A good friend of mine thinks I left out some important issues from my “In defense of Boris?” blog of a couple of weeks ago.
One of those issues is The Leakers. They’re the real piss-takers.
Again, I’m not defending Boris for breaking lockdown rules – he’s a toad – but surely successive leaks from Downing Street – not just about Partygate but lots of other issues as well and for a number of years – are more serious offences. The leaks are criminal. Treasonous. Their intent is to undermine a democratically elected British Government and Prime Minister. If anyone gets rid of Boris and / or the Tories, it should be the electorate. We the people. And therein lies the problem. We the people cannot be trusted to make the right decisions. After all, we voted for Brexit and then for a Tory Government. They were the wrong decisions for the leakers, so they, Starmer, the BBC etc. have shoved their snouts into a cake as a means to act undemocratically.
No wonder Putin is laughing. Not often he can take the moral high ground.
The result of the Partygate leaks in particular has been to divert time and resources from dealing with Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine, doing away with the NI Protocol, managing the (hopefully) tail end of Covid, mitigating the cost-of-living crisis and all sorts of other immediate, life-threatening, life-altering, life-stressing stuff.
One of Starmer’s more hilarious Sermon-on-the-Mount moments was when he preached that Boris was unable to govern the country because he was distracted by Partygate. Well stop distracting him then, you hypocrite. Put country before politics, before personal ambition, before inanity.
Now then. Who exactly are the leakers? Disgruntled or
over-ambitious cabinet ministers? Remoaning, leftie, woke Metropolitan-urban-elite
uncivil servants (haven’t they signed the Official Secrets Act?). Current and
former special advisers (e.g. Dominic Cummings)? All are snakes in the long grass
and must be suitably eliminated, disposed of, punished.
Boris has been blamed for a failure of leadership over Partygate. But how do you lead snakes? They’re snakes, not sheep. (Thinking of the Pied Piper though, they are rats.) And how do you overturn a drinking / party / ‘boys’’-club culture that has existed for longer than Boris has been shagging?
He’s been taunted about not being able to lead his own party. How do you lead bitter, blind, bungling, ball-less backbenchers (be still my beating Thesaurus) like Theresa May?
My good friend also wanted me to point out that there are peace chiefs and there are war chiefs, and that Boris was not cut out for any war, let alone Covid. Then again, had his predecessors put down their own wine glasses long enough to design a robust pandemic emergency plan, Boris might have got off to a less faltering start and been less inclined to listen to worst-case-scenario, scare-mongering, nothing-to-lose, left-leaning, real-people-detached data-junkies. Maybe if there was a scientist in the Cabinet, they’d have been able to counter the hysteria. On the other hand, farmer George Eustace is in charge of Defra (farming), and he should be the first to go in any reshuffle.
Boris’s strength as a leader is his ability to delegate to the right people, e.g. Cummings BC (i.e. Before Carrie); Jacob Rees-Mogg (he’s exceedingly knowledgeable and eloquent and sounds reasonable about so many topics, and I find that a tad sexy); Lord Frost (he’s so right wing and patriotic that he really is a turn-on). But what do you do when there aren’t enough ‘right people’ available? Be more hands-on? Re-strategise? Easy to be an armchair critic, i’n’t it.
So what should Boris do now? Do what he does best. Communicate directly to the great British people. Look them in the eye. Tell them that as from now, he’s going to ignore all-things Partygate and focus on running the country, dealing with what the people want him to deal with, and leave the snakes in their own pit of puerility. He should taunt the leakers and confidence-breachers with a warning that their days are numbered as he is asking Cressida Dick (oh God, that’s going to be a disaster then) to investigate their crimes of treason. He is also setting up an independent task-force to recommend reforms to the civil service to make sure they work for Government, not the other way round.
He should end by promising, as repentance, not to re-stand at the next general election.
He can always stand at the one after that and let the people have the final say.
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