Suddenly all is crashing about Boris, set off by something so petty. The polls, which had been abnormally high, have plunged, the voters poised to see that which last week seemed impossible: No. 10 occupied by Sir Keir Starmer, or by whoever his party replaces him with when he has got their foot in the door.
Listen to the frustration in ordinary voices: it is not what those in the Bubble could have expected, because it has built up over time, waiting for some one thing to burst the skin and let it out. The Conservatives were buoyed up on a magic spell woven by Boris Johnson: when that went, the polls plunged.
A staff get-together at the end of the year is nothing special – it would be good staff practice and the thing that millions of us have had – but when our frustration is at boiling point, when we have just been told that Christmas may be cancelled, knowing that next year too could follow, and the next, as this ineradicable disease continues, then to see those who have made the rules excepting themselves – that makes for anger.
Can anything be done? Maybe, if the Conservatives observe the manifesto on which the election was won two years ago. It was a good, achievable manifesto, but it has been abandoned. The government has started to do all those things they berated Labour for planning to do: sky-high taxes, over-regulation, bowing to the woke mob, opening the doors to immigrants, while the pledges of the manifesto are postponed again and again.
Some of the pledges are just beginning to move, although two years of failure to act, in fact eleven years of failure to act, stretch the credulity to the limit.
Only actual, unconditional and unapologetic action in these fields and a slashing of the tax burden can work now. The spell has been broken. Only action can save the situation.
See also
- Is Boris Good Enough? (24 May 2019)
- You dirty, double-crossing chatty rat
- Jacobean court farce
- What do we make of Boris now?
- Boris unleashed
- Build back better, Boris
Books
- The Borisaurus: The Dictionary of Boris Johnson by Simon Walter
- By Boris Johnson:
- By others:
- The Liberal Delusion by John Marsh
- All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class by Tim Shipman
- Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath
- By Thomas Hobbes
