Dear James,

I’m beginning to feel sorry for Boris. First he takes on the Mayor of Manchester. Then he attacks the Mayor of London on totally false grounds. Then he gets his party to vote against Marcus Rashford’s call for the extension of free school meals until next spring. Add to all this his divide and rule tactics and the division of our nation into different levels of danger and support and, hey presto, without even trying, Boris has managed to alienate at least half the population just by being Boris! It seems he has lost whatever plot he ever had but especially the one about ‘levelling up Britain’. And you James, in your unwavering and cringing support for him, are helping him every step of the way.

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Dear James,

Can you hear it? The sound of rivets popping. The sound of a keel twisting. The crack of metal stringers breaking, of spars rupturing. It started almost a year ago in Northern Ireland. Ever since, the creaking and straining have become ever more prominent, ever more persistent. Bit by bit, James, the ship of state is beginning to crack up. The United Kingdom has never been under such strain from within and without and much of it is to do with your party, its ideology and the lack of coherent, inspiring, leadership.

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Dear James,

He was warned. Three weeks ago, at a meeting on 21 September, SAGE, the government advisory council, told Boris that he should have a short circuit lockdown to stop the dramatic rise in the infection rate since the beginning of September. Boris decided to go against his SAGE advisers. Instead he introduced a 3-tiered system that put different areas into bad, very bad and very, very bad categories. Yesterday the latest infection rate was 17,234. Total Excess Deaths stood at over 54,000. Yesterday Sir Kier Starmer called Boris's bluff, saying that local restrictions were not working and accusing him of ignoring the science. He called for a ‘circuit breaker’. At least 60% of the public are with him. Starmer looked like the leader we do not have.

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Dear James,

Self-esteem is a wonderful thing. Of course, for reasons of genetics, psychology or social conditioning, not everyone has it. I’m lucky. I have a not inconsiderable store of self-respect although esteem might be pushing it a bit far. However, compared with Boris Johnson, I am a pauper. Boris is in a league of his own. He was born into the stuff and it seems that nothing can drag him from his bounteous hoard. His irrepressible smirk says it all. He was born to be admired and trusted. Even when he misspeaks or misgoverns, in his own world, Boris can do no wrong.

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Dear James,

The ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about life and politics. They had seen it all before. They called it Nemesis, the retribution of the gods. It is what Mr Trump is facing today as he lies in his hospital bed. Nature, in the form of covid-19, has bitten back. America has another layer of chaos to add to its current nightmare.

Nemesis follows hubris as sure as night follows day.

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Dear James,

On Tuesday, cocooned within all the televisual trappings of power that his minders could muster, Boris came before us all to announce new measures to stop the current resurgence of Covid-19 in its tracks. He wanted to talk to us directly about “the choices that we face - none of them easy - and why we must take action now.” The faux Churchillian tone and the smirk free visage suggested that here was a man set on real action, a man taking charge at last in a moment of extreme national crisis. His hands came out over the mahogany desk in breathless exhortation. His sentences spluttered out in short exhalations seemingly fuelled by small energy cells exploding according to some predetermined time fuse closely programmed into the autocue before him.

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Dear James,

Last weekend I was in Lancashire visiting my son who is a large animal vet. As it happened he was on call over the weekend and, often when up there, I go out with him on his various call outs. Last weekend it was sunny and warm in Lancashire, unusual for that friendly but rain sodden part of our nation. My son has a wonderful life visiting farms full of Lancashire Vikings, blonde women and their grumpy old farmer partners with a smile behind each grump.

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Dear James,

Yesterday Boris stitched up his rebel MPs by agreeing the Neill Amendment to the Internal Market Bill which allows the government to unilaterally abrogate key clauses in the UK ‘divorce agreement’ of last January. However, the fact that MPs will now be able to vote on the bill instead of just Ministers does not mean that the threat of breaking the law disappears. It simply spreads complicity to a wider population ie, parliament. So now, even you James will become directly complicit in the threat to break the law.

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Dear James,

Your leader is at it again. Last Wednesday he launched ‘Operation Moonshot’, a £100bn plan for mass coronavirus testing. Ten million people would be tested each day and countless millions of a new type of test, saliva based rather than swab based, ‘simple, quick and scalable’ and delivering ’results within 90 minutes’ would be available across the nation by next Spring. Now, while not wishing to be a Cassandra, haven’t we heard all this before?

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Dear James,

Last December Boris claimed to have pulled off the ultimate diplomatic coup to overcome the impasse preventing Britain withdrawing from the EU without wrecking the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. To avoid a hard border between the North and the South, something very likely to reignite the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the province, he agreed to do something that all previous Prime Ministers had refused to do.

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Dear James,

History and politics are inseparable. Two weeks ago Boris said, “It’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, about our culture and we stopped this general fight against self recrimination and wetness”. Instead, he seems to be saying, we have to believe in ourselves, in the nationalistic nostalgic narrative of ‘Rule Britannia’. The latest furore about the non-singing of that song at the Proms is a case in point. It was a storm in teacup

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Dear James,

How long can this go on? Shock after shock, disaster after disaster, your government crashes on through the undergrowth like a herd of bull elephants intent on the destruction of themselves and any others in their vicinity. The latest rogue elephant in the herd, Mr Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary, suffers from a deficiency of ability, a surplus of self-belief and the protection of Boris’s 87 seat majority in a pacified parliament. But his impact on the people he is supposed to represent is disastrous. And this time his victims are thousands of A level students who have seen their efforts brought asunder by that prime tool of the current government, an algorithm!

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Dear James,

What is it about your government? It blusters along, pretending omniscience, assuring us that they know what they are doing and then, with consistent regularity, crashing into the brick wall of reality. It was on May 20th, that your blusterer-in-chief, Boris Johnson claimed that the NHS Test, Track and Trace System would be ‘world beating’ by June. Today it is mid-August and they have just announced that they are cutting 6,000 of the 23,000 tracers employed because clearly the system needs ‘adjustments’.

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Dear James,

Three weeks ago, Babergh District Council agreed to the building of 64 houses on prime agricultural land in Boxford. At the first meeting in 2019, up to 160 villagers had objected to the plan and many of them had attended the planning meeting in person. So the first time round the plan was refused. The more recent meeting was virtual (on Zoom) and the planning committee seemed removed, confused and at odds with the feelings of the local people of Boxford.

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Dear James,

Boris told us last week that there is a prospect of a “significant return to normality” by Christmas. Oh boy! Where does the man live? From the climate crisis, to the pandemic, to the massive clash of values currently erupting between the West and China, the world has not been in such geo-political confusion since the Second World War. Christmas? Normal service will not be resumed for many years to come.

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Dear James,

Boris Johnson once characterised his policy on cake as “pro having it and pro eating it.” Now it is China’s favourite dish, the dumpling, which he aspires to have and consume. But Boris cannot kick Huawei out of the UK 5G system and simultaneously have China as a major new trading partner

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Dear James,

It hasn’t been a good week for Boris or Trump. Both continued to spin their falsities and both failed dramatically. Today is ‘July 4th’ in the USA and ‘Super Saturday’ in the UK, the day when we ‘return to normal’. Hang on to your hats. Yet again, the world is on the cusp of more change!

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