So Boris Johnson is a remainer after all. Clinging on in No 10, he has, it turns out, the same view of leaving as he does of the rules: that that’s for little people. The one consistent principle of his career has been cakeism, his ardent belief that he alone should be able to have his cake and eat it. And so, true to that spirit even to the last, he has decided both to resign and to remain in office.
Of course, it’s an outrage that he’s still there. Defenders of the Downing Street squatter say it’s no different from the way David Cameron and Theresa May stayed in post while the Tory party – not the country – handpicked a new prime minister. But this situation is wholly different. Johnson has been rejected because his colleagues decided that he lacked the basic integrity to do the job, that he could not be trusted with the keys to the house. By allowing him to stay there, possibly until October, Conservatism’s most senior figures are required once again to parrot nonsense in public, contradicting the words they had uttered no more than a day earlier, just to accommodate him (literally so). Like a vaudeville hypnotist who can make his subjects launch custard pies into their own faces, Johnson’s ability to mesmerise his subordinates into idiocy – even now – is a spectacle to behold.
If they do come to their senses and eject him sooner, they should let the cameras in so we can have one of those post-toppling-of-the-dictator videos, showing the golden wallpaper and the £3,675 serving trolley. At the very least, his successor’s first act should be to order a deep clean of the premises. And not just physically. Given the way Johnson burned through ethics advisers, there needs to be a full, independent audit of what happened in that building for the three years he lodged there. Leaks and resourceful reporters have revealed much, some of it emerging only now; but there will be more.
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The dots are all there. Voters are already beginning to join them, even as Starmer insists that the subject is essentially closed. The politicians might not want to say it, but this week is a milestone in the fate of Brexit. The prime author of Britain’s exit from the EU has fallen: the standing of his calamitous project is heading the same way. » | Jonathan Freedland |Friday, July 8, 2022
