neck.

The problem is this won’t last forever. Under current Conservative party rules they can’t boot him for another year. But they can change the rules, and a year is still before the next general election. The worst possible case is Johnson plus lackeys get chucked in time to make the Tories seem refreshed and rejuvenated for the 2024/5 election. It might be nice to go into the next election with the current administration careering toward disaster, but the thought of three more Johnson years doesn’t help me sleep at night. Maybe somewhere in the middle? Honest Boris in office long enough to leave his lingering stain on the Conservative brand, then booted after a scandal and one of his incompetent lackeys takes over?

Now there’s a challenge: who would do the least harm, but be too pathetic and invisible for anyone to notice the change?

Answers on a postcard please.

[05/07/2022]

I’ve been corrected in this argument by a very experienced Labour figure. Yes, he said, there is a case for leaving Johnson to corrupt the Conservative brand. But he’s corrupting the UK political system too much every day. “It is necessary to get rid of him as soon as possible.”

No Change – Honest Boris Will Waddle On

Our illustrious Prime Minister ‘won’ a vote of confidence in his ability to lead this evening. When only 59% of MPs you lead support you the ‘winning’ is nominal and the confidence insubstantial. What will he do?

My guess is nothing. He likes being PM, even if he’s the only one, and awful at it. An honourable man, on realising the substantial opposition, would do the decent thing and step down. Johnson has no flaws like honour and decency.

He will now be able to achieve nothing because he’ll be balancing opposing factions within his party. This would be a problem if he had policies or ideas. Luckily us, the governed, will notice no change.