There stands a man who has gained everything he wanted in life - election to Prime Minister, hot wife and assorted mistresses, lots of money - and has learned that it all comes with a downside.
Not much of a downside unless what he really wanted was to be remembered fondly by posterity
How about not having people travel from miles around to pee on his grave for centuries to come?
what is it about these tory MPs and weird hair ?..
BoJo the clown: I also work too much and am condescending (that’s when you talk down to people, eh).
Boris felt sorry for his staff as they hadn’t had a wine party since…the previous Friday.
It seems there was a culture of heavy drinking and partying in Westminster long before Johnson’s time.
But there’s no excuse for him not to have clamped down on it during covid lockdowns.
Yes, I don’t really care that they bought a wine fridge. I care that they were having parties at a time when such things were actively prosecutable, and that the police (who were prosecuting thousands of others at the time) turned a blind eye even when they were literally standing right there.
He’s absolutely correct there.The UK vaccination rate is very good with over half the population having the booster which suggests unlike the US there isn’t a sizeable anti-vax segment of society. And Johnson should be able to take a victory lap for administering this but instead he is in deep trouble. It’s an incredible own goal he’s scored but it goes with his personality which from afar comes across like someone who has never been accountable for anything before. I read a blog entry from someone who made an astute point that the fact it took a party for the penny to drop with the public that the tories didn’t care about people is as much an indictment on the public as well as the politicians. It sounds harsh but in eleven years they would have done a lot worse than partying that didn’t affect their standing in polls and winning elections. Examples included the severe cuts to public services like 700 libraries being closed under their watch and that lots of people relying on food banks while the rich get richer.
Boris Johnson is a weird character in general. I lived in England when John Major was PM and he was the butt of jokes just for the fact his public image came across like he was just filling the seat temporarily except his term lasted seven years. Boris Johnson looks like Benny Hill, he talks like a student who didn’t prepare for a presentation and just trying to use long words to sound smart, he was fired in his previous career as a journalist and as foreign secretary and yet he somehow became a very consequential prime minister.
…on the people who voted him in, please. Or rather, under our system, the people that voted Conservative at the last election. Even though the alternative didn’t look so good. But it’s not hindsight to say that the Tories were dazzled by a devious, weaselly bletherskite. They were calling him the British Trump even before that election.
It’s getting worse.
Yes, my bad. An indictment on those who voted him in.
The public has its fair share of blame. It was more or less obvious where the Tories were going to go - it was all Brexit all the time and they got exactly what they wanted.
Oh I see. On first reading, I thought they meant the kind of “operation” that plenty of Big Dogs have to undergo. Which in BJ’s case might not be a bad idea either.
I guess that will involve finding suitable scapegoats in Downing St. The easy targets are the civil servants because that would not cause an issue for the Conservative party.
Some big announcement of a clearout of these party animals. Of course it might be a bit inconvenient if it were found that party members had attended or organised such events. With so many people involved, there will be emails and photos.
But the party line at the moment is to wait for the results of the inquiry by Grey. That could take a long time, during which there will be a steady drip of stories to the media.
Prime Ministers are usually surrounded by special advisors who form a praetorian guard protecting the Big Dog from any political threat. This system has conspicuously failed. Why was that? Mrs Johnson was not keen Cummins, who was sacked. Maybe the same was true of others whose company, she did not care for.
One of the downsides of ‘working from home’, for Mr Big Dog, perhaps?
Again, please don’t blame the 46.6% (England), 55.8% (NI), 62.0% (Scotland) who voted to remain. That’s 48.1% of voters for the whole UK. We didn’t want any of this.
Johnson wasn’t fired as Foreign Secretary, he resigned. And that’s not a polite fiction, he genuinely quit on his own. By custom, he would be obliged to resign from the cabinet for opposing the Prime Minister in Parliament, but that’s not the same as being forced out.
If you’re looking for the two jobs from which Johnson was fired, it was as a journalist for The Times for making up a quote, and the combined job of Conservative party vice-chairman and shadow arts minister for lying about an affair.
I’m seeing reports that Sue Gray could deliver her findings as early as this coming week.
If Johnson then fires a long list of people, his problem will be that they’ll be outside the tent pissing in. Not to mention pissed off.
I totally agree with this. I believe the identity of the person who released the garden party invitation email to ITV is still hidden, but it was quite likely someone who’d been forced out of Downing Street, likely an associate of Dominic Cummings, if not Cummings himself. Likewise, the sources for the information about the Downing Street parties the night before Prince Philip’s parties were also people with axes to grind. Any hijinks that Sue Gray misses in her investigation are almost sure to be leaked if Johnson somehow survives after the release of her report and then does a mass clear-out. Prime Ministers Questions would be turned into the weekly Johnson apology session.