Isn’t appointing talented underlings, and listening to what they say, one of the most important leadership skills?
Yes, reportedly that is a problem.
Two of the most important leadership skills, I think you mean. Boris lacks both.
Speaking for myself, I feel quite capable of complaining about both Trump and Johnson. And Modi. And Erdogan. And Orban. And Kaczynski. And any and all national leaders who I think are populist race-baiting shitheads.
It’d be really fucking weird if, just because my country’s leader falls into the set of “populist race-baiting shitheads”, I had to start keeping schtumm about the fact that populist race-baiting shitheads are bad. That seems to me to be a very limiting approach. Equally, I wouldn’t expect Americans not to point out Johnson’s many flaws just because of who their president is. Why should they?
Eh, I think being able to publicly choke underlings with the power of the Force pour encourager les autres is much more important, but to each their upper management strat.
BJ was not selected as leader by the electorate.
Neither party leaders nor Prime Ministers are ever selected by the electorate in the UK.
Overall, I think Boris’s cabinet choices are good. For the major positions, Javid, Raab, and Wallace are all qualified. I don’t think Patel has the experience for Home Secretary, but I think her appointment was a combination of patronage, demographics, and wanting a yes-woman in the job. All the rest, to the extent that I recognise their names, seem decent choices.
They’re not the worst choices he could have come up with. Javid is unduly business-friendly but then most Chancellors of late have been (including Gordon Brown). Everyone’s already noted the irony of making Dominic “Calais? Never heard of it” Raab Foreign Secretary but that’s just sniping. And at least Hunt has been exiled to the outer darkness for the time being. A pity Michael Gove wasn’t likewise shunned.
Patel, however, is a nasty piece of work.
What are Raab’s qualifications? He was Brexit Secretary for all of 5 months, after which he resigned because he didn’t like his government’s Brexit policy. Specifically, he didn’t like the Withdrawal Agreement which had been in place since he took the job and which he must have known it was his role as Cabinet Member and Brexit Secretary to support. As Brexit Secretary, he did take part in negotiations with the EU. This apparently led to him being nicknamed “the turnip” by EU negotiators and despite a certain amount of bluster from “friends of Dominic Raab” that he was the negotiator the EU feared most, didn’t lead to anything else. To be fair, this is because he was utterly sidelined by May, but “held the job title but not the responsibility” isn’t a qualification.
Other than that… I genuinely don’t know what he’s done that would even count as a potential qualification for Foreign Sec.
As DfID minister, Patel took a personal trip to Israel to negotiate her own foreign policy behind the back of the government, meeting senior Israeli politicians - including Netanyahu - without any diplomats present and breaking all protocols for ministerial meetings with representatives of foreign governments. When caught, she apologised but failed to disclose the full extent of these meetings, for which second transgression she was sacked. To do this with any country - say, Australia - would have been bad enough. To do it with Israel, a major player in an unstable region whose role in international affairs is, shall we say, somewhat sensitive, is egregious. It betrays a lack of both judgement and integrity on a massive scale.
In any other time, her readmission to Cabinet would be a scandal. Now it’s just business as usual.
It’s interesting that Dominic Cummings said in 2017:
Now this is news to nobody who has half a brain, and Johnson’s government cares far less than average Tories.
But what I think Cummings is taking away from this is that their message must be that they care. This is the message that Johnson has in fact been plugging.
They hope to fool enough of the people for long enough to force through a no-deal Brexit.
From gov.uk:
"Career before politics
Dominic started his career as a business lawyer at City law firm Linklaters, working on project finance, international litigation and competition law. He also spent time on secondments at Liberty (the human rights NGO) and in Brussels advising on EU and WTO law.
Dominic later worked at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office between 2000 and 2006 on a range of issues from investor protection to war crimes policy."
He doesn’t have a huge amount of experience in government, but as you’ve noted he was the Brexit Secretary for several months which is certainly relevant experience.
I have friends who were trainee solicitors in Big 6 London law firms at around this time. They too did 6-month rotations in different departments and could claim experience in international litigation and competition law. The experience they got consisted largely of photocopying, and putting tags on 100-page documents. It’s…something, but a lot more relevant to a law career than running the UK’s foreign policy.
This is relevant, but it’s also pretty low-level stuff. He qualified as a solicitor in 2000, per wiki, so he would have been mid-20s to early 30s - pretty junior stuff.
A job he either did badly or didn’t do at all, depending who you ask. As qualifications go, it’s not strong.
Admittedly, a vigorous “up or out” policy is generally beneficial to large organizations.
Neither was Emperor Palpatine, but he did OK. For awhile, anyway.
Nor is any PM. But voters for a party do know what the party stands for, and what sort of policies will be advanced by its leaders.
Nor is the President, if that’s the way you are gonna call it.
Look, the people vote for their party. The winning party (or colatilion) chooses the Pm. Of the candidates who won in the election- BJ was voted in by his district.
He was the choice of the people, and picking nits wont help. The british voters made the choice for brexit based mostly on racist xenophobia.
Every American of legal age and not otherwise disqualified had the opportunity to vote in the election in which Donald Trump was on the ballot.
Boris Johnson wasn’t even the party leader when Britain last had a general election in which Britons of legal age and not otherwise disqualified had the opportunity to vote. Theresa May was the party leader at the time, and her approach to Brexit was quite a bit different, for example in their willingness to face a crash-out no-deal Brexit.
The equivalent, in the US, would be for Americans to vote specifically for Donald Trump and then watch Mike Pompeo or Mitch McConnell be inaugurated.
The point is that voters who voted Conservative in the last election were voting for Theresa May as PM and for a platform that was essentially moderate. Even the she only got enough votes, or seats if you prefer, to form a Minority government. Johnson is wildly different from Theresa May, is calling for a completely different form of Brexit than the soft Brexit that Theresa May planned, and his Brexit plans probably won’t face any votes in Parliament beyond toothless motions.