…… the end of the Thatcher and Major governments.
It’s never a good thing for a government, no matter what party it might be, to either have a situation where the government is mired in sleaze or to lose a high profile member of the government. However to have both things happen at the same time is worse.
I remember back in the days of Margaret Thatcher how her government started to crumble when she lost her Chancellor Nigel Lawson through resignation and her Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe who she sacked over the issue of closer ties to Europe. This situation led to a leadership challenge resulting in the elevation of John Major to the Premiership. Major’s government subsequently ended up badly hit by a series of sexual, economic and political sleaze scandals that ended up tiring out the electorate who then in 1997 elected a Labour government who arguably made the problems that Britain faced worse.
The Boris Johnson government is I’m afraid beset by both sleaze scandals over the personal conduct of some of his MP’s, alleged breaches of the Covid regulations and the resignation of a high profile government Minister, in this case Lord David Frost. To have both sleaze and a minister resign along with the loss of an extremely safe seat to the Liberal Democrats via a protest vote is really not a good place for a Prime Minister to be in.
Lord Frost, or to give him his full title Baron Frost of Allenton, has resigned from the Government over his disquiet and discomfort about the direction of travel that the government is going in. According to at least one press report Lord Frost is worried about the impact of Covid regulations but also about high taxes and the obsession by the Government with economically and socially damaging Net Zero policies.
This resignation could not have come at a worse time for Boris Johnson and will increase pressure on the PM to either resign or change his policies. Lord Frost was a key player in the debate about Britain’s relationship with the EU post Brexit. From looking at Lord Frost’s biography he is a man with immense knowledge of how the EU works and of its strengths and weaknesses. Lord Frost is going to be a difficult person for Boris Johnson to replace.
Lord Frost’s resignation is going to heap yet more problems onto an already embattled Prime Minister and I suspect that the New Year will bring the fabled ‘interesting times’ for Boris Johnson and his government. Going by reports on how backbench MP’s are treating Johnson loyalists such as Nadine Dorries with disdain and contempt in closed online forums, I would not be at all surprised to find that Boris Johnson, a man who many of us held in high regard and had high hopes for back in 2019, faces a leadership challenge around Easter time.
The slow but sure loss of knowledgeable and reliable support will bring Boris down in the end. I do wonder if someone else is pulling Boris’s strings and he is too weak to resist this resulting in trusted and invaluable support drifting away. It might be that those that refer to Boris as the Prime Ministers husband are right and that the constant interference of his wife will end his premiership.
An isolated PM is a weak PM. Boris doesn’t seem to have a reliable constituency in the Tory Party. He has always been somewhat of a mixture, a creature that is neither fish nor fowl. He’s been on the liberal wing of the party with regards to migration such as his support for migration amnesties when he was Greater London Mayor but he has also been on the classical liberal right when it comes to freedom of speech. As for who’s pulling the strings, since Boris became PM I’ve come to agree with Dominic Cummings in that Boris Johnson is a bit of a wonky supermarket trolley, veering this way and that depending on who is advising him. I tend not to agree with the more tin foil hat types who believe that Klaus Schwab is pulling the strings and believe that the influence peddler is more closer to home in the form of his wife Carrie. It is her who is well in with the extreme greens, the tranny extremists and the like.
Yes I would agree with you, it really looks as if Boris and his wife have done for the Conservative party. It’s a terrible shame as I have been associated with the party for many years but now I have resigned as I just can’t be a part of the dishonesty and sleaze anymore.
I rarely join political parties or groups, mainly because, especially when I was on the Soft Left, I’ve been burned in the past by joining a group only to find that the group’s moderate face hid a plethora of nasty middle class authoritarian far leftists. However I felt comfortable joining Cameron’s Tory party as it seemed that he would stand up for free speech and had sidelined the racialist Monday Club types, the slimy corrupt types from the Major era and those who had an irrational hatred of gay people. I voted for Cameron in the 2010 election but was disappointed by the undue influence over Cameron by the Lib Dems and especially over the poor management of the voting system referendum. We could have had a more responsive voting system but basically he let the Lib Dems have full reign on this but they and their allies put up spokespersons and frontmen who represented the very same sorts of crap from the far left to the extreme greens who myself and others believed should not have the extra influence that a proportional voting system might give them.
I voted for the Tories in subsequent elections on the grounds that they were the best of a very bad bunch but I will have to be convinced that it’s worthwhile voting for them again. I’d vote Reform despite my concerns about their constitution policies if they made their political product more professional. My local Tory MP is a quietist sack of shit who really doesn’t seem to do much for his constituency and the party probably needs to replace him with someone who doesn’t have all the woodenness of a Crossroads actors performance.
Doris was always going to be useless. He just took advantage of Brexit and was the only one to promise it all the others being traitors to their country. He didn’t really care though. He just took advantage to get elevated beyond his skill set, which is a that of a self obsessed buffoon.
There was a time though when I had hope, that was his support of Trump but that didn’t survive long once pressure was brought to bear.
He is or rather was a good communicator the problem is that he has turned out to be easily led and what’s worse easily led into the wrong directions.