On 4/9/21 I posted this blog David Shoulder - Isle of Wight: #ConservativeParty a short letter of protest to my local Tory MP. (davidshoulder60onwards.blogspot.com)
I was dismayed by the incoherent performance of Johnson and his government and resigned my membership of the Tory party in protest. Since then the Johnson leadership has been shambolic.
He is now close to being forced out. I am greatly relieved if a little sad - because Boris after all got Brexit over the line and even more importantly saved our democracy. For that he deserves much credit - and that is his legacy.
However thereafter his tenure has been hopeless and misguided - more Labour than the Conservative values we voted. Johnson has spectacularly failed to deliver - made all the more galling as wasting the opportunities available to him with an 80 seat majority.
I could spend a lot of time writing a blog about why I feel that. However I came across and article written by Alistair Heath in the Telegraph that accurately and I am sure - more articulately - represents my view and sums up the failings of Boris Johnson as I see them too. I have therefore copied and pasted the article and posted it here as follows :
His premiership is ending in disaster, but I don’t regret
backing Boris in 2019
The tragedy of the PM is he used his Brexit triumph to
impose socialism and eco-extremism on the UK.
Is this the time for a mea culpa or as our outgoing Prime Minister
might have once put it, even a mea maxima culpa, for supporting Boris Johnson
three years ago? The answer, dear readers, is an emphatic “No”, and not only
because I’m not a Roman Catholic. His subsequent performance has been
atrocious, delusional and indefensible, but Johnson was the right and only
person for the job in 2019, a time when, some have conveniently forgotten,
Britain was falling apart.
Within months of becoming leader of the Conservative Party,
he had rescued the country from a debilitating constitutional crisis after a
series of audacious gambles, delivered a meaningful Brexit and thus salvaged
the greatest democratic exercise in our history, saved and united a
Conservative Party that had fallen to 9 per cent in an election, destroyed the
most Left-wing, fanatically dangerous leader in Labour’s history and repelled
the threat of anti-Semitism. It was an astonishing turnaround job, confounding
his Tory sceptics in the most vivid way imaginable.
For all these historic achievements, and despite his
subsequent, calamitous failures, he shall be remembered as one of this
country’s most consequential prime ministers. This is why the 160 MPs who
supported him in June 2019, fully aware of his imperfections, should feel no
regret for their decision, and neither should the 13.9 million people who voted
Conservative on that glorious December day. He delivered on his core, short-term
mission, against all the odds: backing him was the right thing to do at the
time, even if it isn’t true any longer today.
Johnson’s tragedy is that he outlived his usefulness so
quickly and turned from exceptional asset to prohibitively costly liability in
record time, which is why so many erstwhile Johnson loyalists and voters turned
on him decisively. He misunderstood his early luck and success, and refused to
build a proper structure around himself, rather than a dysfunctional court made
up of warring factions.
His staggering lack of self-awareness extended to the moral
realm: he didn’t seem to grasp that voters are allergic to double-standards,
hypocrisy and downright lies. His lack of a guiding ideology, other than
personal ambition and self-interest, meant that he failed to understand why so
many of his supporters feel ideologically betrayed by his high-tax, high-spend
agenda.
It became apparent well over a year ago that there would be
no lengthy Johnsonian era, as I fleetingly thought might have been possible in
the immediate aftermath of the election, no new economic and social model named
after him, no great project to remodel Britain a la Thatcher. It is a bitter
disappointment, a catastrophic waste of an 80-seat majority, a seismic defeat
for the forces of conservatism in an increasingly Left-wing culture, the
ultimate proof of the futility of purposeless ambition, of the idea that
charisma, slipperiness and off-the-cuff verbal dexterity beats principle,
thoughtfulness, organisation, reliability, focus and managerial ability.
Johnson’s performance went downhill almost immediately after
the General Election, with his decision to approve HS2 the first of many
errors. His greatest failure was to make fools of those of us who believed his
assurances that he was broadly a Reaganite, freedom-loving supply-sider, albeit
one with an unfortunate weakness for Keynesianism, municipalism, Helseltinian
central direction and grand projects.
For a short while, at least in the second half of 2019 and
until the start of Covid, it felt as if there was some sort of plan, a fusion
between his ideas and those of his advisers. I didn’t like all of them by any
means, but it felt as if we would end up with a mix of tax cuts, deregulation,
a radical reform of the Civil Service and procurement, the end of the licence
fee, a semi-libertarian embrace of freedom, a semi-consumerist, conservative
(rather than collectivist) approach to environmentalism, as well as lots of
extra spending in many areas.
We ended up instead with massively more spending, a vicious
series of tax increases, global corporation tax harmonisation that made a
mockery of Brexit, a hard-Left green agenda that is barely less authoritarian
than that of Extinction Rebellion, a war on consumers, including drivers,
meat-eaters and anybody with a suburban lifestyle, a full-on paternalist
agenda, more red tape and bureaucracy, no planning reform, an unleashing of the
Civil Service and further gains for the woke classes. None of the good things
have been delivered, and all the bad ones have happened, and worse.
His management of Covid was middling, average even by global
standards, but no less disastrous for that. Yes, he faced difficult choices,
but he refused to follow his supposed principles. Why did he not conduct proper
cost-benefit analyses? Why didn’t he tell the public that furlough was strictly
temporary? Why all the mendacious, demagogic nonsense about the NHS? The
vaccine success was one of the few positive outcomes, but even that was
squandered when Johnson returned control to the bureaucracy. The British state
has learnt none of the right lessons from Covid when it comes to future
pandemic-management.
Covid would have damaged any PM, but it permanently derailed
this one, and not just because he suffered so badly from it. It gave Johnson a
taste for unlimited spending and state power from which he never recovered. It
also exposed the hypocrisy of an elite that thought it could party while the
rest of the country was locked down, destroying Johnson’s greatest political
advantage: the idea he was different and on the side of normal people.
Perhaps Johnson’s most perplexing failure was to
misunderstand the purpose of Brexit, the policy that will define him forever
more. Instead of a traditionally Eurosceptic pro-growth agenda, he chose to ape
the continental economic model we had struggled so hard to escape. Instead of
renewing our institutions, he happily embraced the technocratic status quo. His
semi-socialist economic model is incompatible with growth, and will now need to
be scrapped if his successor is to have any hope of rescuing the Conservative
Party and the Brexit legacy.
Now that his Government has imploded in a sordid, chaotic
mess of resignations and frustration, Johnson will soon have a lot more time to
reflect on how it all went so pathetically, absurdly wrong.
Who the next leader will be I am not sure. However what we do need is a conviction politician - someone who believes business is the engine - creates the life blood for our society - that we have to earn it before we can spend it. No more nanny state - no more big government. We need Thatcherisim badly. We need someone that will exploit the opportunities Brexit offers - to truly engage with the global economy - and to of course secure our borders so we can control who comes and goes and in what numbers.
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