Floundering Boris leaves no doubt: our PM is a
showman out of his depth
John Crace
Clueless on health policy, clueless on benefits. No
wonder Dom is still in a job – he runs the show
We’ve reached the point where the only way to understand the state the country is in is to realise that it has become a banana republic.
@JohnJCrace
Wed 27 May
2020 19.49 BSTLast modified on Wed 27 May 2020 20.00 BST
We’ve
reached the point where the only way to understand the state the country is in
is to realise that it has become a banana republic.
A failed
state run by a bad joke of a prime minister, who prioritises the job security
of his elite advisers over the health of millions. A man who sees no need to be
across the most basic points of government policy and is so inarticulate that
he can’t even start a sentence let alone finish one.
It’s normal
for a prime minister to appear before the liaison committee – the supergroup of
select committee chairs – at least three times a year. This was the first time
Boris Johnson had bothered to turn up in more than 10 months. And you could see
why. Even with Dominic Cummings sitting just off screen – Boris’s eyes kept
darting to the right, desperate for help – holding up placards with something
approximating an answer, Johnson was lost for words. The great populist who
doesn’t even realise he has long since lost the support of the people. A
mini-dictator surrounded by yes men locked inside the No 10 bunker.
What made
this even more pathetic and desperate a spectacle was that Boris clearly
believed he had prepared thoroughly. If he had, then his short-term memory is
completely shot. More likely though, Boris’s idea of preparation is just a
quick 10 minute skim of a briefing note.
Boris is
the supreme narcissist – the apogee of entitled arrogance in which other people
are there only to serve his needs. A fragile ego, disguising an absence of any
self worth.What’s more, you sense he knows it. That in the wee, wee hours he
looks through a glass darkly and sees the blurred outlines of his limitations
and failure.
The session
started with questions from committee chair, Bernard Jenkin, and Boris was
clearly expecting friendly fire. Only to many people’s surprise – possibly even
his own – Bernie turned out to be no patsy. Instead he went straight to the
point. Why was there to be no cabinet secretary inquiry into Dominic Cummings’s
clear breach of the government coronavirus guidelines.
“Um...
er... well,” Boris blustered looking frantically to Classic Dom for help. Up
went the placard ‘It’s time to move on.’ “Um... er... well... I think what the
country wants is to move on,” he said.
What the
opinion polls have clearly shown is that at least 70% of the country think that
Laughing Boy is basically taking the piss – one rule for the elites, another
for the little people. Only Boris somehow ignored that, believing that he knew
better what the people really thought than they did. Who would have guessed
that Boris would have ascribed to the Marxist idea of false consciousness?
Six times
Boris insisted that the country wanted to move on. Something I’m sure the
families of those who have died – not to mention the many thousands who could
yet die as the prime minister trashed his own public health message to protect
a chum – must have been delighted to hear.
Pete
Wishart, Meg Hillier and Yvette Cooper all went in for the kill. Had Boris
actually seen the evidence that Cummings had provided for his special and
different Covid-19 fortnight away on his father’s estate? Boris nodded
fiercely. He had.
And the
evidence was that it was Dom who was running the country and he didn’t have the
power to sack him.
Nor could
he explain the difference between deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries’s
clear instructions to stay at home and the supine advice of several cabinet
ministers who had insisted that maybe having to look after your own child
constituted exceptional circumstances. Boris’s best guess was that maybe
Harries hadn’t been as clear as he would have liked her to be and he hoped that
she would come on message in the near future.
He ended
the section on Cummings by insisting that all the stories that Dom had
corroborated in his rose garden press conference were essentially false.
Things didn’t
improve when Jenkin moved on to other areas of the government’s handling of the
coronavirus. Boris had only the sketchiest idea of how the new track and trace
system that was meant to come in to operation the following day would work. A
nation panicked. He even said he was forbidden from making any promises on
dates for reaching government targets. Let that sink in. The prime minister is
forbidden from making his own policy. If we had been in any doubt who was
running the country we weren’t any more.
Boris
didn’t even know the basics of how his own benefits system operated. This was
Government 101 and the prime minister was still out of his depth. During the
worst health crisis for a century we are lions led by dead donkeys.
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