Honesty, integrity lost

Re: “Hold Brexit con artists to account”, (Opinion, June 19).

The senior judiciary in the UK often interprets the law in a way that favours the establishment. In the case referred to in the article the plaintiff’s suit failed on the somewhat bizarre grounds that the deception practised by Boris Johnson was public, not clandestine.

In a similar court case, plaintiffs argued that the clear breach of electoral rules on funding invalidated the referendum.

The government’s defence that the referendum had no binding force and therefore was not subject to the same rules as an election was accepted by the court, even though Theresa May has spent over two years insisting that she was duty-bound to deliver Brexit.

While there is a distinction to be drawn between a legal obligation and a moral one (thus absolving the prime minister of the charge of doublethink) these two cases leave one with a sense that few in the establishment are prepared to stand up for honesty and integrity in public life.

Boris Johnson is the UK’s equivalent of Donald Trump. He’s an incorrigible liar and narcissist who holds the lower orders in contempt and is interested in only himself and his ambition to be PM. He has no command of detail as we saw in his abysmal performance as foreign secretary, and he constantly flounders and waffles when challenged.

His adulators might fawn at his feet but where are the qualities needed to renegotiate with Brussels and rescue the UK from a crisis? Churchill offered nothing but “blood, sweat and tears”; all we get from Boris Johnson is a somewhat different bodily fluid. ANDREW STEWART