Blundering PM must carry can for failures

INCOMPETENCE is panicky brinkmanship, jeopardising more jobs and businesses a year after lying you’d got Brexit done.

Incompetence is upwards of 64,000 virus deaths when below 20,000 was the “good outcome” your chief scientif ic adviser, Patrick Vallance, hoped for.

Incompetence is inflicting a costlier economic hit than any comparable country in the world.

And incompetence is continuing a Brexit fantasy during the worst financial crisis for 300 years.

If prizes were handed out for incompetence, blundering Boris Johnson would sweep the board.

David Cameron was poor, Theresa May awful but Johnson’s by far the greatest liability of a Tory troika wrecking and dividing Britain over the past decade.

Prime Minister for 18 months, the buck stops at the door of the lazy shirker who devoted his life to evading responsibility. Johnson can’t get away with it any more, tripping himself up as he kicks the can down the street.

Because Brexit is his disaster, his deceit. No deal will match the prosperous frictionless trade Britain enjoyed when the best deal was staying in the EU.

No deal will lead to promised sunlit uplands when Brexit benefits were a figment of his dishonest imagination.

And an actual no-deal would crash the car industry, trigger food shortages, threaten medicines, raise shop prices and even capsize fishing when half of catches are exported to Europe. One Brexit- backing Tory Sunday newspaper urging readers to buy a second home to make no-deal Brexit a success for Britain underlined how quitting Europe was never about improving the lives of struggling working people. The gravest danger to Johnson isn’t Brextremists in his party or Nigel Farage accusing him of selling out to Brussels, though they’ll do that if there’s a deal. It’s from Tories who’ll savage him if there isn’t. One senior Tory told me Britain crashing out without a deal would be Johnson’s ultimate failure, saner blue MPs threatening to write letters demanding a leadership challenge. Furious Conservative MPs, he added, were already envisaging a contest between Rishi Sunak, Dominic Raab, Michael Gove and Priti Patel – plus a Liz Truss “waving her knickers in the air” before pulling out from lack of support.

Deal or no-deal, incompetence will be Johnson’s undoing.