The government spent Thursday stuck in quicksand. The prime minister was in sand up to his neck. But he still blundered and blustered on regardless through PMQs and a parliamentary committee most people had not heard of. More than forty members of the government have resigned, some from the top table, some the servers who usually bow and scrape. Michael Gove was sacked.
I write this article in the early hours of Thursday before heading off for a lengthy day battling in a Tory dominated council. Will Boris Johnson still be prime minister when I leave the council chamber? Will there be more resignations as dawn breaks?
Boris Johnson has always been in denial of reality. He has always lived in a fantasy world. His world is centred around himself. He is stuck in Slogan Land. Sound Bite Land. Anything but Resigning Land.
When watching Johnson perform at PMQs yesterday, a song from my youth randomly popped into my head. “Three wheels on my wagon, and I’m still rolling along…” The song was nonsense and hasn’t aged well. The same might be said of Johnson. For all the sense he made yesterday, he might have been chanting the New Christy Minstrels’ chorus: “I’m singing a higgity, haggity, hoggety, high. Pioneers, they never say die.”
That’s Johnson. Never say die. Never say resign.
That was a theme picked up my Munira Wilson during PMQs:
The Prime Minister once wrote: “It is a wonderful and necessary fact of political biology that we never know when our time is up. Long after it is obvious to everyone that we are goners, we continue to believe in our ‘duty’ to hang on… to the perks and privileges of our posts… In reality, we are just terrified of the come-down.” For the sake of this great country, will the Prime Minister heed the advice of his former self, get over his terror and do the decent thing?
The government has come to a halt as Britain’s Trump battles for his survival. Even cabinet members are calling on Boris Johnson to resign. Here are just a few recent Lib Dem tweets.
I’ve a list of proposals to help fix Cumbria’s housing crisis, provide rural bus services, bring cancer services closer to home.. at tomorrow’s Levelling Up Bill committee… only to find that it’s now cancelled because *both* ministers have resigned! In office but not in power.
— Tim Farron (@timfarron) July 6, 2022
As long as Johnson clings on, we effectively have NO FUNCTIONING GOVERNMENT. The Conservatives knowingly foisted this amoral, narcissistic PM on us and we’re all paying a heavy price.
— Sarah Olney (@sarahjolney1) July 6, 2022
Who’d have guessed that Britain’s Trump would have ended up causing a constitutional crisis and threatening violence.
I know, I know. https://t.co/YrPeI1jUqt
— Helen Morgan MP 🔶 (@HelenMorganMP) July 6, 2022
Boris Johnson is increasingly behaving like Donald Trump.
So far we haven’t had #CapitolHill
But nobody ever thought Trump would do what he did until it happened.
— Wera Hobhouse MP 🔶 🇺🇦 (@Wera_Hobhouse) July 6, 2022
Deluded. He may well have the title of PM tomorrow. But he lost the authority of that title today https://t.co/WaRjzRXyR5
— Layla Moran 🔶🕊️ (@LaylaMoran) July 6, 2022
* Andy Boddington is a Lib Dem councillor in Shropshire. He blogs at andybodders.co.uk.
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Simon Jenkins’s piece in the Guardian echoes the Sun’s headline, “Johnson appears still to believe he can appeal to a popular electoral mandate over the heads of his parliamentary colleagues: a grim parody of the lingering campaign of his opposite number and erstwhile admirer, Donald Trump in America. But it won’t and can’t work. In Britain, layers of political membrane separate the office of prime minister from the electorate.”
With apologies to Jenkins (and Godwin); to me it seems more like ‘The last days in the bunker’. Johnson seems to have esconsed himself, together with his few remaining loyalists, in a room in No.10 and is moving imaginary groups of supporters to overthrow the will of the electorate (and the Conservative party) and take personal dictatorial control of the country.
Of course it’s only 7.30am and everything could have changed in the next few hours.
It is clear that the Conservatives have finally decided that mass resignation is a better way to remove him, without giving him the chance to call a snap election to keep himself in power, because it is clear even to Boris Johnson that he wouldn’t be their leader after the election even if they won it. If they had gone down the 1922 Committee vote of confidence route it would have given him the “Great Leader, Man of Action, Unconstitutional Second Referendum” narrative to hide behind as he called a General Election before the 1922 Committee vote had even taken place. That has now gone and I don’t think even he is so self centred as to believe that calling a snap General Election now is an option (but you never know for sure until it has happened).
I think he will now be penning a final speech that will doubtless crow about his so called achievements but will probably contain a few barbed points about the lack of loyalty, backbone, vision, staying power etc etc to work with him to get the job done.
Our job is to ensure we stick the blame on the Conservatives over the next two years for the mess that will continue, so we can regain our rural seats in Somerset, Devon, etc and new ones, plus those suburban areas where Labour has no chance.
If have the courage and do that successfully we could even be in a better position than we were before 2010.
Latest “Johnson will resign today”…
‘History repeating itself’or ‘What goes around comes around’..
In May 2010 Johnson wrote, about Gordon Brown, in the Telegraph.. “The whole thing is unbelievable. As I write these words, “the PM” is still holed up in Downing Street. He is like some illegal settler in the Sinai desert, lashing himself to the radiator, or like David Brent haunting The Office in that excruciating episode when he refuses to acknowledge that he has been sacked. Isn’t there someone – the Queens Private Secretary, the nice policeman on the door of No 10 – whose job it is to tell him that the game is up?
So it all ends with a whimper rather than a bang, disappointing that we have to put up with two more Years of Tory Government but it gives us more time to recover.