Boris Johnson: We must never have a clown as PM again – Jayne Dowle

WHEN people turned over the habits of a lifetime, generations even, and shunned Labour to vote Conservative at the 2019 election they did so because, they were appalled by the left-wing fanaticism of Jeremy Corbyn and fascinated by Boris Johnson.
Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure over Downing Street's parties that breached lockdown rules.Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure over Downing Street's parties that breached lockdown rules.
Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure over Downing Street's parties that breached lockdown rules.

I spoke to many people here in Barnsley, where both sitting Labour MPs, Dan Jarvis in Barnsley Central and Stephanie Peacock in Barnsley East, saw their majorities reduced, who turned their faces towards the bright burning bundle of Brexit banter that was Mr Johnson.

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Hard to imagine now, after we’ve lived through two battered and bloodied years of a pandemic, that he was heralded for breaking the political mould – in a good way. Friends and family said to me that they were voting Conservative, not only because they backed his promise to “get Brexit done”, but because he seemed like “a man of the people” who would do things differently.

Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure over Downing Street's parties that breached lockdown rules.Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure over Downing Street's parties that breached lockdown rules.
Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure over Downing Street's parties that breached lockdown rules.

Just how differently, we’re now finding out. Last week, watching the recent ITV1 drama Anne, which chronicles the fight of Anne Williams, the mother of a teenage Liverpool fan who died at Hillsborough in 1989, to overturn legal rulings on the victims, I was struck not just by one woman’s sheer determination, but the parade of Prime Ministers who punctuated the 30-year battle for Hillsborough justice: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May.

Sitting beside me, my own teenage daughter, Lizzie, asked a pertinent question: “Do you think Theresa May would have been a better pandemic leader than Boris Johnson?”

Certainly not for the first time since March 2020, I longed for her steady and unprincipled hand on the tiller. How derided that woman was, I said to Lizzie, how belittled she found herself by chauvinistic Tory bullies.

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Whatever you thought of her personally, whatever her own failings in EU negotiation and whatever stresses handling a pandemic as PM would have brought her under, she couldn’t have made a worse job of it than her successor.

Would Theresa May have been a better premier than Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic?Would Theresa May have been a better premier than Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic?
Would Theresa May have been a better premier than Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic?

Johnson may have grovellingly apologised for any involvement in the Downing Street ‘bring your own booze party’ held when the rest of the nation was under house arrest in May 2020, but it’s far too little and much too late.

Those of us who knew him – in my case albeit vaguely – in his former life as a rakish bon viveur and newspaper columnist, have not been surprised at how he has turned out in the highest office of state.

It was always going to be a gamble; what’s clear is that we have all paid the price of his self-indulgence, excuses, lies and hypocrisy.

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The country, if it has any sense, should purge itself of the stain of his premiership at the earliest opportunity. This is not a Tory-bash; many, many Conservative MPs, local councillors and party members are equally appalled at his mishandling of power.

Would Theresa May have been a better premier than Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic?Would Theresa May have been a better premier than Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic?
Would Theresa May have been a better premier than Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic?

And to think he once had so many people in the palm of his hand. Even I was concerned when he fell dangerously ill with Covid 19 in April 2020.

No-one would wish that on anyone, especially a man under such unprecedented pressure, and a father to boot. However, I never had much faith in his Lazarus-style resurrection, when he returned and made a zealous vow to lead us through the wastes of the pandemic with honour and dedication.

And guess what? Just a month after his own serious brush with the virus, which has contributed to the loss of more than 150,000 lives in the UK, he was back to his feckless ways.

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When BJ and his chums were allegedly partying in the Downing Street garden, my children were stuck in Yorkshire anxious because they couldn’t plan their usual birthday visit to see their father, in Surrey, due to social distancing rules. He was already suffering from a terminal illness and shielding.

They celebrated his 57th birthday on Facetime instead and said their final goodbye to him in March this year, the same way. That birthday, in June 2020, turned out to be his last. At his funeral in April 2021, social distancing was still in place. I couldn’t even reach over in the crematorium and hold my children’s hands.

Johnson is fond of quoting his hero, the great war-time leader Sir Winston Churchill. I don’t think he’s worthy right now, so I’ll do it for him, shall I?

With apologies for the paraphrasing: “Never, never, never, never again must a nation fall for a clown on a dodgy promise.”

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If anything good is to come of the debacle that is engulfing Downing Street it is that we have all had our eyes opened as to what really goes on in the corridors – and back gardens – of power. It is not a pretty sight, at all. The behaviour, not just of the Prime Minister, but the self-serving political coterie which surrounds him has been appalling and also unforgivable.

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