It turns out that Boris Johnson is a one trick pony.
In 2016 he hitched his wagon to Brexit as the one sure way to become prime minister. Dazzled by Dominic Cummings’s misleading, scaremongering, sloganizing – ‘£350 million a week to the NHS’, ‘Turkey about to join the EU’, ‘Millions of Turks heading for Britain’ – Johnson became the poster boy for the campaign repeating the lies ad nauseam. His winning slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ won him the 2019 election with a majority of eighty. Brexit done on January 31, he went AWOL in February. That was it. He would go down in history as the man who did Brexit, who got the UK out of the EU.
Then came Covid-19. We now know that Johnson can’t actually do anything except bluster and sloganize. Furthermore, neither can his puppeteer Cummings. Those revelations for the people who were deluded into voting for Johnson may be the only good outcome from the pandemic.
Johnson’s shambolic handling of the greatest crisis Britain has faced in generations has so far resulted in something over 50,000 dead, the worst in Europe and one of the worst in the world. No one is certain of the true figure since the Conservatives’ extraordinary manipulation of the figures and lack of transparency are so outlandish even the north’s Department of Health must be envious.
As a result of his laziness, superficial knowledge and conflicting messages, topped off with his unquestioning support for Cummings, the voters have seen through Johnson for the charlatan he is. His ratings in all polls, whether for ability to do the job, or show leadership, have plummeted. More people disapprove of Johnson’s performance than support him. From being streets ahead of Labour, the Conservatives are four points ahead.
Now it has emerged that the man Johnson depends on so abjectly is cut from a similar cloth to his boss. Not just because he snuck off to Barnard Castle on his wife’s birthday, but because he manipulates his blog to make himself appear a super-forecasting genius. At his disastrous press conference in the Downing Street garden, scene of staid parties with orange juice and biccies Cameron laid on for DUP suckers in 2015, Cummings claimed that he had been worried about a pandemic in March 2019 and had blogged about dangers from coronavirus then. Except he hadn’t.
A German computer buff, Jens Weichers, decided to check his claim and discovered that Cummings had revisited his blog to make himself appear prescient. Weichers, using software that tracks changes to web pages, found that Cummings had inserted the change to his March 4 2019 blog at 8.55pm on April 14 2020, the night he returned from Durham. If asked, as he was, he could say that not only did he care about Covid-19, but he was aware of pandemics and had predicted the dangers of coronavirus a year ago. So the stories about him being cavalier when the pandemic struck in March this year were false stories, but they weren’t. His claim was a false story.
Did you not find it especially piquant to hear Johnson’s defence of Cummings, until the press conference, that the allegations against him were ‘false stories’ – like Trump’s fake news? A bit rich coming from a guy who was sacked for inventing quotations, or as the head of Channel 4 News, Dorothy Byrne, put it last August, Johnson is “a known liar”.
So the scales have fallen from the eyes of thousands of voters who were conned not just by Johnson, but by another conman, his chief adviser. The question is, did it happen too soon? His Cabinet of talentless yes men and women, appointed from their mindless loyalty to Johnson and Brexit, have rowed in blindly behind him. They depend totally on him for their careers. They are desperate enough to hang together for four years during the coming recession/depression.
