BLOOD STIRRING BORIS IS STILL THE BEST SHOW IN TOWN
OUR dullard Establishment hates anyone with ‘a vision’. But that is exactly how Boris Johnson described his article which has caused such hyperventilational hand-flapping among Remainers.
‘Here’s my Brexit vision,’ said swashbuckling Boris. And what an upbeat vision it was.
Freedom to run our own business sector without Brussels setting our regulations and taxes. Immigration laws to suit Britain (not Bulgaria or Romania or Berlin’s Frau Merkel).
And the right to say how we spend that weekly £350million – and yes, whatever the BBC says, that IS how much of our cash is currently under the say of boozy Brussels bigwig Jean-Claude Juncker.
Boris diplomatically did not have a go at M Juncker in his article but he hardly needed to. European Commission president Juncker has already achieved ‘cut-through’ on the streets of Britain and he has become a wonderful vote-winner for Brexit. His pompous antics and now naked political ambitions (which were disguised during the referendum campaign but became apparent with his ‘state of the union’ speech last week when he called for ever-greater tax powers for Brussels) have left larger numbers of British voters thinking ‘thank goodness we’re leaving’.
This is one of the things Brussels, the Blairites, pro-EU Tories and the absurd Lib Dems at their conference down in Bournemouth do not acknowledge: British Euroscepticism is now stronger than it was last June. The Remainers’ only hope is in the elite somehow neutering Brexit behind the scenes in parliamentary committees and inside Downing Street. That is what they are trying to do, but thanks to Boris and (though sadly to a lesser extent) his fellow Brexiteer ministers such as David Davis and Liam Fox, it is by no means certain they will succeed.
Westminster’s heebie-jeebies about Boris’s weekend article must puzzle those outside the political bubble – the people of places such as Sunderland and Stoke-on-Trent and Walsall and Wigan who so firmly voted for Brexit.
BORIS said he backed Mrs May and he firmly reiterated what she said in her Lancaster House speech in January. What’s the problem?
True, he touched on education and health policy, areas of government policy beyond his brief, but as holder of one of the great offices of state he has a right to offer his world view on such matters. Boris is Foreign Secretary, and therefore most certainly has a right – a duty – to say what he thinks about the Brexit process. It is very much his business, despite what pro-Remain Home Secretary Amber Rudd said yesterday when she attacked Mr Johnson for ‘backseat driving’.
Then there is the quibble about timing. Scots Tory leader and
Europhile Ruth Davidson – a talented politician who could well be next Tory leader, if only she could swallow Britain’s verdict on Brexit – said Boris should be thinking only of public ‘service’ so soon after the Parsons Green Tube bomb.
Without wishing to diminish the disgracefulness of that terror attack, this seems an overly prissy position. Why the heck should our politics be paralysed by would-be terrorists? Londoners are made of solid stuff. Miss Davidson should not patronise them by suggesting we must all go into black-crepe purdah every time some Isis punk tries it on.
‘Ah,’ continue Boris’s critics, ‘but he should not have spoken out so close to the big speech Mrs May is going to give in Italy on Friday.’ And now, perhaps, we step closer to the nub. Here is petty politics in the raw.
Miss Rudd and Chancellor Philip Hammond and First Secretary Damian Green, all former Remainers and members of the Downing Street court, may have thought they had Theresa May in the bag.
With that Italian speech looming, was the Rudd/Hammond/Green axis prematurely congratulating itself that it had forced the PM to concede important ground to Brussels on how much of a divorce payment we will give the EU?
Can we not imagine Downing Street’s Cabinet Secretary, the egregious Sir Jeremy Heywood, oiling the cogs for Rudd/Hammond/Green? Boris was away in the Caribbean last week, offering solidarity to our dependent territories damaged by Hurricane Irma. What a perfect time for all that Press briefing that Mrs May was preparing to weaken her position on the divorce payment.
Boris, now back in Britain, thinks we should be prepared to tell the EU to get stuffed if need be. His article may certainly make it harder for Remainers to give billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to the EU. Hooray!
For weeks this Foreign Secretary has been effectively silenced on Brexit by the Whitehall machine. The Civil Service’s compromise merchants were appalled by the thought of Boris sticking to the principles on which he and Nigel Farage and pro-Leave Labour politicians won the Referendum. No doubt some of the Cabinet’s former Remainers felt a smidgen of envy that Boris backed the winning side last June.
I have not always been a total Boris fan. His bedroom palavers, his tendency to try to busk through problems and his eye for the main chance are all major drawbacks. But he has a littlerivalled connection with the voters. His ability to discuss politics in a pungent, picaresque way, is something the Hammonds and Greens of this world lack. What anti-democratic bores many Remainers are.
It has to be admitted that since last year’s Leave vote, Brexiteers have been outgunned in the media and Parliament. Did they ill-advisedly think the battle was won? Or was it inevitable that Remainers would resist the will of the majority of the people last June?
THE status-quo brigade continue to hold most of the top positions in public life and they are determined not to give up their perks without a dirty fight.
Westminster’s elite, particularly the House of Lords, is in a furious sulk about June 2016’s amazing democratic result.
On the airwaves and in the broadsheet Press, the Remain side has most of the firepower. Our broadcasters (not least yesterday morning’s political programme on Sky) are aggressively pro-EU.
The Financial Times and Economist, both read (and believed!) by Eurocrats, are forever undermining Brexit. No wonder Brussels has got it into its mind that our Government will meekly hand over scores of billions of pounds simply to leave the EU club.
The readiness of some politicians and commentators to support a hefty divorce payment is bizarre – the political equivalent of terrible self-harm. These billions belong to us, not to the chancelleries of Europe.
What sort of madness grips an MP (such as Labour’s archRemainer David Lammy) who recommends that we willingly hand over all that gold?
This money should be spent on British nurses and doctors, British police officers and firemen, British soldiers and care workers. This should be a great workingclass cause. And yet centre-Leftists want the dosh to be given away to Brussels!
Until Boris’s contribution at the weekend it was as though the waters had almost closed over last summer’s vote and our clubclass rulers felt they could resume business as normal. Boris’s bloodstirring blast may force them to think again.