One last service after a life of selfless duty
I remember when the Rhodesian PM Ian Smith died, his family put out a press release claiming that , “a life of selfish duty to the people of Africa has drawn to a close” or something like that.
It was very funny or it would have been but for the utter lack of self awareness, taste, accuracy or even reality.
Which brings us to Boris Johnson and his own UDI. He seems to be dumb enough to think that with one bound he is free. That the damning judgements against him no longer exist, that he is right and everyone else wrong, that he can fight history, that the majority really support him and that he is a lion brought down by jackals
But Boris Johnson seems to be down to three or four followers. People willing to throw themselves on the their swords for him or in the case of Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, as we now have to call him, demand that Boris Johnson be allowed to stand in a safer Tory seat, or risk starting a civil war.
That is quite a demand, not least because the Tories have been racked by civil war for decades, as the UKIP ultras and the “bastards and swivel eyed loons” tried to take over.
But just like Ian Smith and the whites of Rhodesia they have already failed. The old guard, one nation Tories who kept their heads down shamelessly and the Brexiteers who now know that they have failed and must make the best of a bad job, along with the majority of totally cynical MPs who just want to keep in power whatever the cost are now a large majority.
Mr Johnson has sad dreams of making a come back, sweeping into power again as his successor fails. It is a pipe dream.
He could, of course, try the only other way out. He can team up with Farage and stand against the Tory party. He could claim that Brexit was right and like Rhodesia it has been abandoned and betrayed. I think he would win up to 5% of the vote, that along with tactical voting by the “Anyone but a Tory” (ABAT) voters might be enough to place the Conservatives behind the Lib Dems and even the SNP.
A final service to the country.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media