Liberal BoJo must be left in past
PBORIS Johnson may have been ousted as PM, but in many respects he defies political gravity more than anyone I’ve seen – with the possible exception of John Prescott.
Just as only Prescott could have survived punching a voter as Deputy Prime Minister in a general election campaign – with Tony Blair simply saying “John is John” – Boris still commands the blind loyalty of supposed right-wing Thatcherite Conservatives, despite being the most left-wing premier since the days of HaroldWilson.
I’ve no idea how he does it, but it’s a great skill and can only be admired.
Of course Boris won a big majority in the last election – and I should make clear I don’t think anyone else would have won that by the same margin as he did – but Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit were much bigger factors in that victory.
I voted for Boris to be party leader but I’m afraid he completely squandered that 80-seat majority, and pursued an agenda more aligned to a socialist than a Conservative.
Under him, we had lockdowns during the pandemic which totally undermined the principle of individual freedom and responsibility.
Conservatives believe that people make better decisions than the state for themselves, their families and their communities, but Boris decided the state knew best, setting ridiculous and arbitrary restrictions, with no scientific basis, such as the rule of six and 10pm curfews.
But the triumph of the nanny state under Boris didn’t start and end with lockdowns. He also decided the Government should impose a ban in supermarkets on offers such as buy-one-get-one-free on products the state decided were “unhealthy”.
Under him, the Government spent money as if it was going out of fashion; the Conservative principle of living within your means went out of the window, despite him presiding over the highest burden of taxation in our history in a vain bid to keep up with his vast public spending.
With Brexit, not only did Boris fail to make any headway with repealing bureaucratic EU laws, in his final year in charge legal net immigration was more than 500,000 – the highest level in recent history.
Despite all this, Boris is still lauded – often by those who should know better – as some kind of right-wing Thatcherite, removed from office by left-wingers. How does he manage to get otherwise rational people to take such leave of their senses?
From what some say, you might be forgiven for thinking all of the country’s problems had happened since Rishi Sunak became PM.The fact is Sunak inherited all of these problems and is trying to fix them.
The Boris and Liz Truss regimes trashed the Conservative brand to such an extent that when Sunak took over, the Party was north of 30 per cent behind Labour in the polls. Remarkably, that deficit’s been pretty much halved in just six months – and yet some with selective amnesia still blame Sunak for our losses in the recent local elections.
Despite the opinion poll deficit, more voters think Rishi would be a better PM than Keir Starmer. In short, the polls show Sunak is more popular than the Conservative brand – an inconvenient fact for the Boris cult, but a fact nonetheless.
I voted for Boris, hoping he would prove to be a true Conservative. But he governed as the liberal, leftleaning metropolitan he’s probably always been. I admit I was wrong about him, and it’s time remaining members of the Boris cult did too.
All Conservatives should get behind Sunak, the most able PM we’ve had since Margaret Thatcher. Boris will not be PM again, so let’s end this self-indulgent pretence now.
Finally, while we can lament Boris’s record, we should admire his ability to get people to make excuses for him and pretend he’s something he isn’t.
It is a wonderful skill, but that doesn’t make him a good Prime Minister. He wasn’t, and history will not be kind.