Boris Johnson is an insult to the nation. His plotting led to this horror show
AStephen King film set to the Benny Hill theme tune: that’s Britain’s current political plight. It feels like a horror show without end yet it is simultaneously preposterous and absurd. For the last two years, Britain has been held hostage by the Tories’ disastrous scheming, plotting and manoeuvring: the EU referendum campaign, the chaotic aftermath, the snap general election. Boris Johnson – and goodness knows what we all did in a past life to deserve him – opportunistically backed Brexit as a career move. Despite his demonstrable buffoonery, he is astute enough to realise that Tory Brexit is spiralling into disaster. He risks going down in the history books as one of the principal architects of a national catastrophe. So now he plots and schemes, helping to plunge an already politically crippled Tory administration into further turmoil as Britain navigates through its postwar greatest crisis.
As Ken Clarke notes, in normal times Johnson would have been sacked. But these are not normal times, because the prime minister has no authority and heads a zombie administration united only by panic at the prospect of a Corbynled Labour government. It is speculated that Johnson wishes to be sacked, so then he can be a martyr rather than a deserter who can claim that Brexit went wrong because of May’s wrongheadedness, rather than by design. The Tory Brexiteers have already devised their alibis, the traditional “stab-in-theback” myth of rightwing populists and nationalists, that betrayal and sabotage by opponents – “enemies of the people”, if you will – will be responsible for the process unravelling. The key Brexit strategist Dominic Cummings attempts to absolve himself of blame, too, claiming a premature triggering of Article 50 was like “putting a gun in mouth and kaboom” and the government was being “led like lambs to slaughter”.
Tory lies and disastrous Tory scheming: that’s what has driven Britain into chaos. The only time the “£350m a week extra for the NHS” pledge should ever leave a Brexiteer’s lips is when they are grovelling for forgiveness. They knew the figure was a lie, a con, a deceit, a travesty, given Britain’s rebate, and given a portion of the money would still be spent on essential projects. According to Cummings, Britain would probably not have voted for Brexit without that figure. And still Johnson shamelessly parades this falsehood around, leading to a humiliating slapdown by the UK Statistics Authority. Indeed, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Brexit has led to a downgrading of the public finances by about £300m a week. Johnson is an insult to our collective intelligence, and his continued presence as foreign secretary is an insult to the nation.
It is worth noting that the Tory acrimony is erupting so swiftly. That’s before Brexit negotiations really do start floundering. What then? The Tories know they are in a hole, but they are so delusional they are addicted to digging. They know that younger people are abandoning them, so Boris Johnson denounces them for having “split allegiances”, while the party toys with making party leader a caricature from the 18th century who opposes equal marriage and abortion in all cases, including for rape and incest.
Tory plotting and scheming landed us in this mess. It stands to reason that more of it will not wrest the country from the mire. As their panic increases, so will the plots and the schemes. This is a party that has thrown one of the major western powers into turmoil because of repeated misjudged attempts at gaining partisan advantage. The longer this party is allowed to pretend to govern, the worse the country’s plight will be.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist