The Summer Before the Dark

Johnson's Last Hurrah

So it’s almost over - at least for now. This week, after a summer of doing absolutely nothing, Boris Johnson has finally emerged from holiday for a ‘farewell tour’ to defend his ‘legacy’. As always there were the kind of cosplay photo ops we have come to expect these last three years. Here is Johnson in a police raid wearing a stab vest. Here he is with his deranged temple guardian Nadine Dorries, posing in a high viz jacket in a digger when she really ought to be wearing a long flowing robe and flowers in her hair.

In one photo the Great Man can be seen waving his portfolio, or perhaps it’s a menu or wine list, with a faintly regretful and winsome smile as he prepares for his new role as Churchill in the Wilderness or the Prophet Scorned.

Anyone watching this long goodbye would be forgiven for expecting a rousing rendition of My Way on the White Cliffs of Dover, or for believing that we are witnessing the departure of some great warrior-king, saying goodbye to his adoring subjects before hanging up his sword and returning to his castle to look after his sheep or write his memoirs.

The reality is that Johnson is the first prime minister to leave office in disgrace, entirely because of his personal dishonesty, his arrogance and narcissism. This the man who threw away an 80 seat majority because he turned Downing Street into a tawdry extension of the Bullingdon Club in the midst of a lethal pandemic, and then repeatedly lied about it to parliament and the public.

Even in the dying days of his premiership, there was still one last breath of sleaze, as Sky News reported that Johnson had previously ignored allegations of sexual abuse against a cabinet minister and a former aide.

At no point have Johnson or his supporters ever recognised the seriousness of what he did. Again and again they have tried to portray his critics as the unserious people, trivialising the Great Man’s achievements in a time of crisis by focusing on irrelevant ephemera.

Even as Johnson shambles from the stage, they are still seeking to undermine the cross-party Standards Committee’s inquiry into ‘Partygate’. All this is only to be expected from the Great Charlatan and the many people who inhabit the same moral vacuum that produced him.

To see him finally go should come as a huge relief to the millions of people who have been disgusted by him. But behind the last minute attempts to rehabilitate Johnson’s reputation and stymie the parliamentary inquiry that may well find him guilty, it is difficult to avoid the lingering suspicion that his departure may not be permanent, and that his supporters are preparing to bring him back from exile at a suitable time.

The Car Crash PM

It’s obvious why they might want to do this. Next week, it’s almost certain that Liz Truss will become the next Prime Minister, and throughout the dismal Tory hustings that have dragged painfully on throughout this dystopian summer, it’s become clear again and again that she is likely to be even worse than her predecessor.

Don’t take my word for it. Even the markets seem to know how bad she is. This week the pound dipped against the dollar once again, and a portfolio manager at Bluebay Asset Management predicted worse to come:

“If Truss was to win the leadership election, then the pound would react very negatively. Populistic policies tend to be bad for the economy over the medium term and weaken the purchasing power of the people.”

And Citygroup’s Chief Economist also observed that:

“Truss’s policy platform still poses the greatest risk from an economic perspective in our view with an unseemly combination of pro-cyclical tax cuts and institutional disruption.” 

If the ‘pro-business’ would-be Margaret Thatcher clone can’t please the markets, who can she please? Some clues were available on Wednesday, when Truss and Sunak brought the morbid leadership contest to an end, with a final hustings at Wembley Stadium.

Both of them sashayed onto the stage accompanied by blasts of pop music which will never come close to making either of them as funky - or as popular - as they would like to think they are.

Truss came in hard, assuring her listeners that she knew what a woman was; and she wasn’t going to tolerate ‘left wing identity politics’. She attacked Sadiq Khan for rising crime rates in London and promised to get police on the streets to deal with it ‘instead of policing Twitter.’

Do the police ‘police Twitter’? I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve certainly never heard that police are diverting resources from the London streets to do this, but it’s doubtful that many of Truss’s listeners care. Her remarks were aimed at the right-wing gallery that Truss and Sunak believe is key to getting them into Downing Street. This is why Sunak joined in the culture war discourse, with an incoherent rant about ‘woke nonsense’.

It’s also why Truss made the seemingly outlandish pledge to abolish speed limits on motorways. To say the nation has not exactly been crying out for this policy would be something of an understatement.

The callous idiocy of this proposal is instantly obvious: Higher speeds mean more emissions, in addition to more accidents and more deaths. But Truss doesn’t seem to care about this any more than she cares about anything else. Her pledge to shave a few minutes off journey times is not intended as a practical solution to anything, except to indulge the fantasies of a certain breed of Tory voter that would like to drive an Audi as fast as he or she can down the motorway, while the planet burns and the country slips into mass poverty, belching particulates and blasting Little Mix on the stereo.

Maybe Truss regards removing the speed limit as a Brexit opportunity, or an expression of sovereignty, or most likely she has been told that a policy like this will scrape a few more votes from the bottom of the Tory barrel.

Throughout her campaign, she has pitched her messaging at the extreme right of the Tory Party, and this is one more reason why we may well see the worst Prime Minister in British history succeeded by the even worse, presiding over a cabinet in which Suella Braverman may be Home Secretary, and there may even be room for the likes of the blustering windbag ‘Lord Frost.’

Meanwhile, somewhere beyond the dark world of the ERG and the Tory damned, the country crossed a new threshold on its terrifying descent into mass poverty, as a result of the Ofgem price cap. Faced with this imminent catastrophe, neither Johnson’s zombie administration, nor any of the candidates has offered any substantial or coherent proposals on how to ameliorate its worst impact.

This week Johnson coolly acknowledged that ‘ ‘Families up and down this country are going to face a very tough winter and we just have to accept that.’

Why should we ‘accept’ this? And who are ‘we’ in this context? Johnson did not elaborate, though he did advise his successor to ‘go nuclear’ and build more nuclear reactors.

Incredibly, he advised the public to buy a new kettle, and pointed out that this can save them £10 a year. The callous idiocy of this recommendation is only outstripped by the barely-credible arrogance and the complete absence of empathy of the man who made it.

In Johnson’s estimation of himself, he is the man with his hand on the pulse of the common people, unfairly ousted by the parliamentary ‘herd’ of his own MPs. But again and again he has made statements like this, which show that he doesn’t care about the country he claims to love, or the people who live in it.

Too many didn’t see this, or chose to ignore it. Too many Tories share exactly the same sentiments, and the same sociopathic disdain. And now they are about to inflict yet another visionless narcissist on a country that is crying out for serious government and serious leadership.

So no one should be surprised that Liz Truss feeds her supporters with populist trashtalk about motorways and identity politics. Or that Johnson’s supporters are plotting to bring about his return while the Great Man tells us how to save £10 a year with a new kettle.

They don’t believe that this a serious country, and they treat it with the contempt they think it deserves. They think the electorate is like the tiny percentage of the population that is voting for the next prime minister, that all it wants to do is define what a woman is or prevent our history from being ‘erased.’

This winter, more than ever, we need to show them how wrong they are, and faced with yet another set of Tory rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, we need to support the strikes that are already unfolding across the country, and build the new political coalitions that can bring these painful years to an end, and usher in at least the possibility of something better.