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Now that Baker and Wallace have withdrawn, all the contenders for the British Conservative Party leadership are women or from ethnic minorities or both (Tom Tugenhadt is of Jewish ancestry but a Catholic), except Jeremy Hunt, who as a former Remainer is ruled out.
Tom Tugenhadt is ruled out for the same reason. A better reason is that he called for the sainted Tory philosopher Sir Roger Scruton to be dismissed from his unpaid job because of an allegation of antisemitism that was swiftly shown to be completely false.
Boris's father's father was a Turk, Osman Kemal, who changed his name to Wilfred Johnson.
THE astonishing thing about our departing Prime Minister is that he is so ordinary. See past the fake Edwardian growl, the artfully rumpled appearance and the little jokes and you find a rather dull person with no actual ideas or aims.
ReplyDeleteHe is a Bertie Wooster without a Jeeves, amusing at first but not so funny later, bound to get himself and you into impossible trouble.
Some of you may remember the Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy’s fictional English hero. By day he was the apparently moronic Sir Percy Blakeney, a languid, drawling fop, but by night he was a ruthless, courageous and successful rescuer of French aristocrats from the guillotine.
Quite a lot of Englishmen of Mr Johnson’s class think that they are like this. Generally they only manage the languid, drawling bit.
In the same way he likes to think he is a new Churchill, but Churchill had a profound knowledge of English history and had faced bullets in real combat. Johnson’s knowledge of the past and of the world is shallow, and he knows nothing of war.
Has he ever actually said anything interesting about politics? When he was Foreign Secretary, the most responsible detailed brief he has ever held, I listened to his speeches and statements with amazement. How could anybody so superficially brilliant be such a dull retailer of official clichés?
His performance over the great Covid panic was a mixture of gullible, credulous floundering and iron despotism, which it is still painful to remember.
So you will not find me among those mourning his fall, even though his successor is certain to be even worse.
But you will find me jeering at those who brought him down. They are even less attractive than he is.
Look at the effort and co-ordination that went into all those resignations. Who knew we had so many Ministers on the public payroll? What do they all do? How on earth did they get their jobs?
And above all, why were they so outraged by the Pincher affair, when they had sat silent and obedient through Johnson and Sunak’s mad smashing of the economy, which all of us will pay for until we die, and the gross assault on our liberty made by the whole Cabinet in the name of Covid?
They have now shown that they are not in fact the goggling wax dummies they appeared to be during that needless disaster.
They have voices, and they can write letters and go on the BBC and criticise their leader. Just not when it really matters. Johnson was quite right, in his Thursday speech, to blame his fall on a mindless stampede.
If he is not fit for office, and actually he never was, those who brought him down were not fit to remove him. We have just seen a coup d’etat against the useless, by the pointless.
Or perhaps it was the other way round. I struggle to care.
PETER HITCHENS
JULY 10, 2022
https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/comment/200233/johnsons-fall-was-a-coup-by-the-pointless-against-the-useless
I read this and agreed with much of it but his huge achievement was getting Brexit done and done reasonably well, which I believed he would do. After that he was hopeless.
DeleteEric Clapton's new song entitled “Pompous Fool”
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_yUmGg5YU