There are a lot of accounts on Social Media created by Britons on the political Right and Centre Right who are, quite rightly in my view, disgusted at the way that the current leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, was installed as leader by MP’s with no reference to the members of the party. I tend to agree with the negative comments about Mr Sunak as he comes over as more than a little ‘Starmerish’ in that he will say anything that he believes will play well with potential voters, such as promises to crack down on illegal migration, but doesn’t put these promises into action.

But what these social media commentators in my opinion get wrong is their solution to the problem of Shifty Sunak. All too many of these conservative commentators believe that the way out of the mess and the way to get voters to come back to the Tory fold is to ‘bring back Boris’. I don’t really think that this is the answer, we’ve tried Boris Johnson and the outcome was not good.

Boris Johnson achieved what no other Conservative Party leader has achieved since the glory days of Margaret Thatcher which is to win an effective and unassailable majority in the House of Commons. Unfortunately it was a win that was squandered. Boris Johnson, a Prime Minister who I initially welcomed as I believed, based on his previous writings and speeches, that he would defend and enhance rights that are extremely important, such as freedom of speech. Unfortunately on this issue as with many others Boris Johnson let the voters down.

Boris Johnson fronted a brilliant election campaign in 2019 but sadly underneath the campaign was little more than fluff and bubbles. What we got was often the complete opposite of what the Party and Mr Johnson implied that we would get.

Boris Johnson campaigned like Winston Churchill but governed like Greta Thunberg and by doing so has damaged Britain’s economy, made Britain vulnerable to energy price shocks and put us in hock to the Chinese Communists who are the major global suppliers of ‘green’ technology. His government did nothing to enhance freedom of speech and under his watch the censorious Left ramped up their influence and their abilities to shut down debate. His government and those that followed it has been relaxed about the release upon the population of dangerous legislative monsters such as the Online Safety Bill which will do little to protect children from porn and predators but will further eviscerate the free speech rights of Britons.

When the big event that challenges a Prime Minister, in this case in the form of SarsCov2, came along Boris Johnson flunked it. Whilst his leadership did give Britain an edge when it came to vaccine development, his administration failed when it threw away decades of pandemic studies by the UK government and its scientific advisors by abandoning a pandemic plan that, if implemented, would have spared Britons from some of the damage done to the economy, society and individuals by the lockdown policy.

On immigration the Boris Johnson government also failed. Despite his rhetoric when campaigning and whilst governing, Boris Johnson’s government presided over an increase in immigration both legal and illegal. Even at the height of the SarsCov2 pandemic Mr Johnson’s government kept the nation’s doors propped open. We had a situation where the pubs were forcibly closed but the borders were wide open. Mr Johnson’s government also liberalised the immigration system allowing foreign students to stay in the UK longer than they did in the past and did not implement the Australian style points based immigration system that many in his own party had called for. There was also no serious intent by the Boris Johnson government to remove from the UK those migrants who had either no right to be here or who had committed crimes whilst living in Britain. His government did very little to prevent illegal entries via the English Channel coast or via cross border freight transport leading to a situation where millions upon millions of pounds of taxpayers money are expended on housing and feeding a group that could reasonably be described as invaders not refugees. A government that was serious about controlling immigration would have put more effort into both immigration policy and standing up to well funded left wing legal figures and NGO’s who approve of and promote open borders ideas. On this issue of illegal migration specifically Boris Johnson, as I said back in September 2020 was less a hard man in the actor Chuck Norris mode, but more like ‘Cuck Boris’. Mr Johnson has always had some pro-migration ideas, when he was Mayor of Greater London and whilst he was campaigning for this position many of us discovered that he was favourable to the idea of an amnesty for illegal migrants, despite this policy being a failure wherever else it has been tried as it merely encourages more illegal migration because migrants believe that if there’s one amnesty then there might well be another. America tried migration amnesties under Ronald Reagan but it did not solve the problems of illegal migration, the USA still has a horrific illegal migration problem which is bad for Americans themselves and for those who pay traffickers to take them across America’s worryingly permeable border.

On the economy, the handling of SarsCov2, migration, free speech, energy security, cultural protection and much much more, Boris Johnson and his administration failed. Some of this failure can be put down to the nature of the current Conservative Party in Westminster which contains MP’s who came in during the David Cameron years and who are so weak that they are often indistinguishable from their Janus faced Lib Dem parliamentary colleagues. But a stronger, more focussed and competent leader, might have been able to bribe, cajole, dominate or even blackmail the weak Remain supporting out of touch Lib Dem-a-likes on his back benches and make this bunch of what Baroness Thatcher once called ‘wets’, back policies that would have benefited Britons.

Boris Johnson was not the sort of leader that was needed in either the political circumstances, which include carrying left liberal Tories who were Parliamentary hangovers from the Cameron and Theresa May years nor was he a good leader in the face of other challenges such as SarsCov2, energy shocks and social and cultural problems. I’ve seen enough of Boris Johnson to know that, unlike others in Britain’s centre-right, I really, really don’t want him back.