Boris Johnson: A Depreciation

In characteristic style, Boris Johnson made the Brexit crisis engulfing the Conservative Party all about him. From ostentatiously gesticulating at Chequers and dubbing the plan a "turd", to stumping for Theresa May in a speech backing the cabinet's deal with itself, and then plunging the knife into his boss's back half hour before she addressed Parliament on the government's position, he showed himself to be the cowardly, treacherous self-centred chump he always was.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, Emily Thornberry said Johnson was the worst foreign secretary ever to have taken office. That's a fair assessment. In the last two years, he's rubbed EU politicians up the wrong way. You know, the sort of people the government should be charming to get a half-decent Brexit deal. He's embarrassed the country by constantly winging it, which in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe condemned her to more years in an Iranian jail. And he destroyed what little credibility he had by scuttling off to a tete tete in Afghanistan to avoid the Heathrow vote. Readers will recall Johnson had previously pledged to lie down in front of the bulldozers to prevent it. In short, he's not just the worst foreign secretary we've had in recent times (no doubt Jeremy Hunt will give him a run for his money), he is quite possibly the worst Parliamentarian this century. The man is a poltroon, a deeply deceitful and dishonest chancer, a cynic who grasped at every network, every connection made at Eton and Oxford, and managed to bulldoze himself into plum spots at The Times, The Telegraph, and The Spectator before being given a Tory seat and various stints on BBC programming. There are many millions with more guts, more nous, commitment, and seriousness than Boris Johnson but because they weren't born with his connections or afforded the same advantages, we instead have to suffer lazy mediocrities like him.

If Johnson was a one off, you could put him down to being the one that wriggled through the net, a freak of circumstance that someone with such low ability could climb so high. However, he is not an isolated character. In his temperament, aversion to work, and political outlook there isn't a great deal separating him from his great rival. In fact, look around the Tory cabinet. If this is the best and the brightest the Conservative Party have to offer, one must shudder at the state of the back benches. Idiocy, spitefulness, bigotry, arrogance, cluelessness, these are words that jump to mind when considering the least worst Tory members.

None of this is an accident. It's an entirely understandable consequence of the crisis the Tory party are in. When Thatcherism tore through the political landscape of the 1980s, it wasn't just working class communities and trade unions she laid waste to. The small businesses and manufacturing capital that served and were tied up with the old class relationships got rent asunder. Her right to buy policies, the privatisation of the most profitable parts of the nationalised economy, cheap credit and tax breaks designed to create new constituencies of Tory voters were enough to secure her a majority in 1987, and John Major one in 1992, but it did not bed down a lasting affiliation. These constituencies were, like good Thatcherites, mercenary and when Blair offered them a better deal in 1997 that's where many of them ended up.

Where was their gratitude? Thatcher did not and could not reassert the role the Tories played throughout the earlier part of the century. Just as Labour and the unions socialised millions of people into politics, the Tories did the same. In the late 19th and early 20th century, in large parts of the country their party organised communities, particularly in rural Britain, around village fetes, country fairs, as well as doing the bread and butter stuff. In many more well to do areas the party was the lynchpin of what you might call associational life. A vehicle for paternal do-goodery towards the below stairs classes with charity work, philanthropy, and so on. Such, in want for a better phrase, Tory collectivism was taken to the knackers' yard by Thatcher. Out went a condescending responsibility for the poor, and in came the the bootstraps fetish. Associational life, whereby a Tory activist would combine party activities with charitable commitments became rarer and rarer. It's almost like the membership retreated from the rest of the society, and as they diminished so did the party infrastructure. The Tory Association bars shut down, with a few exceptions, charity work and Toryism were increasing antipodes, not twins, and the party shrank, its political footprint entirely reliant on megabucks donors and their press wing.

New blood doesn't course through the Tory veins in sufficient numbers. What exists are a dwindling band of ageing MPs and councillors, with a small smattering of careerists, and a wing now in the process of decamping from the party over what they see as the betrayal of Brexit. This situation is nothing new, it's been the reality of Tory party life for well over a quarter of a century. Without the refresh it's the well-connected dross who elbow their way to the front. Their underwhelming presence and inability to move with political realities is a symptom, a consequence of earlier Tory success. To win her third term, to defeat the labour movement Thatcher had to set in motion the slow burn destruction of her party. Johnson, Dave and the rest are all creatures of this decomposing party, their political sense impaired and skewed by necrosis. The good news is the Tories are not about to and cannot throw up another Churchill, Disraeli or, for that matter, Thatcher, but the repulsive striplings we see before us are damaging enough. The career of Johnson reminds us of this, he typifies all that is useless, fatuous and decadent. Do right thinking people everywhere need any more encouragement to put the Tory party down for good?