Johnson’s creating a great stink of sleaze

In 1858 the Thames was little more than a massive open sewer, and the stench from it was so bad that business in the Houses of Parliament was curtailed.

Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was forced to hurriedly leave a Committee Meeting holding a handkerchief to his nose.

The work of Joseph Bazalgette and other Victorian civil engineers built new sewers which carried away the raw sewage, preventing outbreaks of disease and a recurrence of the Great Stink.

Then our present government forced through new regulations that would have allowed water companies to dump raw sewage into our rivers!

The unexpectedly huge backlash against this environmental vandalism forced the government to do a U-turn on the dumping of raw sewage.

Now comes the Great Stink of sleaze! This latest episode brought universal condemnation yet again on our corrupt prime minister.

He had flown by private jet back from the COP26 Conference Climate Conference, to a self indulgent dinner of pheasant and claret with his cronies in the private Garrick Club.

At that dinner the Johnson cronies appeared to have hatched the scheme to stop the censure and suspension of a Tory MP guilty of blatant misuse of his position to lobby for companies which paid him very large sums of money on top of his MP’S salary.

Subsequently, Boris Johnson demanded a three-line whip of all Tory MPS to ensure a majority in Parliament for the plan. Absentees and Tory rebels meant a slim Tory majority of 18.

The result was yet another huge backlash which derailed Johnson’s manipulations, starkly revealing his sheer inexperience of Parliament and how woefully out of touch this former Old Etonian was. His journalism experience enables him to spout optimistically, but unfortunately he has little understanding of the real world of politics and is content to encourage corruption and sleaze. The growing great stink of sleaze has massively reduced the Tories’ lead in opinion polls. And now his own actions face scrutiny as the sleaze spreads.

Pete Milory Trowbridge