Here comes yet another poll of the Tory faithful, this one commissioned by Lady McAlpine, an incurable Boris Johnson addict. More than half of the 13,534 Conservative voters questioned have lost faith in their party, but would vote for Johnson if he came back and took charge. This confirms previous findings. A Savanta poll last May showed that for 64 per cent of Tories he was a jolly good leader. Only 19 per cent expressed disapproval.
Rishi Sunak must be trembling. We should be too.
First, a short digression. During the volatile 2019 leadership contest following Theresa May’s resignation, I wrote a column in which I vowed to leave the country if Johnson – manifestly disreputable and unreliable – won. I never thought it could happen. It did. Those words have been thrown back at me, every day, on social media by those who have long hated me and everything I stand for. It was a stupid, stupid, stupid, gratuitous, vainglorious statement. I should never have written it.
However, my misgivings about this man have only thickened and hardened over the passing years. The young Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson wanted to be “world king”. The middle-aged narcissist whose record stained the political history of this nation is still extravagantly ambitious.
When he reluctantly resigned after the Privileges Committee found he had fibbed to MPs about Covid lockdown parties, he said: “It is very sad to be leaving parliament – at least for now.”
To his loyalists, commoners as well as MPs and media bosses, political influencers and rich donors, he is Midas, a politician with the golden touch.
Did they watch Breathtaking on ITV this week? It’s a drama about the NHS in the Covid years based on a candid memoir by Dr Rachel Clarke.
Healthcare workers from top to bottom went through unimaginable terrors, many of those the result of carelessness and an absence of serious purpose in Johnson’s cabinet. Or, as Clarke puts it: “The unforgivable human consequence of lack of candour from a Government with the public.”
Nurses made protective gear from binbags, doctors used masks that didn’t fit, mixed messages confused the citizenry. Doctors and nurses died. Many still suffer from long Covid.
Never forget those parties in Downing Street and Chequers, the chillaxed Boris deciding older lives could be wasted, the words which fell out of the mouth of the compulsive truth twister, the way he charmed, then betrayed lower-middle class, working-class and workless Britons.
The Privileges Committee investigating Partygate said Johnson made “repeated contempts”, intimidated members and undermined the legitimacy of parliament and our democratic institutions. In response, Trump-lite grossly denigrated the chair, claimed he had been tried by a “kangaroo court”, and sinisterly insinuated he wasn’t done yet.
David Garfinkel, spokesman for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, believes the remorseless Johnson, “lied to our faces when he told us that he’d done ‘all he could’ to protect our loved ones. He lied again when he said the rules hadn’t been broken in No 10, and he’s lied ever since when he’s denied it again and again…. he should never be allowed to stand for any form of public office again.”
As Eliot Wilson, formerly a House of Commons clerk, wrote in these pages last June, “lying is in his personal and professional DNA.” He misrepresented the EU when he was a columnist and later became the deceitful poster boy for Brexit. The previously cosmopolitan, liberal, former London Mayor turned into a populist in one easy jump. No one asked him who he really was. I doubt he knows that himself.
The show-off classicist will know the Latin saying, “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” – false in one thing, false in everything. He is an embodiment of that maxim. Think of him as a political scammer, who always escapes accountability and reaps rich rewards.
Yet, like cultists following a fake and nasty guru, Boris fans carry on believing in him and won’t heed those who know the real man behind the many masks.
Sonia Purnell, his former colleague and author of the biography Just Boris, tweeted this last summer: “To work with him his to encounter something dark and sinister and totally without soul.” Ex Tory minister and podcaster Rory Stewart has written about Johnson’s masterful use of “the fib, the grand lie, the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie and the bullshit lie”.
A bullshitter without a soul. Would you really vote for him?
Tory voters want Boris Johnson back. Sorry, but never again
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1
21.02.2024
Here comes yet another poll of the Tory faithful, this one commissioned by Lady McAlpine, an incurable Boris Johnson addict. More than half of the 13,534 Conservative voters questioned have lost faith in their party, but would vote for Johnson if he came back and took charge. This confirms previous findings. A Savanta poll last May showed that for 64 per cent of Tories he was a jolly good leader. Only 19 per cent expressed disapproval.
Rishi Sunak must be trembling. We should be too.
First, a short digression. During the volatile 2019 leadership contest following Theresa May’s resignation, I wrote a column in which I vowed to leave the country if Johnson – manifestly disreputable and unreliable – won. I never thought it could happen. It did. Those words have been thrown back at me, every day, on social media by those who have long hated me and everything I stand for. It was a stupid, stupid, stupid, gratuitous, vainglorious statement. I should never have written it.
However, my misgivings about this man have only thickened and hardened over the passing years. The young Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson wanted to be........
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