it's a relief that Prime Minster Johnson's impenetrable carapace is at last beginning to crack. I had expected that the Tories would have ditched him by this autumn, but the electorate has been absurdly generous in giving him and his fellow incompetents "slack." Now the odds are that he will be dumped sometime next year, in ample time for the new leader to be bedded in and lauded before he or she calls an election at what is deemed to be the most advantageous time for their own party.
Whereas the Labour Party is still mulling over the awfulness of their invasion of Iraq on the coat-tails of the Americans (along with other errors such as PFI and mugs to keep out immigrants), and we Liberals agonise over how we could possibly have elected leaders who would betray our allegiance to the principles and policies of Beveridge and Keynes, the Tories have no such scruples.
Going forward(s) will be their mantra. That was then, this is now.
Whether the chosen one is a sanitised Sunak (he of the bungled "Eat to help out" campaign or the pointless stamp duty holiday which stoked up the housing market) or Priti Patel and her unacceptable though ineffective wall against migrants regardless of their potential to drown, veils will be drawn over the shambles of the last 12 years - the demonising of the poor, the corruption, Brexit, the shambolic handling of the COVID crisis, the besmirching of our international reputiation, the lies, the trashing of constitutional norms.
Attempts to keep these matters alive will be swallowed up by the compliant press, which will slavishly applaud the wonders of the new and squeaky-clean regime.
It would be churlish and dangerous to hope that Johnson survives to bring further opprobrium on his party, because that would mean, to say the least, further unnecessary deaths.
So the best we can do, along with piling on the pressure for the charlatan to go, is do our best to keep the record alive.
Lest we forget, here's a summary:
- effective reductions
in NHS funding from 2010 onwards so there was insufficient spare capacity when the pandemic struck;
- failure to take action on the results of the Cygnus Exercise of 2016 on how to prepare for a likely pandemic;
- the Brexit referendum purely to protect their party from encroachments by UKIP:
- the hardest possible Brexit;
- illegally proroguing parliament;
- signing the Northern Ireland protocol in order to “get Brexit done” but without, apparently any intention of implementing it (and now blaming the EU for trying to do just that);
- abusing the judges for enforcing the law;
- glad-handing indifference when the first COVID infections appeared;
- lucrative contracts to their mates to provide inadequate and often defective equipment;
- an eye-watering £37bn spent on a “world beating” test and trace system that didn’t work;
- failure to sack the Home Secretary for breaking the ministerial code;
- failure to institute a “circuit breaker" for the October 2010 half term;
- bullying the BBC with threats of cuts in its funding;
- sanctioning Dominic Cummings’s trip to the Northeast to “test his eyes";
- 2020 Christmas lockdown only at the very last minute;
- stuffing the House of Lords with, among others, 15 former Tory Party treasurers, each of whom contributed at least £3m to party funds;
- threatening to break international law;
- at the World Trade Organisation blocking the US proposal that the pharmaceutical companies waive their patent rights on Covid vaccines;
- calling on the rest of the world to abandon coal burning while planning a new coal-mine in Cumbria;
- attempting to protect corrupt MPs making shedloads on the side;
- regaling the CBI with tales of Peppa Pig rather than a plan for economic recovery;
- altering the voting laws to make it more difficult for the less likely to vote Tory to vote at all;
- turning migrants away in the Channel and blaming the French when they drown;
- partygate, the final straw? Or is there more?
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