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Michelle Donelan was made Education Secretary late on Tuesday evening after the resignation of Sajid Javid, which began the revolt against the Prime Minister. 35 hours later, having failed to persuade Mr Johnson he should step aside, she quit herself. She was the shortest-serving Cabinet minister in British history, breaking a 239-year-old record of four days set during the government of Pitt the Younger. The clever thing for her to have done was publicly to have called for his resignation without resigning herself as "Suella" Braverman etc did.
Boris Johnson failed because he tried to impose a presidential model on a parliamentary democracy. He’s not a creature of Westminster and never built a tribe around him. His job, he thought, was to win and govern: theirs to follow orders and spread the word. It’s quite true no one else would have won the 80-seat majority and vanquished Corbynism. Probably no one else would have delivered Brexit. He was the perfect revolutionary, upending convention and breaking logjam. In Dominic Cummings, he had a ruthless and effective chief of staff.
ReplyDeleteBut like many revolutionary leaders, he struggled to govern after the battle was won. The command-and-control model which Cummings helped him to build – with No 10 giving orders to a supine Cabinet – was alien to the Westminster system. Everything, then, depended on the quality of decisions coming out of No 10: no checks, no balances. No one to demand (for example) a proper assessment on whether lockdown would cause more harm than good. When Cummings left, this quasi-dictatorial system had no dictator. Chaos ensued.
The Tories are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from Boris’s fall
The party finally needs to start talking plainly about Britain’s problems. There’s little sign yet that it will
FRASER NELSON
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/07/tories-danger-learning-wrong-lessons-boriss-fall/
What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?
Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.
Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.
How the Left fell for capitalism
Progressives were always part of the corporate elite
BY PAUL KINGSNORTH
https://unherd.com/2022/07/how-the-left-fell-for-capitalism/
The principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one's parents and one's country.
St. Thomas Aquinas
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3101.htm?