Ambition is still burning beneath Boris’ buffoonery
IN THE week that the Chief of the Defence staff was rolled out to warn about the threat to Britain’s security from foreign actors, the most clear and present danger to the country and Theresa May emerged from the Foreign Office.
The headline-addicted Boris Johnson has refocused his sights on Downing Street, as if for a second in his life he had ever erred from that target.
First, there was the bizarre appeal for a bridge to be built across the English Channel, which succeeded for days in tying down pages of news coverage and the minds of the best engineers on whether such a preposterous idea was practical.
As Johnson upstaged President Macron and the Bayeux Tapestry with one quip, few pointed out there already was a bridge to continental Europe.
It’s called the European Union – and you broke it, Boris.
But audacious is as much of a byword for Johnson as buffoon – which is simply an act, though one he finds impossible to drop.
So along with the bridge, he doubled down on his Brexit bus lie, claiming that the £350million a week that would be available for spending on the NHS would actually be far more, were it not that the UK will have to carry on paying for access to the single market after we leave next year.
Impervious to the dull-headed logic of his case, Johnson took out the equivalent of discount settee advertising in the press to let the world know he would be arguing for more NHS spending at Cabinet on Tuesday.
There he was duly reminded of his status as the most loathed person
around the table and his position as
PEOPLE are shocked that Speaker John Bercow charged taxpayers nearly £180 for travelling to appear on Alex Salmond’s chatshow at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.
Salmond’s hit show transferred to the RT channel and this week he sported a pair of tartan trews in the studio for Burns Night.
Who paid for that pair, taxpayers will wonder?
blunderer abroad.
Blundering in the NHS is Jeremy Hunt’s job. The humiliation doesn’t matter to Johnson.
Ultra-populist Johnson is positioning himself to claim the credit for inevitable increases on NHS spending. He may move on his ambition faster than anticipated, amid signs that Brexit may not mean Brexit, or at least the free-wheeling deregulated version he wants.
Moribund by the mediocrity of May, Westminster is in the grip of one of these squalls of gossip that has a coup against the Prime Minister lurking behind each Pugin doorknob.
The chair of the Tory party’s 1922 committee, Graham Brady, is said to be shaken at the prospect of receiving a few more letters that would trigger a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister. You need 15 per cent of the parliamentary party, 48 MPs, to send a letter calling for one and Brady has warned his colleagues to conserve ink.
Somewhere between the Brexit trade talks lull and England’s May council elections, already written down as a Tory disaster, could be the tipping point.
Though hated by the parliamentary party, Johnson is electoral catnip – one of the few politicians people will cross the road to have a selfie taken with. A whirlpool force is pulling him to No10.
Under May the Tories are adrift. Fitzgerald’s lines might have been written for the Tory party under her: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Johnson has missed the tide before and another might not fill for him again. He will feel compelled to row out soon.