I do admire BoJo – but can’t bear his no-show
Boris Johnson’s secluded holiday cottage on an isolated stretch of the scottish coast could not be more idyllic. Just the spot for a beleaguered pM, his fiancée Carrie and son Wilfred to get away from it all. not bad for walks with Dilyn the dog either.
You cannot begrudge him a holiday, in 2020 of all years. as the former spin doctor to William hague when he was the Leader of the tories, i know this only too well — and it is commendable that Boris chose a staycation in Britain.
i recognise, too, that he has done this country an immense service. he is the man who saved us from social-ism with his sensational election victory last December — imagine Corbyn, abbott and McDonnell in charge today, and shudder.
Yet in recent times he has been found deeply wanting. and nothing better demonstrates this than his invisibility during the unprecedented catastrophe over a-levels, BteCs and GCses.
Why on earth has he not come out and apologised to the kids who worked hard for years for their exam results only to be let down by a system run by his witless education secretary Gavin Williamson?
one day students were told they’d failed, the next that they’d excelled — although their places at their chosen universities or colleges had been taken by others amid the bedlam. a* grades have now been scattered like confetti, throwing eve-rything into disarray and threatening untold consequences in the future.
amid such chaos, such disappoint-ment, lie the broken dreams not just of today’s teenagers, but of their par-ents and their grandparents. three generations of furious potential vot-ers who will have given up on Boris.
any adviser worth their salt should have warned him of the damage his continuing absence is doing to his reputation. politically and strateg-ically it is a disaster, as the Mail’s poll today shows so graphically.
What was Boris — the consummate communicator — thinking, hiding away in scotland when the country yearned for leadership? a couple of tweets was all we got. Who does he think he is, Donald trump?
so many of us are bitterly disappointed in him. he should have been on the airwaves telling us he understood the students’ pain and that of their families; assuring the nation that his heart went out to them; accepting his Government had let them down, that he would put it right.
i imagine he and his coterie think they are immune from the daily buffeting. i imagine they dismiss it as hysteria and froth.
i’ll tell them the truth. the pM’s silence has done nothing but twist the knife in thousands of voters’ hearts — and caused the prime Minister and his Government immense, if not irreparable, damage.