No offence to Carrie Johnson and her sterling feminist and environmental credentials, but how deluded does a Tory have to be to gaze on Boris Johnson’s shambolic party and decide that the source of all their woes is. . . the prime minister’s woke new wife.
Nine years since David Cameron first promised a Brexit referendum to appease his swivel-eyed Eurosceptics, seven since he called it, six since Boris Johnson opted to lead the Leave campaign, five since Theresa May triggered article 50 and lost her majority in a snap election focused on denting the thick, brick wall of the Tory hard-right brains trust.
A shambles is a butcher’s slaughter house, which is a good deal worse than a mess, commented Jacob Rees-Mogg at the time, removing himself from the crime scene, while shifting investment funds from England to Ireland to protect them from Brexit.
You have to hand it to Carrie Symonds, as she was then called. Any woman capable of producing that slaughterhouse years before exchanging flirty side-eyes with Johnson is capable of taking down Putin in an hour. It was Johnson’s previous wife, Marina Wheeler QC, who allegedly pushed Johnson to the Leave side.
Wasn't it obvious that a leader known to be reckless, deceitful and lazy would cede undue influence to unelected individuals
When he told BBC presenter Andrew Marr that he would threaten to withhold the £39 billion payment from the signed EU-UK agreement in order to “incentivise” a free-trade deal, Marr was astonished: “We are an honourable law-based society. . . We have solemnly promised it as a government. . . That’s a kind of political gangsterism.”
Next day, in unrelated news, he was crowned idiot of the year in the Economist Awards and dubbed “the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years”.
The brains trust elected him their leader, naturally.
Johnson behaviour
When he imported the Leave team to Downing St, headed by the genius Dominic Cummings, none of them predicted that when the worm turned, the genius would apply himself to collecting examples of typical Johnson behaviour from insiders and prime pieces to explode just when Johnson was relaxing again.
His emoji depiction of Johnson as a shopping trolley – mindlessly crashing into stuff – would be funny if the human trolley hadn’t been Cummings’s hand-picked vehicle when required to crash Brexit through rational dissenters. They all knew exactly who Johnson was. Munira Mirza, Johnson’s closest adviser of 14 years, who resigned last week over his refusal to apologise for the Jimmy Savile-related smearing of Keir Starmer, knew. Hooray for patriotism Brexit-style.
And Carrie? Back then, she was the young one who could keep the rambling old dog on the porch, monitor his diet, straighten his head and make him presentable.
Now they have her nailed as the source of all Tory sorrows.
But they can’t have it both ways. Wasn’t it obvious that a leader known to be reckless, deceitful and lazy would cede undue influence to unelected individuals – or didn’t it matter as long as the unelected ones were making the right Brexit noises? Either way, this is all on him and them.
Their other difficulty is that if Carrie is the power-mad harridan as portrayed, why is he the one swearing that it will take a panzer division to get him out of Downing St while she, according to the Sunday Times, is telling friends she would be happier if he left number 10, and that she just wants to focus on her children?
Bored with Brexit
The real problem for Carrie and the Brexiters is that the trolley is crashing in public and there is no one left to blame. Just as they got bored with Brexit, most Brits are bored with the fulminations about the EU. How long can you bleat on about Ireland, civil servants, thinking Tory MPs, “activist” lawyers, opposition politicians, supreme court judges, the queen, George Soros and the metropolitan elite?
Isn't there a big difference between, say, reporting from Brussels and being a stand-up comedian there, and might this be a clue to what has happened to Britain?
When he spoke at the Pendulum Summit here pre-pandemic, a huge audience listened spellbound and cheered his tales of derring-do, citing the mayor from Jaws who kept the beaches open. This was politics as FUN. The capacity for convenient amnesia burns bright in us all. It’s evident already in the impressive memory gaps around compliance and context in the pandemic.
It’s evident in Johnson’s former editor, Max Hastings, who employed him as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, where, in the words of a former Tory party chairman Chris Patten, Johnson was “one of the greatest exponents of fake journalism”. Yet, while eviscerating him as a leader, Hastings describes him as a “brilliant journalist”; “it seems reasonable to judge a reporter and entertainer by wholly different standards from those that should be applied to a prime minister”. Isn’t there a big difference between, say, reporting from Brussels and being a stand-up comedian there, and might this be a clue to what has happened to Britain?
On Monday, Chris Bryant, the Labour MP and chair of the committee on standards, became emotional while commenting about the incident in which Keir Starmer had to be bundled into a police car outside the UK Houses of Parliament to rescue him from a mob roaring “paedophile” at him. Bryant accused the British prime minister of deliberately putting Starmer in danger by inciting a mob.
It felt like the end was nigh.
Ah yes, but what about Carrie and the gold wallpaper? Remember Hillary and the emails. It’s ridiculously easy to distract people when you put your mind and mighty mass media to it.