Sorry, dear readers, but I feel compelled to write again on the malevolent legacy of Boris Johnson and the fans, champions and patrons who still carry him aloft. I wrote a column on these enablers in January. The Covid inquiry usefully reminds us of his carelessness, indifference to victims and public health, and the chaos he presided over.
According to a March 2020 official memo from a meeting with Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, Johnson apparently questioned the wisdom of lockdowns protecting people “who will die anyway”. One of those was my sister Zarina, mentally ill and in a home.
In WhatsApp messages, Johnson’s top civil servant Simon Case fretted that the then prime minister wanted to “let it rip” and expressed concern about his incompetence and the perpetual chaos in Downing Street. Among the shocking examples was a message by Case in which he said Johnson’s rejection of masks in schools was because unions were pressing for them: “At every turn PM backs bullshit ‘no surrender’ ideas from Hancock/Williamson/Shapps and then totally regrets it later.”
During this national emergency, Johnson’s ministers were standing by as fraudulent claims were sucking cash out of the Covid-loan scheme, bypassing established guidelines for government procurement, and leaving much unchecked.
The nation should be engulfed by rage and calling for Johnson to be blackballed. Heck, no. Millions of voters, even now, hold him dear and believe devious plotters brought him down. In his old constituency, Uxbridge, many miss him. Loyalists elsewhere pray for the return of the political sinner.
One taxi driver told me on Monday: “He was a man of the people. They were jealous. That’s why Sunak and other hunting dogs went for him.” For once I was speechless.
These acolytes are like loyal wives who dote on and repeatedly forgive charming but useless husbands. They don’t know any better. But why have knowing, intelligent, rich and powerful people promoted and rewarded the mendacious, bungling narcissist whose journalism was often dishonest and whose political career stained and sullied British democracy?
Michael Gove and other anti-EU politicians used Johnson’s charisma to get the Brexit vote. Sunak, lacking personal appeal, basked in Johnson’s popularity for the longest time. In 2019 he wrote: “Boris Johnson is one of life’s optimists and can help us recapture a sense of excitement and hope about what we Conservatives can do for Britain.”
As Adam Bienkov bluntly asserted in Byline Times: “The story of Boris Johnson’s disgraceful period at the top of British politics is indivisibly intertwined with Sunak’s own. From the moment Sunak publicly endorsed him for prime minister, to his long tenure at the top of a government defined by scandal and dishonesty […] to his refusal to block his resignation honours, Sunak has been complicit in Johnson’s behaviour from beginning to end.”
The mainstream media was complicit, too. On BBC’s Have I Got News for You, years before he became prime minister, Johnson rolled out his rehearsed sloppy persona and endearing jokes, which helped hide his right-wing self. As PM, his cheery visits to hospitals and workplaces also provided great PR. Right-wing newspapers only really turned against Johnson when their readers had had enough.
Let’s not forget the billionaires who have generously stood with this egomaniac. Tory donor Lord Anthony Bamford – whose tax affairs are reportedly being investigated by HMRC – paid for Mr and Mrs Johnson’s wedding party; the Bamford family even gave the couple somewhere to live. Evegeny Lebedev’s Evening Standard, London’s only paper, backed Johnson’s mayoral bids.
Johnson now gets millions of pounds in book advances and for public speeches, pens a lucrative weekly column for the Daily Mail, now has a show on GB News, a TV venture backed by hedge fund multimillionaire Paul Marshall. Their faith in the knave is unfathomable. And, to me, indefensible.
People who knew him well – biographer Sonia Purnell, for example, and ex Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings – warned us over and over about the real Boris Johnson, his true character, fake clownishness, greed for power and ethical deficiencies. But the powerful pro-Johnson lobby saw these detractors off. The resounding 2019 Tory victory convinced them that Johnson was political gold. In truth, he shone bright, but was cheap brass.
Last summer, the perceptive Irish Times journalist Finton O’Toole expressed what many of us have been thinking for a long time: “It is hard to think of a figure at once so fatuous and so consequential, so flippant and yet so profoundly influential… [his] dark genius was to shape Britain in his own image. His roguishness has made it a rogue state.”
We are currently bearing witness to just what this means. As more toxic messages are released by the Covid inquiry, as Dominic Cummings, Case and other top civil servants are questioned, I hope Britons will begin to understand how the populist ex-PM and his backers – including many in the Cabinet today – have almost totally trashed the checks and balances that keep our democracy safe and steady.
They will never have to pay for what they did. And we will never recover.
Boris Johnson will never pay for what he did to this country – and we will never recover
4
50
01.11.2023
Sorry, dear readers, but I feel compelled to write again on the malevolent legacy of Boris Johnson and the fans, champions and patrons who still carry him aloft. I wrote a column on these enablers in January. The Covid inquiry usefully reminds us of his carelessness, indifference to victims and public health, and the chaos he presided over.
According to a March 2020 official memo from a meeting with Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, Johnson apparently questioned the wisdom of lockdowns protecting people “who will die anyway”. One of those was my sister Zarina, mentally ill and in a home.
In WhatsApp messages, Johnson’s top civil servant Simon Case fretted that the then prime minister wanted to “let it rip” and expressed concern about his incompetence and the perpetual chaos in Downing Street. Among the shocking examples was a message by Case in which he said Johnson’s rejection of masks in schools was because unions were pressing for them: “At every turn PM backs bullshit ‘no surrender’ ideas from Hancock/Williamson/Shapps and then totally regrets it later.”
During this national emergency, Johnson’s ministers were standing by as fraudulent claims were sucking cash out of the Covid-loan scheme, bypassing established guidelines for government procurement, and leaving much unchecked.
The........
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