Don't waste all your anger on Boris Johnson -- save some for his enablers

[brooklynite]

The Guardian

Those ministers and bag-carriers who have resigned this week in the name of “integrity” and “decency” display only their lack of either quality. They are, as Keir Starmer jibed in parliament, “the sinking ship fleeing the rat”. Today, parents are worrying about what they will feed their kids, workers are wondering if they can afford to drive to the office, and pensioners are already in dread of a winter of record-high fuel bills. Meanwhile, the Tory MPs handed a landslide have spent the past few weeks and months not governing but plotting the right time to depose their leader, and whom they fancy as a replacement. A vast tableau of national immiseration serves only as the backdrop to their squalid careerism.

Though on one big thing Johnson was quite correct: a man in late middle age cannot change his nature, and he never offered to do so. All that has changed is his value to the politicians, funders and journalists who put him there. His electoral currency was once pure gold. Now it is the most debased metal in Westminster.

That is why his departure will be most greatly celebrated by his own side. But the prime minister who handed out plum jobs to a man accused of sexual harassment (as deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher’s total salary would have been some £115,000), who attended lockdown parties then lied and lied about it, and who tried to defend a chum who broke the lobbying rules, is by no means the cause of the rot in Westminster. Johnson is instead the most obvious and serious symptom of a deep crisis in our democracy.

Consider who might replace him. Sunak and Sajid Javid have together spent 32 years working in high finance. Liz Truss is Nigel Farage without the pint glass. Matt Hancock is Matt Hancock. That is today’s Tory party: a vacant-eyed coalition of bankers, bounders and Brexiteers. They have no ideas, save the most parodic form of Thatcherism. Hand huge home loans to people on housing benefit who can barely afford to eat. Allow mortgages to be passed down fromparent to child, like some 21st-century remake of debt serfdom. When all else fails, attack the BBC for not showing more flags.

[Ocelot II]

1. Sounds a bit familiar...