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.