Pound Shop Disraeli brought low by a B&M Parliament

So, the Turkeys have voted and Boris has succumb. Frankly the current situation is beyond the scripting of both “The thick of It” and “Yes Minister”.

Was he perfect? “Clearly not”.

Was he married to truth? Again “No”.

Was he the best on offer? A harder question. If the hunt is for a leader with self belief, the ability to connect with all strata of the electorate and a vision of Britain as an independent self determining nation able to compete on the world stage – given the limitations of available stock; the answer is possibly “Yes”.

As I have argued previously there are qualities within Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson that are to be respected, indeed admired. He did deliver a workable platform from the Brexit debacle. A debacle that demonstrated to the electorate what happens when those elected move away from and frustrate the expressed will of those who elect them. He did lead a positive response to the COVID pandemic in terms of the vaccination programme and economic support, if in doing so at the same time piling up a huge fiscal bow wave that, with extra impetus from the inflationary impacts of the war in Ukraine, is now reaching the shore line and building to become a tsunami of fiscal woes, He has been in the vanguard in supporting Ukraine and dragging the EU and to an extent the US in his wake.

In counter balance to these positives there is much to treat with caution if not outright destain in his chaotic domestic policy delivery and cabinet management and his somewhat tangential attachment to truth - a quality on which he does not hold a political monopoly.

But: measured against his current parliamentary piers he holds qualities that his contemporaries, of all stripes on all sides of the parliamentary benches , continually and painfully show they lack. If bounded, directed and focused by a strong and able cabinet of equal vision and superior management skill, his qualities could have brought considerable success rather than the ignominy and spectacular implosion currently being witnessed.

This said, the truth of the current malaise in political sobriety and excellence predates and runs much deeper than the failings of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. The conduct of UK politics over recent decades – say from Gordon Brown’s government to date - has been a truly unedifying, rudderless, self serving, challenging passage that has been compounded by the not so subtle change in the reporting styles and abandonments of neutrality by our mainstream screen and print media outlets and pundits.

A divide has opened that risks becoming a deep, possibly permanent, fracture between the ruled and ruler; the elector and elected; and danger to to our unwritten constitution – a constitution that would have been in grave and immediate danger had it been written and so instantly judged at law as so many now seek . As such a tablet of stone it would have become a political litigants delight and a tool to conduct "law war" stripped of the ability to stay above short term arguments argued for legal & political advantage and the proven ability to bend and flex in the winds of disruption that its unwritten nature has allowed it to show to advantage over the centuries since the penning of the Bill of Rights in 1689.

The state we now arrive at is not a new experience. it is a state that was recognised by Thomas Paine in his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense”. Its opening is worth reading today….

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them: whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerable follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others”

In short government is a necessity and a two edged sword. Good government a gift. A gift dependent on the engagement of those governed with those who seek to govern in their names. Bad government is the consequence of the absence of that engagement.

Good government demands good, committed and able people to serve and deliver it – at this point in time it is reasonable to ask if we have such people in or tilting for power?

The replacement of Boris requires very careful thought; I have a suggestion for the Conservative Party to consider in that process:- think a long way outside your comfort blanket, recognise why the North reconnected with you and the domestic dangers that the SNP, Welsh Assembly and the situation in Northern Ireland present together with the international dangers a conflagration in Europe sparking from Ukraine and the developing realignments between countries both in and beyond Europe poses.

I suggest a deputation go on bended knee to the Other Place and beg Ruth, now Baroness,

Davidson to take the position. Initially from the Lords then as with Sir Alec Douglas-Home, renouncing her peerage and taking a safe seat in the Commons before the next election.

In one move you would give Nicola Sturgeon heart failure, detoxify your brand in Scotland & Wales. Change the dynamic in Northern Ireland and with the EU and gain a leader who like Boris has the media charisma and common touch to reach and deliver your message to both the metropolitan reportage and the provincial “common people”.

It would be common sense in the eyes of the common people