Forty years ago a master at Eton College wrote a letter to Stanley Johnson about his 17 year old son, Alexander Boris, he told him that his son sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility….”I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.”
Regrettably, decades later Boris Johnson has still not grown up. As the letter shows even at Eton his over-sized sense of entitlement was seen as anti-social and inappropriate.
Someone who knew Johnson well, his former boss at the Telegraph, Max Hastings predicted in 2019, “Jeremy Corbyn…may yet prove to be the only possible Labour leader whom Johnson can defeat in a general election. If the opposition was led by anyone else , the Tories would be deservedly doomed…” Hastings proved correct, the election giving Johnson the undeserved reputation of being an election winner, which subsequent results have done much to destroy.
Now Johnson talks of a third term as Tory leader, of leading them into the 2030s. This despite 148 Tory MPs voting to remove him as party leader, despite losing nearly 500 Tory council seats in England, Wales and Scotland in the local elections, and despite the two catastrophic by-election losses in Honiton in Devon (a record 24,239 majority overturned)and Wakefield in Yorkshire!
This third term delusion reveals how little Johnson has changed in forty years. Writing in the Observer, political commentator Andrew Rawnsley commented of Johnson “whatever he’s been inhaling it’s not reality”. Senior Conservatives also accuse him of increasingly “delusional” behaviour for that statement.
Max Hastings further predicted “the Johnson premiership could survive for three or four years, shambling from one embarrassment and debacle to another, of which Brexit may prove the least.”
In reality Johnson is increasingly an election liability – the other political parties must be desperately hoping he stays on as Leader, crippling his party.
It goes beyond that unfortunately.
Perhaps because Johnson needed to ensure support for his agenda and minimise leadership threats, numerous experienced, centrist Tories were not selected for the 2019 General Election. Thus the current slate of Tory MPs does not reflect the Party at Large, and were drawn from an impoverished pool.
The current Director of Communications at No 10, Guto Harri, in 2018 described Boris Johnson as “sexually incontinent”. That “ impoverished pool” appears to reflect that.
In the past three months there have been five allegations of sexual misconduct involving Tory MPs, two of which resulted in resignations and subsequent by-elections.
In the Boris Johnson Tory Party loyalty to the leader is far more important than integrity and apparently self restraint!
Pete Milory
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