United Kingdom

muriel_volestrangler

(101,361 posts) Fri Jul 22, 2022, 11:45 AM Jul 2022

Johnson's squalid departure

That unreality is compounded by the fact that whilst Johnson’s shameful premiership is in one sense over, it still lingers on, like those apocryphal guillotined heads which continue to speak after being severed. In his case, that speech consists not of repentance for the crimes that led to his execution, but is more like a foul-mouthed reminder of why the court passed sentence. For, unsurprisingly, he is not passing his final weeks as a dignified caretaker of the nation. Rather, he skips vital meetings to host parties in his taxpayer-funded mansion, cadges outings in RAF fighter planes, makes spiteful boasts about his previous illegal actions, and hatches tawdry schemes to reward his cronies with seats in the House of Lords. Nothing so vividly illustrates the many reasons, at once banal and corrupt, that he was unfit to hold office as the squalid manner of his departure from it.

Perhaps most dangerous in the long-term, whilst bragging emptily of having ‘got Brexit done’, Johnson speaks, Trump-like, of plots by the “deep State” and Labour to undo Brexit. Having done so much to saddle the country with Brexit, and in a particularly damaging form, his words can only contribute to making it still harder for any future government even to ameliorate it. They set the stage for him to continue to exert a malign influence on British politics for, as Rafael Behr, consistently Britain’s best political columnist, perfectly puts it, “the role of former Prime Minister will suit his taste for elevated status without any burden of responsibility”.

At the same time, the very fact that Johnson and so many other Brexiters warn of the possibility of Brexit being ‘undone’ is a vivid testimony to their and its abject failure. Brexiters envisaged themselves as having ‘liberated the nation’ and they promised a great future, not at some distant time but immediately. Yet, over six years since the vote, the number of people who think Brexit was a mistake is now at a “record high”. Even so, audaciously, Brexiters like Reform Party leader Richard Tice implore them to “put their shoulder behind making [Brexit] a huge success”. That’s pretty rich given that not only have the advice and warnings of remainers been treated with contempt, but that Brexiters assured everyone that there would be no wheel to put any shoulders behind: the success was guaranteed.

Instead, Brexit has, on any reasonable reckoning of its effects and its popularity, failed as a project of national liberation and renewal. But, as outlined in last week’s post, it has been barely discussed in the leadership election. As Annette Dittert, the outstanding foreign correspondent who heads the London Bureau of German broadcaster ARD, observes in her fine, wide-ranging essay on the coming post-Johnson era, “none of the would-be successors has the courage to question the founding myth behind all this chaos: Brexit. None of them will admit that the latter is little more than a mirage”.

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/suffocating-unreality.html

Those "spiteful boasts":

Boris Johnson did not “see off” Brenda Hale – so why did he say that he had?

Yesterday the now departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in the House of Commons:

“With iron determination we saw off Brenda Hale and we got Brexit done.”

But it was not Boris Johnson and his government that “saw off Brenda Hale” but the Judicial Pensions Act 1959 (as amended and unamended by subsequent legislation).
...
Indeed, Miller 2 – which held that Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament was unlawful – was when that unconstitutional antic was “seen off”.
...