The deed is done, the leader is gone. At the time of writing, Boris Johnson has tendered his resignation from outside Downing Street in a well-judged and magnanimous speech.
It merely remains for us at BringItBack to add his political obituary which we do here.
According to Aris Roussinos it wasn’t Partygate or the thousand and one personal and professional indiscretions which finally did for him, but a lack of basic competence.
“None of the accusations against him — his constant lies, his disregard for Westminster conventions — would matter in the slightest if he were just competent, but he is not. And that is why he must go.”
But even by his standards, the manner and speed of his fall from grace has been astonishing:
“No one in living memory can have squandered such a far-reaching and revolutionary mandate for reform through such petty and absurd personal failings. Never the quasi-fascist wrecker of the constitution our more hysterical liberal commentariat still make him out to be, he was, as the phrase has it, simply a messy bitch who lives for drama, brought to these humiliating depths by the penumbra of chaos he carries swirling around him."
There is of course a huge irony in all of this:
“It is the failings for which he is now condemned — the contempt in which he held Westminster’s institutions, his urge to override the sterile norms and petty taboos which have sunk British governance into a tar-pit of torpor and incapacity — which won him office in the first place.
The people wanted him to break our failing state, and rebuild it in a way that finally worked for all the nation. With a historic majority in parliament, Johnson had almost unlimited power to drive through the Meiji Restoration our collapsing country so desperately requires.
That he survived so long, and won such a parliamentary mandate for total change, is a reflection not on his personal qualities, about which no one ever had any doubt, but on the sheer disgust the vast majority of the country feels for his political enemies.
Johnson was — we can say was now — a creature born from chaos, thrust to power by the same inchoate demands for political revolution that are roiling every western democracy. Yet instead of embracing meaningful reform and wielding power to transformative ends, he embroiled the nation and mired the entire governance of the country in his own domestic strife.
The chosen agent of creative destruction entirely lacked a vision, a philosophy, or any justification whatsoever in his legislative record for the position he clings to so desperately, even now.”
Worst of all were the huge opportunities squandered:
“Like Trump, Boris set himself up as the tribune of the proles, and like Trump, Boris frittered it all away through an absolute unfitness for the role. The Brexit vote afforded an extraordinary opportunity to reform Britain’s sclerotic institutions, and steer us out of the state’s ongoing death spiral.
But the longed-for burster of the Westminster bubble turned out to be its worst avatar yet. Instead of breaking Britain’s governance free from the witless rigmarole of the lobby, he dived headlong into it; instead of breaking the power of the Blairite para-state, he let its tentacles wrap around him until all the life and energy he brought into office was crushed out of him.”
The man is now gone. And as Boris himself would say, ‘It’s time to move on.’
The full article can be read here with a link to the original beneath it:
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