Enda Brady: Bumbling Boris is a spent force — Britain cannot let him back in
Boris Johnson remains a deeply unpopular and divisive figure in British life. Picture: Mary Turner/Pool via AP
Boris Johnson celebrated his 59th birthday on Monday in Oxfordshire and you can be sure there was cake and fizz and jollity. Perhaps a bumbling speech and a few mentions of a Greek god and a Roman emperor. Classic Boris, then.
If there was mention of a Roman ruler, Nero would have been apt. Fiddling while all around him burns.
And the flames were certainly rising on the same day in Westminster where MPs voted to back a damning report that found the former prime minister lied to Parliament over partygate.
In the end, just seven MPs voted against the Privileges Committee’s findings. With a total of 354 votes in favour, MPs also supported the sanctions recommended by the committee, including banning Mr Johnson from having a pass to access parliament.
Out in the real world, people have had enough. I live a couple of miles down the road from his nine-bed €4.5m mansion (with its moat) and ordinary families are struggling. These are the very people he thinks adore him and want him back inside No 10 Downing Street. The reality is that he remains a deeply unpopular and divisive figure in British life.
But on Planet Boris, he has apparently been telling anyone who will listen (and people are tired now, Boris, tired of you) that Winston Churchill didn’t become prime minister until he was 65.
What he has never grasped is that Churchill put his country first. Johnson only ever thinks about what’s best for himself. People have finally realised this now, even if it is a decade or two too late.
So the comeback ship hasn’t just sailed, it has sunk to the bottom of the Channel. Rishi Sunak will never sanction Johnson’s name getting on the approved list of Conservative candidates for any by-election and he knows it.
His allies point out that the core Conservative party membership love him and the energy he brings to any campaign. The charisma, the enthusiasm, the swagger and the clever three-word slogans.
Put simply, the majority of his backers live in a wealthy echo chamber that doesn’t listen to the outside world. These are the very same people, remember, who gave the world Liz Truss. They point to the crushing 80-seat majority Johnson inflicted on Labour in the last election, though in truth, an Eskimo could have been parachuted in to defeat Jeremy Corbyn.
The right-wing press backed Johnson and ran scare stories predicting that under Corbyn’s rule the UK economy would plummet and migrants would arrive in record numbers. Everything they wrote came true, just under Johnson and Truss, and now the hapless Sunak is left to pick up the pieces.
My father used to say to us when we were children and one of us was misbehaving that if you laugh at an eejit you just make an even bigger eejit out of him. The problem with the British is that they didn’t just laugh at Boris Johnson, they voted for him.
And now they’re paying the price. Every aspect of British life has got worse in recent years, the country’s international reputation has rarely been lower and hard-working decent people are genuinely struggling to make ends meet.
Mortgages have skyrocketed, inflation is touching 9%, the health service is a mess and more than €4m a day is being spent housing asylum-seekers in hotels. Post- Brexit Britain has become a laughing stock.
He saw that referendum as a personal opportunity to make a grab for Downing Street and went for it, with utterly disastrous consequences.
I often wonder what Britain could have achieved if the Johnson family had joined an actual circus instead of turning their country into one. I think back to the buzz around the place during the 2012 Olympics, but all that momentum has been squandered.
And lest Johnson ever claim credit for the games’ success, they were brought to London by a Labour government. Even the famous ‘Boris bike’ in the capital was the idea of a previous mayoral team (and they borrowed it from the French).
Brexit was never going to bring anything good and he probably knew it. But that craven lust for power was just too strong and Johnson has never been one to deny himself anything.
To understand him and his bizarre rise, you need to first understand the class system in the UK. The British working class have always doffed their caps to the elite, instead of asking just why the rich have so very much and everyone else has so little. That servile attitude emboldens people like Johnson.
If Trump wanted to ‘Make America Great Again’, what harm could Boris do in just wanting to make politics great craic?
So what now for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?
Those loyal allies (note how he never has any friends) are briefing journalists that his best chance of a comeback is to go “submarine” and send his periscope up if Rishi Sunak loses the 2024 general election and is replaced. His thinking appears to be that a new Tory leader will sanction his return, possibly in a by-election in 2026.
Ask yourself this — what party leader in their right mind would want such a scheming non-team player on their side, waiting to seize power? Nobody. Literally, nobody.
So Johnson will resume his column writing career for a right wing tabloid, reportedly for “north of £500k a year”, according to those same allies. They say he intends to shape the political weather with his thoughts, yet the first piece was about how he ended up vomiting after taking a weight-loss drug. Again, classic Boris, always after the shortcut.
Johnson is a big believer in three word slogans. If I was asked to write one now for Keir Starmer’s Labour to offer the British electorate ahead of next year’s election I’d give him this — you deserve better.
As for Johnson, two words suffice. Yesterday’s man.
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