Family. Love. Constancy.
They may not matter much to Boris Johnson – but they’re the only things that matter to everyone else.
Listen to the phone-ins, the news programmes and even the frosty old BBC in the wake of the Downing Street Garden Party revelations – that lockdown “work event” the Prime Minister finally admitted to attending during Prime Ministers Questions.
Story after story with heart-wrenching detail about loss, isolation. Stories of rule-following despite every instinct to behave differently. Rule-following through upbringing and a belief in the greater good – even though hearts were broken by failing to answer that greater, higher duty to comfort and coorie folk known and loved over long lifetimes.
Mothers who died alone, partners who went into hospital terrified, never to return, dads who died unable to understand why family could only wave from their nursing home window. And the countless folk who couldn’t and wouldn’t push to the front of the Covid health queue despite symptoms of terminal disease.
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All these folk. All these memories still alive amongst friends and family who still struggle with guilt and shame – feelings Boris Johnson so evidently doesn’t feel.
Cannot feel.
Grief – even in the Commons – that hits the Speaker mid-sentence, out-of-the-blue, hard and overwhelming like a hammer blow. Grief that reduces grown men to tears – men like MP Jim Shannon whose mother-in-law died alone – his choked words prompting an instant wave of solidarity across the Commons. Empathy – summoned so quickly by the simple sound of another’s person’s genuine emotion. Powerful and pervasive.
Family. Love. Constancy.
Who would’ve guessed that failing to judge the enduring power of these higher human emotions would finally unseat the “bullet-proof” Boris Johnson?
And make no mistake, despite support from shameless Tories during his Commons performance, Boris is trussed up and ready to be despatched when the grey men and women of the Tory Party decide the time is right.
Yes, his delays in Covid lockdown, crony contracts, devastating Universal Credit cuts, Brexit “deal” and gas-dependent energy policy count as worse crimes against the post-war settlement which underpins this fragile Union.
Sure, his earlier assertion that he knew of no parties at Downing Street during lockdown now stands revealed as an obvious lie – as Sue Gray may affirm if she’s capable of delivering such a difficult conclusion to her own boss.
And of course, even though Peter Stefanovic’s video – circulating for more than a year – lists a dozen other outright lies by Boris at the despatch box, this lie about that Downing Street party will be a bridge too far for the smirking PM.
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Partly because he is Boris Nae Mates, partly because the contrast with what he imposed on the public looks so bad, but mostly because of the North Shropshire by-election and subsequent opinion polls. Boris the Winner ain’t winning any more. And since Brexit is mostly done, it’s impossible to see Boris leading the Tories into the next General Election.
He is a PM with nae loyal pals, nae grand, overarching political purpose and nae lead in the opinion polls. That equals toast.
But as everyone rushes to analyse how, when and by whom he will be despatched so that a new leader can address the Tory conference in October, we should pause for a minute to consider why it was a Downing Street party that finally did for him.
Family. Love. Constancy.
Boris completely underestimated the importance of these human values to the population of the UK because of the unimportance of these human values to Boris Johnson.
I ken that’s a harsh thing to say. Who knows what emotions Boris Johnson feels – there must be some beyond brazen self-interest.
But the terrible grief felt by people whose family members died alone during lockdown and the capacity for that grief to turn into anger at the first revelation of arrant hypocrisy and double standards by Number 10, all those utterly predictable human dynamics were misjudged by the PM with the supposedly infallible “common touch”.
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The speed with which those memories return – almost two years on – misjudged.
The empathy that lets others feel the Covid horrors that passed them by – likewise misjudged.
The visceral, stomach-turning disgust felt as the different picture of party life in Downing Street unfolded – well, you need to have truly loved and lost in this life to know how deep those feelings go.
Thanks to Covid, there is too much grief around in Britain – even in Tory-voting England – for a smirking, rule-breaking, disrespectful Prime Minister to be tholed.
Let’s not waste space by listing his multiple liaisons and children, lack of loyalty and many betrayals. Let’s just say Boris couldn’t understand the potency of Covid, loss, love and grief well enough to anticipate the backlash from a grief-stricken public when his laissez-faire partying was found out.
Boris has been steadfast only to wealthy Conservative donors, as the Good Law Project established when its case against the UK Government’s VIP lane for PPE contracts was upheld in the High Court.
So, what happens next?
Thanks to his thumping majority, Johnson’s fate rests with Conservative back benchers – so sickeningly biddable that they crammed PMQs with trivial questions about micro plastics pollution and dinosaur fossil discoveries while the Prime Minister’s integrity was the only important matter to hand.
But they protected Boris Johnson for one reason only: his is the hand that feeds. But others are available. And plotting. And circling.
Hell mend the whole malign lot of them.
The SNP’s Steven Bonnar MP pinpointed the core issue. “Boris may not understand how to be socially distant but he is morally distant from the rest of us.”
The morally distant Prime Minister. That’s what Boris Johnson has always been. Even if it’s taken some hingers on some time tae twig.
READ MORE: Who is Sue Gray – and how is she involved in protecting the Union?
Naturally, in the wake of his PMQs performance questions abound – particularly in Scotland.
Does Douglas Ross get political brownie points for his outspoken criticism of Boris’ behaviour? Hardly.
Might this be the moment an independent Scottish Conservative Party is formed? It should be – but likely not.
Is it significant that Scottish opinion is united across the political spectrum? Actually, yes it is.
That universal condemnation of a lying, rule-breaking Prime Minister is the surest sign that Scotland possesses a different political culture that requires its own independent governance.
Did Keir Starmer perform well enough to improve Labour’s electoral chances?
Will the Sue Gray enquiry conclude Boris misled parliament – in which case jotters should be delivered? And if he remains in post, will Boris survive the (likely disastrous) local elections?
Part of me simply doesn’t care. Part of me refuses to plough any more emotional energy into the game-playing that surrounds a man ready to brazen out anything, lie about everything and orchestrate willing Tory MPs to divert our gaze from the only thing that cannot be forgiven or forgotten.
He just doesn’t care about people.
That’s partly a personality issue, partly a product of his privileged social background but mostly a political outlook that’s generated and reinforced by the culture and voters that elected him and still buy his party’s basic contention – that there is no such thing as society and it’s everyone for themselves.
Scotland needs away from all of this. And that’s what Yessers will spend 2022 planning, no matter how events pan out for the shameless Boris Johnson – a hollow man Scots saw through from the very start.
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