PM out of time
STANDING solemnly in the Cabinet Room, the Prime Minister bowed his head and observed a minute’s silence as a photographer captured the moment.
It was 11am on Monday, and a shocked nation stopped to remember the victims of that terrible Plymouth shootings. Or was it?
The clock on the mantelpiece certainly said so but the hands of the watch on Boris Johnson’s wrist told another story.
They showed the time as 11.14am, and the PM’S critics leapt on the anomaly.
Snooze
Bumbling Boris had missed the boat again, so the disrespectful scoundrel must have turned back the clock to save face. They were wrong. Electronic data proved the photo was taken at 11.01am and No 10 officials smugly explained that the PM always keeps his watch running fast. So there.
Hang on a minute…
Are we supposed to welcome the fact that the man who runs the country doesn’t know what time of day it is?
That he can’t get through the day without kidding himself he’s on course, or that he always needs a bit of wiggle room? Well, he certainly got his timings all wrong on Kabul, didn’t he?
He wasn’t expecting the Taliban quite so soon.
Like US President Joe Biden, Mr
Johnson was apparently oblivious to the Doomsday Clock ticking in Afghanistan.
Or he pressed snooze once too often and missed the alarm.
Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was enjoying a little time out at a five-star resort on the island of Crete.
And he could not be arsed to get off his sun lounger for half an hour to make a crucial phone call that could have saved lives. Their failures mean the sacrifices of two decades have been for nothing and the clocks in Afghanistan have been rewound to 2001. But its women and girls have been plunged straight back into the dark ages.
Our tardy Prime Minister should be hanging his head in shame.
This is a man who thinks of himself as the new Winston Churchill – the hero who led this nation at a time of desperate danger for the free world.
“Cometh the hour, cometh the man” they said of the great Prime Minister.
But Boris Johnson has been asleep at the watch.and it’s time for him to go.