Integrity and Competence?

Last seen under Tony Blair, Britain's real governing party is the Court Party of those whose influence derives from picking up the tab for the Prime Minister's lifestyle, or (unlike Blair) from sleeping with him, or both. But everyone always knew that that would be the case under Boris Johnson.

If integrity and competence were your thing, then you would never have voted for Johnson the first place. But in that full knowledge, more than enough people did. And more than enough people will again. Yet everything is being put into place to follow the Conservative Party's triumphant results at the forthcoming local elections and at the Hartlepool by-election with a coup against its Leader.

Rather than allow the second term and the three figure majority for which Johnson was well on course, those who were organising around Michael Gove would be perfectly happy to see Keir Starmer as Prime Minister in some kind of arrangement with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, since those were all much more their sort of people, and since such a Government would have plenty of advisory roles for them.

Could they get away with it? Why not? Reform UK will be lucky to get one per cent at Hartlepool, Laurence Fox will be lucky to get one per cent in London, and as for the Left, it has not even begun to recover from the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn. That destruction established that only the Gove-Starmer position was permissible in British politics. Those on the Right who helped to sow that wind are now about to reap the whirlwind. Indeed, they have already begun to do so.