Ripeness is all..

As the country waits on tenterhooks for the much, much, much-anticipated Sue Gray report, and the Met Police investigation, and for the next scandal or scandals to leak, emerge or erupt, the writing may be on the wall for our current PM. At the time of writing, it appears to be the case of when, rather than if, and high-street bookies are offering odds as short as 1/4 on that Johnson will be gone from No.10 at some point in 2022.

Many are speculating that the Tories may try to keep Johnson in place as a scapegoat for potentially catastrophic results in the May local elections, and others that the wound must be cauterised sooner rather than later, in order to mitigate the worst effects of a bad showing at the locals.

It appears that the PM’s perceived strengths have become liabilities and that, just as in 2019, where more people appeared to vote against Corbyn rather than for Johnson, the opposite might happen in a ‘Johnson vs Starmer’ contest. Whilst we tend to spend a lot of time focused on the most partisan groups in society (Momentum, the ‘woke left’, the ‘alt-right’, anti-vaxxers, ERG-types etc), the hard facts are that elections are won in the centre, and by a relatively small number of swing voters in a fairly small number of swing constituencies. This of course, is one of the key issues that we need to address; that the ‘democratic deficit‘ of this system means that some votes count far more than others, which is an affront to the concepts of fairness and democracy. In a world that is becoming more political, more organised, and also more diverse, this system looks more and more like an anachronism, a throw-back to simpler, and less just times.

In fact, talk of political reform is becoming far more commonplace. Rather belatedly, political operators across the spectrum appear to be arriving at the same conclusions that Renew came to in 2017 regarding the unworthiness of the current UK political system, structure and culture. ‘Root and branch reform of the system’, a central Renew message, is being espoused by Labour’s Andy Burnham, who is now criticising the whip system, abuses of power and our generally scandal-prone system of government.

And former Conservative Rory Stewart went viral last week with a fairly scathing interview on Sky News, followed by an absolutely scalding attack on Johnson in the Financial Times, the opening lines of which are worth quoting in full.

“Boris Johnson is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next. Twenty years have passed since the Conservative party first selected him as a candidate. Michael Howard and David Cameron made him a shadow minister, and Theresa May gave him the Foreign Office. Thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment. Yet, knowing this, the majority of Conservative MPs, and party members, still voted for him to be prime minister. He is not, therefore, an aberration, but a product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone.”

Is Johnson ready for the axe?

He may have to endure his going hence even as his coming hither.

Ripeness, after all, is all.