PETER HITCHENS: Boris Johnson’s fall was a coup by the pointless against the useless
The astonishing thing about our departing Prime Minister is that he is so ordinary. See past the fake Edwardian growl, the artfully rumpled appearance and the little jokes and you find a rather dull person with no actual ideas or aims.
He is a Bertie Wooster without a Jeeves, amusing at first but not so funny later, bound to get himself and you into impossible trouble.
Some of you may remember the Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy’s fictional English hero. By day he was the apparently moronic Sir Percy Blakeney, a languid, drawling fop, but by night he was a ruthless, courageous and successful rescuer of French aristocrats from the guillotine.
The astonishing thing about our departing Prime Minister is that he is so ordinary. See past the fake Edwardian growl, the artfully rumpled appearance and the little jokes and you find a rather dull person with no actual ideas or aims
Quite a lot of Englishmen of Mr Johnson’s class think that they are like this. Generally they only manage the languid, drawling bit.
In the same way he likes to think he is a new Churchill, but Churchill had a profound knowledge of English history and had faced bullets in real combat. Johnson’s knowledge of the past and of the world is shallow, and he knows nothing of war.
Has he ever actually said anything interesting about politics? When he was Foreign Secretary, the most responsible detailed brief he has ever held, I listened to his speeches and statements with amazement. How could anybody so superficially brilliant be such a dull retailer of official clichés?
His performance over the great Covid panic was a mixture of gullible, credulous floundering and iron despotism, which it is still painful to remember.
Look at the effort and co-ordination that went into all those resignations. Who knew we had so many Ministers on the public payroll? What do they all do? How on earth did they get their jobs?
So you will not find me among those mourning his fall, even though his successor is certain to be even worse.
But you will find me jeering at those who brought him down. They are even less attractive than he is.
Look at the effort and co-ordination that went into all those resignations. Who knew we had so many Ministers on the public payroll? What do they all do? How on earth did they get their jobs?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson reads a statement outside 10 Downing Street, London, formally resigning as Conservative Party leader after ministers and MPs made clear his position was untenable
And above all, why were they so outraged by the Pincher affair, when they had sat silent and obedient through Johnson and Sunak’s mad smashing of the economy, which all of us will pay for until we die, and the gross assault on our liberty made by the whole Cabinet in the name of Covid?
They have now shown that they are not in fact the goggling wax dummies they appeared to be during that needless disaster.
They have voices, and they can write letters and go on the BBC and criticise their leader. Just not when it really matters. Johnson was quite right, in his Thursday speech, to blame his fall on a mindless stampede.
If he is not fit for office, and actually he never was, those who brought him down were not fit to remove him. We have just seen a coup d’etat against the useless, by the pointless.
Or perhaps it was the other way round. I struggle to care.
Who could doubt this killer had a dope habit?
With infuriating slowness, conventional wisdom is starting to grasp that marijuana is actually a horrible, dangerous drug which should not be legal. Maybe the realisation will come in time to save us from a dreadful mistake. Maybe not.
Last month the self-important New York Times, still very much on the side of legalising this poisonous filth, actively suppressed news that the recent Texas school shooter had been a dope smoker. Last week, the less grand New York Post recognised that Robert Crimo, the mass shooter in Highland Park, Chicago, was unquestionably a marijuana user, and that this might have influenced his behaviour. Well, look at this pathetic individual with his facial tattoos and his air of being broken and deranged. Even before his acquaintances confirmed his drug habit, who could have been in doubt?
Miranda Devine wrote in the Post: ‘He does fit a familiar pattern of mass killers: alienated young male stoners who appear to be in the grip of a distinctively American madness.’
Last week, the less grand New York Post recognised that Robert Crimo, the mass shooter in Highland Park, Chicago, was unquestionably a marijuana user
She added: ‘But virulent attacks always greet any hint of opposition to wholesale drug legalisation. Youth mental illness is a crisis in this country and yet we are not allowed to discuss a scientifically verified trigger.’
How true this is, in Britain as well as the USA. My astute and diligent colleague Eve Simmons filed a dispatch from California a week ago about the growing mountain of evidence that cannabis has grave health dangers.
Her article was carefully researched, full of verifiable facts and figures and quoted experts. But she was subjected on social media to a revolting storm of personal insult and abuse. (I have been getting this for years, and am used to it. When you first experience it, it is deeply nasty.)
How much of this is organised, we cannot know. But the huge, rich Big Dope lobby for marijuana legalisation will do anything to silence dissent. It has never been more important that the anti-drug view is heard.
To my bafflement, some people seem to think that Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, would be a good Prime Minister. Leaving aside her time as a Liberal Democrat, her republican speechmaking, her silly posing in tanks and fur hats, and her wild encouragement of British people to volunteer to fight in Ukraine, and her ignorance of geography in that region, there’s this: in a recent appearance before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (wearing a badge featuring the Ukrainian flag and the Union Jack), she was reduced to long pauses and pathetic evasions when asked how our supposed opposition to authoritarian regimes applied to blood-soaked Saudi Arabia. She could not, under repeated questioning by Chris Bryant MP, give one example of an occasion when she had raised human rights issues with any Gulf leader. You have been warned.
To my bafflement, some people seem to think that Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, would be a good Prime Minister
A free country should free Assange
I don’t think anyone even bothers to deny any more that the police have virtually given up pursuing a large amount of crime. Muggers, vandals, burglars, car thieves, shoplifters – nothing much ever happens to them.
Yet Julian Assange is enduring miserable conditions in a cell in Belmarsh maximum-security prison, among murderers and terrorists.
Yes, he jumped bail, but he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for that offence in May 2019, more than three years ago. Why is it necessary for him still to be held in this especially grim place? He is now an unconvicted prisoner, awaiting extradition to the US for embarrassing the American government.
At the very least he should be transferred to somewhere less gruelling, in which it is easier for him to be visited by his wife and two young children. But really, he should be released, as the alleged offence is plainly political and no free country should grant extradition on such grounds.
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