No. 221 - Boris on the Ropes

Dear James, 

Surely, even you must be feeling uncomfortable? The last fortnight has been a self-inflicted disaster for your leader and your party.  Yesterday, at PM’s Question Time, Boris was castigated not just by the Opposition but also by the Speaker of the House. When Boris refused to offer an apology for the mess he’s made and then questionned Starmer’s own second job, the Speaker pointed out that Question Time is meant to be Questions to the PM, not by the PM. ‘Sit down!’ he shouted at the Prime Minister. ‘In this House I’m in charge!” Many will have applauded the Speaker. It’s the only way to deal with a man whose endless avalanche of verbiage cries out that it’ s one rule for them, another for me. 

PMQs was followed after lunch by a grilling before The House Liaison Committee. Boris accepted that he’d made a mistake last week in forcing a vote on the Paterson case but again refused to apologize. And last night he appeared before the 1922 Committee of backbench Tories. Although he received the usual tribal drumming of your clan James and admitted to ‘crashing the car on an open road’, apology was nowhere to be seen. One of his MPs reported that he ‘looked and sounded weak’.

Weak? ‘Feeble’, ‘confused’, ‘battered’ would make better descriptions. A man with no convictions, no thought out agenda, whose decision making is still run by the ageing caucus of the ERG, lives in a comic book world full of derdoing heroes living in a world that ended a century ago. Only the likes of David Davis, Bernard Jenkins and Iain Duncan-Smith gird our PM’s inadequate loins. On the day before the disastrous vote he dined at the Garrick Club with some of these ancient Brexiteers. They, it seems, swung him to save Paterson, one of their own. The rest is history.

Yesterday, amongst the debris of that infamous vote, Boris’s Commons performance was again empty of credibility. There were the usual noisy swaggering threats but that’s all. The Churchillian gravitas was absent. His hands flailed like the sails of Don Quixote’s windmill suddenly ungeared to produce nothing but empty air. Even his histrionic turning to the Speaker or back to his loyal MPs were over rehearsed, empty gestures. You can tell when Boris is not connecting by the looks on his colleagues’ faces. Sunak hardly dared look up behind his PM. Others sat there bewildered. This was a PM on the ropes.

When Boris is in trouble, he ‘does something with his hair’. After the COP26 Conference last Sunday he appeared before the cameras, his albino locks patted down with not a wisp escaping his normally unruly mop. He was trying to win brownie points on the back of one of the very few successes of one of his Ministers - Aluk Sharma’s impressive efforts on climate change. But Boris the statesman lasted only a day. By yesterday his hair was back to its usual appearance – a haystack infiltrated by a colony of rats.

Last week the Daily Mail announced that Labour was ahead of the Tories by six points. It also found that voters overwhelmingly believe Mr Johnson should apologise for his botched handling of the scandal.  With regard to Geoffrey Cox - he of the fully charged codpiece and ridiculous courtroom histrionics - a majority believe he should resign for earning a million pounds from his second job. Boris is finding out that the need for honesty and transparency is embedded in British culture and his weaving and dodging is seen for what it is. The inability of the entitled to admit wrong doing. The endemic hypocrisy of the public school, patrician politician has been laid bare.

What is it about apology that Boris can’t bring himself to do? Perhaps it’s because he’s a fifty-something, year old teenager, unable to admit wrong doing. No amount of attempted grooming in appearance or word will change him. He’s his own worst enemy. This week his genetic boosterism has once again hit the buffers of reality. Patersongate apart, the eastern branch of the HS2 from Birmingham to Leeds has, to cries of betrayal, been cancelled. Like Maplin Sands airport was cancelled, like the bridge between Scotland and Ireland was binned, like the flower bridge across the Thames failed to bloom. This teenager has failed to grow up. His comic book heroes fail to materialise in real life. Instead we have a caricature of a PM and an omnishambles of a government. 

Sorry to be so negative James but for goodness sake, find someone to put the man out of his misery!

BH –Your Concerned Constituent

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