The Prime Ministers Who Killed the Conservative Party: Boris Johnson, Part 6

We're picking up a selection of articles from the last ten years about Conservative prime ministers who led a relentless push to the left and ruined the party they led. This article was first published on June 8, 2022, under the headline “Tories must remove their blinkers and oust toxic Johnson now.”

The supporters of the now-lame prime minister continue to be wrong. Apart from a few giddy individuals who think he can still prove himself and lead the Conservatives to power for another five years in 2024, Johnson’s support comes from those who think any alternative will be worse.

These people are not only mistaken in their beliefs, they are themselves morally compromised if they cannot grasp the simple fact that, quite simply, Boris Johnson is unfit to lead anything or hold any public office.

Bruce Anderson in his perfectly worded commentary for the Reaction The Conservative Party website explained on Monday why it was time for the Tories to sack Johnson, citing what happened on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral last Friday. when the Prime Minister and his wife Carrie arrived for the Jubilee Thanksgiving service.

He wrote: The crowd outside St Pauls can hardly be considered an opinion poll. It is fair to assume, however, that they were not the sort of people who naturally boo.. Yet they booed the Prime Minister. This is significant. Such aesthetic disgust at the sight of Boris Johnson on the steps of the cathedral tells us what many ordinary people in England think.

What followed was a delightful example of dramatic irony. The Prime Minister was made to read the following passage: “Whatever things are true, whatever things are honest, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report; if there is any virtue, if there is any praise, think about these things.”

We know that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Nevertheless, Boris must be congratulated for having uttered these words without cadaverizing, as the actors would say. Speaking of cadaverizing, the Almighty must be congratulated for his restraint, in matters of lightning strikes. Hypocrisy is surely the closest this Prime Minister will ever come to virtue.

Anderson also explained why Johnson's lies were untenable: “The relationship between him and the party will always be contractual. If people think he's going to win an election, they'll stick with him. If they don't, they won't.”

Lies are part of this story. When Boris was 17, his wise headmaster, the eminent classicist Martin Hammond, wrote to his father Stanley, who was not the ideal recipient, that his son should understand an important point. The chains of obligation that bind societies together should apply to him as well.

He never did. To be fair to him, it is not a question of thinking that once he is prime minister he can do whatever he wants. He has always believed that he can do whatever he wants and not do what he does not like. That includes thinking about government policy.

We at TCW I have always maintained that a man with such fundamental character flaws is not fit to be prime minister. He is where he is because he has managed to get out of them time and time again.

His interview with Sky News Just after losing the confidence of 42 per cent of Conservative MPs, he has tried once again to pull himself out of what he considers to be the latest crisis in his drama-addicted lifestyle.

He may rejoice in it, but MPs should no longer prepare themselves to play second fiddle to his destructive dramas. It was a strange and uncomfortable display of bravado, of the sort he doubtless tried out with his masters at Eton.

Even in these times of disappointing politicians, institutionalized incompetence and stupidity, this performance by a sitting prime minister has hit a new low. Let us hope it is the last. The past has, after all, a strange way of catching up with people.

So what about the fear that a candidate worse than the lockdown-loving Jeremy Hunt, whose name people are most concerned about, will emerge? Is that a sufficient argument to stick with a leader who is so deeply flawed and whose word has been repeatedly shown to be untrustworthy? Not to mention that it is a form of fallacious reasoning based on an unknown assessment of risk, a bit like the General Medical Council saying that we cannot strike off Doctor A for serious misconduct because Doctor B who gets the job might be worse.

Worse still, such thinking prevents the few honest, moral and competent MPs from having a chance of replacing Johnson. It even prevents, and this is only a glimmer of hope, the possibility of a man or woman coming forward to work to restore conservatism within the party and roll back the massive (and recklessly spendthrift) authoritarian state and the radical elitist policies developed under its watch.

Anyone who is under the illusion that Boris is actually holding the thin blue line of a Horatio on the bridge defending true liberalism and conservatism seriously needs to have their head examined.

If we get it wrong again, what difference will it make? Andrew Cadman recently said that the record of the last 50 years suggests that more radical and anti-democratic projects will be imposed against the will of the people, the scale and audacity of which we can only guess at. So-called Conservative MPs should think seriously about whether they really want to ally themselves with this.

Of course, if Johnson had any decency he would follow Margaret Thatcher's example when the 1990 leadership contest ended in a 204-152 victory for Michael Heseltine.

That was not enough for Mrs Thatcher to pass the two thresholds specified in the party rules, which stipulated that the winner had to obtain more than 50 per cent of the total vote but also have a 15 per cent lead over the runner-up.

After initially saying she would run for a second round, She took stock and courageously sounded out the opinions of her close colleagues.

One after another, she was told it was time to step aside. She did. But she was a woman of character, decency, dignity, principle and moral courage. Boris Johnson is none of these things, but he is exactly as Anderson describes him: a grotesque fool who clowns around as if he can’t wait to get back to the latest party at 10 Downing Street.

He asks: Is he the most useless man who ever became Prime Minister? Morally, Lloyd George was pretty mediocre, but he had other qualities that made up for it. Wilson was a useless Prime Minister, but a better human being. Boris: There is only one possible summary. A man without a single redeeming trait. It is time his party recognised that and redeemed itself.

We agree.