British Government on Verge of Collapse

[PeterRS]

The headline may be a little over the top, but the fact that Boris Johnson's government has had 40 resignations and the sacking of another all virtually in the last 24 hours is the worst in British history. Many have occupied the most senior cabinet posts in government. It is a truly damning indictment of the man and his leadership.

Yet there were more than a few who realised at the outset that this is almost precisely how a Johnson administration would bite the dust. Indeed, I am reminded of what I wrote on this Board some years ago when Johnson was running for the position of Prime Minister. Earlier in his career he had been a journalist for the right-wing Daily Telegraph newspaper. His highly respected editor at the time, Max Hastings, wrote on June 24 2019 about the prospect of his becoming PM in what was a disastrous article for Johnson but one whose predictions, rather as those of the witches at the start of Shakespeare's Scottish play which we cannot name, have come spectacularly to fruition. Hastings wrote -

"I have known Johnson since the 1980s, when I edited the Daily Telegraph and he was our flamboyant Brussels correspondent. I have argued for a decade that, while he is a brilliant entertainer who made a popular maître d’ for London as its mayor, he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification . . . We can’t predict what a Johnson government will do, because its prospective leader has not got around to thinking about this. But his premiership will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability.

"Dignity still matters in public office, and Johnson will never have it. Yet his graver vice is cowardice, reflected in a willingness to tell any audience, whatever he thinks most likely to please, heedless of the inevitability of its contradiction an hour later.

"Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character . . . Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade. In a commonplace book the other day, I came across an observation made in 1750 by a contemporary savant, Bishop Berkeley: 'It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.' Almost the only people who think Johnson a nice guy are those who do not know him."

Johnson clearly cannot survive more than a few days - a week or two at most. Like the character in Shakespeare's Scottish play, his elevation will prove to have been his undoing. No doubt thereafter as he ponders what had happened to him, he will think of himself as another Shakesperean king whose weaknesses resulted in his downfall - "I am more sinn'd against the sinning." (King Lear Act 3, Sc. 2)

[JKane]

Does he have the same cult following of inbred poor idiots determined to vote against their own self-interests as the US version?  

Who supported him in the first place?  It was also based on racist/anti-immigrant BS right, Brexit? 

Any sign of people coming to their senses and undoing the damage over there?