Another core Conservative Party value appears to be: being an absolute shower of fucking rubes, as dumb a collection of natural born suckers as PT Barnum could ever dream of meeting.
Here, we have one MP voicing the idea that he and many of his colleagues are giving Johnson one last chance to change his ways:
This morning, in an interview on the Today programme, Huw Merriman, the Conservative chair of the Commons transport committee said that Johnson had to shape up or go. Mangling the familiar phrase (it was early in the morning), he said:
I’m deeply troubled by what’s going on. We all know that if the prime minister doesn’t ship up, then they have to shape out [sic], and that’s exactly what happened when this prime minister took over.
Interestingly, Merriman also claimed that he was probably talking for a silent majority of Conservative MPs.
I think there are a large group of Conservative MPs who are being loyal, focusing also on the prime minister’s positives and are not either eulogising with tweets, copy and paste, or going on the attack because they’ve never liked the prime mnister. That’s why you don’t hear from a lot of us, because we want this to work.
When it was put to Merriman that he was saying it was “shape up or ship out” for Johnson, Merriman replied:
It is for very single leader of any party, and certainly any prime minister, because it is all about winning elections and having a mandate to deliver.
How the fuck do any of these guys think that Johnson is about to stop being Johnson. He is exactly who he is when they made him Leader and PM, and he always will be. The idea that he’s about to turn things round and become a trustworthy leader with a strong grip on government is for the birds.
Someone needs to sit these guys down and explain to them that there are in fact no Official Wallet Inspectors and they are not getting their money back.