The clown prince - Boris Johnson

[Lofos-5]

The clown prince

The former foreign secretary’s bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party is gathering momentum

The Brexiteers’ great white hope

ONE of Boris Johnson’s favourite phrases is aut homo aut mus: are you a man or a mouse? The former foreign secretary, classicist and contender for the Conservative Party leadership is going out of his way to prove that he is no rodent. Barely a week passes without his lobbing a missile at Theresa May in the form of a newspaper article, speech, bon mot (or faux pas). He uses his weekly column in the Daily Telegraph to explain why she is making a mess of things. On September 9th he took to the pages of the Mail on Sunday to deliver his most incendiary one-liner yet: “We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier,” he wrote, referring to the EU’s chief negotiator.

Never a strong leader, Mrs May has been weakened by her travails over Brexit. On September 11th members of the European Research Group (ERG), an 80-strong collection of Brexit-supporting MPs, met in Westminster to discuss the mechanics of bringing down the prime minister. Mr Johnson is the prime contender to replace her. But what are his chances?

She will be at her most vulnerable in November or December when (and if) she returns from Brussels with a deal—presumably a modified version of her Chequers proposal—on which the House of Commons will vote. Steve Baker, the shop steward of the Brexiteers, claims that he has 80 votes gainst Chequers. That could trigger a confidence vote on the prime minister.

Mrs May might well win such a vote, if only because Mr Johnson is so unpopular among Tory MPs. His problem is not just that the majority of Tory MPs voted “remain” in the referendum, and hate him as leader of the Brexiteers. MPs of all political persuasions regard him as a cad. One senior Tory says that “it’s 100% inconceivable that he’ll become leader of the Conservative Party…He’s a media clown, not a serious politician.” “He’s a shit who doesn’t give a shit about anything but himself,” says another. The list of charges against him is long: he doesn’t believe in anything but his own advancement; he doesn’t lift a finger to help his colleagues; he was a disaster as foreign secretary.

He has one big thing going for him, in the eyes of most Tory MPs: his performance at the polls. When he won two terms as mayor of Labour-leaning London he was praised for possessing the “Heineken factor”—the ability to reach parts of the country that other Tories couldn’t reach.

But since Brexit, Heineken has turned into Marmite: while some still like him, many loathe him. When he attended the England v India cricket match at the Oval on September 8th and his face flashed up on the screen, the crowd booed. A recent YouGov poll found that, among the general public, Mr Johnson leads Mrs May on “being liked” (36% to 29%) but trails her by 24% to 31% on “being a good prime minister”. More important, among Conservative voters he is on par with Mrs May on “being liked” and trails her by 42% to 69% in the good-prime minister stakes.

But should Mrs May lose a confidence vote, Mr Johnson has a good chance. The two further hurdles are probably superable. He has to get onto a shortlist of two MPs that the parliamentary party sends to the party’s 124,000 members, and then he has to win the membership’s support.

On the first, the Brexiteers, who include not just the ERG but other eurosceptics, have enough votes to get one of their own onto the final shortlist, and are likely to coalesce behind Mr Johnson. Jacob Rees-Mogg, their leader, has already said that he thinks that Mr Johnson would make an excellent prime minister.

On the second, Tory party members like Mr Johnson more than Tory MPs do—and are getting keener with every suicide-vest jibe. In a poll published on September 6th by Conservative Home, a website, Mr Johnson came top, with 35% of the vote; Sajid Javid, the home secretary, in second place, got 15%. A month earlier Mr Johnson got 29% and Mr Javid 19%. As Mr Johnson’s numbers go up those of his rival Brexiteers go down: Mr Rees-Mogg, the most extreme Brexiteer, is running at 10% and Michael Gove, the most pragmatic, is at 6%. In a party that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, Mr Johnson is the popular leader of the Brexit cause.

There is an uncomfortably close parallel with the rise of Labour’s leader. Jeremy Corbyn was distrusted by the vast majority of Labour MPs but nevertheless won the support of party members. And just as Mr Corbyn has tapped into deep wells of anger on the left, so Mr Johnson might on the right. If he succeeds, it will be unfortunate for the country.

(Economist)

[WHL]

The whole conservative party is a sick joke at the moment, should rename themselves 'The Keystone cop party'

[Devil]

The whole conservative party is a sick joke at the moment, should rename themselves 'The Keystone cop party'

The whole conservative and labour parties are a sick joke at the moment, should rename themselves 'The Keystone cop parliament'

[OhSusana]

Another interesting article about Johnson, from the former Irish Ambassador -

To Boris Johnson, the truth really is an alien concept
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... uth-brexit

I have a confession to make. Boris Johnson and I have a quite a bit in common. We attended the same Oxford College (Balliol). We studied the same subject (classics). We were presidents of the same debating society (the Oxford Union)….

To be fair, I don’t believe that Johnson’s fatuous claim about extra Brexit money for the NHS or his glib dismissal of the profoundly important Irish border issue should be understood as lies. To tell a lie, one must first understand that there is such a thing as truth. Mere frivolousness about matters that will impact on ordinary people, especially in the UK itself, seems to me to be a greater threat.,,,

Thucydides wrote that most people will not take the trouble of finding out the truth but are more inclined to accept the first story they hear. Watching Johnson hold forth to his faithful when he dropped into the Tory party conference last week, it struck me that he may have picked up something at university after all.