Blame ........
When Prime Ministers start having problems there is a simple system to follow; blame the media, blame the advisors, blame the Civil Service, blame the Cabinet, oust the PM.
But for Boris Johnson one of his many difficulties is that he is the pretty much the whole government. He got elected on one policy, packed his cabinet with ultra loyalists who supported that policy and picked advisors, aides and civil servants, regardless of ability, who would make it happen no matter how damaging it was. He owns this government like no previous PM.
That is presumably how the PM managed to publish an open letter to President Macron which the French will have had difficulty reading as anything other than an attempt to attack them publicly to placate the PM’s populist power base.
Why his cabinet, advisors, aides or civil servants didn’t stop the PM is easy to understand, he does what he wants.
The trouble for the country is that a bad PM normally has support, advice and constraints that make it difficult to be a total wrecking ball. The trouble for Boris Johnson is that doing just what he wants makes it far easier to blame him when things go wrong.
The CBI speech was a case in point, it was impossible to blame a bad speech writer, it was so obviously the PM’s own terrible work. So too is this letter.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.