How to topple a prime minister

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has won a confidence vote by 211 votes to 148. Whilst hardly a ringing endorsement it should be remembered that it was an improvement on the 160 votes he achieved from 312 MPs in the parliamentary leadership contest over Jeremy Hunt in 2019. The Conservative Party is a broad coalition which ranges from those who would be much happier as members of the Liberal Democrats, to those who against all the odds still continue to espouse traditional conservative principles. So there will always be a significant number of MPs who would prefer an alternative leader for reasons of personal character or policy differences.

Boris Johnson is not a conservative in any meaningful sense of the word as in reality he is a social liberal. He supports the net zero policy on climate change, was an enthusiastic attendee at ‘gay pride’ marches when London Mayor, appears unconcerned about open ended immigration from all around the world. He retains invasive and divisive ‘equality’ legislation, demonstrates minimal opposition to delusion transgender thinking, has done nothing to curb the growth in so called ‘hate crime’ legislation, supports same sex marriage but has introduced measures to further undermine traditional marriage. Many Conservatives have accused him of presiding over the expansion of socialist economic policies. So by any definition he is a long way from being a true conservative.

Nevertheless he is despised by the liberal politically correct class. This is because more than any other individual he delivered a victory for Brexiteers in the EU referendum. This was the first occasion in decades that liberals had suffered a reversal in their creeping, gradualist yet vociferous political agenda, and their fury knew no bounds as shown by the no holds barred campaign to overturn the referendum decision. Moreover, since becoming Tory leader he had the temerity to deliver a Conservative government with a huge majority, which further increased liberal loathing.

Since that election victory liberals have mounted a vocal campaign to destroy Boris Johnson’s premiership. Until late last year this had gained relatively little traction with the electorate. But matters changed when after repeated attempts the Metropolitan Police agreed to opposition requests to investigate the alleged breaches of covid regulations in Downing Street. The campaign to demonise the Prime Minister on this matter was orchestrated by the opposition parties and enthusiastically taken up by the BBC and other liberal minded media outlets.

For months on end the news agenda was dominated by a continuing drip-drip of revelations under what became known as ‘Partygate’, the primary instigator being the supposedly politically neutral BBC. Hardly a day went by without the public being informed of potential illegal gatherings at Number Ten, all supposedly presided over by Boris Johnson. The most egregious emotionalism was employed, particularly by Labour leader Keir Starmer. Wholly outrageous comparisons were made between grieving individuals being unable to visit dying relatives at a time when Downing Street staff were accused of ‘partying’. Those employing this kind of unprincipled emotional blackmail never asked themselves in what way would those experiencing grief have been affected by the events in Downing Street.

It is still unclear why any of the gatherings at Downing Street and Whitehall investigated by the police were contrary to covid regulations. It would clearly have been a breach if outsiders had been invited to social events but no evidence appears to have come to light that this occurred. Everyone at the ‘parties’ appears to have been a member of staff present at their workplace, socialising with colleagues who they would have worked with together throughout the same day. The only difference is that food and drinks were being consumed, and the conversation may have been primarily social rather than work related. Thus nothing was being done that would have added to the spread of covid as everyone involved had already engaged, through normal workplace activities, in the kind of close physical contact which would have facilitated the spread of the virus. So they are being demonised and criminalized solely for consuming food and drink in the workplace.

Despite all this the Partygate issue has successfully alienated many voters against both Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. The mantra has taken hold that lawmakers should never be lawbreakers. But as outlined above it is very unclear whether any laws have really been broken since nobody knows the criteria used by the police in deciding who should be issued with fixed penalty notices. Despite all the fuss Boris Johnson received just one fine, for the bizarre ‘crime’ of accepting a birthday cake in his office, which he did not solicit and which he was not involved in the presentation. It is a mystery why he never appealed against this outrageous abuse of the criminal justice system.

The job of Prime Minister is to preside over the running of the country, concentrating on issues of national and international importance. It is not his responsibility to act as an office manager as plenty of senior civil servants are employed to oversee the smooth running of Downing Street. No Prime Minister should ever become involved in the minutiae of office management or in supervising the behaviour of the workforce, which would be a very poor use of his valuable time that should be more productively employed on far more important matters. So his claim that he was unaware of any Downing Street social activities is entirely credible.

So the campaign to destroy the premiership of Boris Johnson has succeeded in severely weakening him. He has not yet been toppled but we can be sure that this operation, led by the subversive mouthpiece the BBC, will continue until its objective has been achieved. This is the modus operandi used by liberal activists to brainwash the public through their distorted manipulation of the media, promoting through relentless negative tactics their one sided agenda to blacken the reputation of their opponents.

Is the covid hysteria finally over?

Covid infections are currently running at over 100,000 per day, significantly higher than during the lockdowns, yet neither the media nor politicians appear to be paying much attention. Nobody is any longer arguing that we should all stay at home, wear masks in shops and on public transport, get tested frequently, or maintain social distancing to ‘control the spread’. So why are most people now behaving in this apparently reckless fashion when covid has most certainly not gone away?

Part of the answer is that virtually everybody has either been triple vaccinated, and/or gained natural immunity by contracting covid. As a result if they do become infected again they are appreciably less likely to die or become seriously ill. So the element of fear for most people has considerably diminished. There is also a general acceptance that because the Omicron variants are so contagious any curbs or restrictions on behaviour are pointless as everyone is now vulnerable to infection despite the precautions. So the question that now needs to be asked is whether the lockdowns and restrictions were ever necessary in the first place? Could we not have responded to covid in the same way as for flu and stayed at home for the period when we felt ill?

The truth is that a large part of the media, politicians and the public succumbed to a mass hysteria generated by the alarmist fears of a very small coterie who claimed an expertise about how best to handle the response to the pandemic. In the UK this source was the tiny but highly influential group of people on the Government’s SAGE committee who were allowed to impose their outlook on the rest of the nation. They asserted that they were ‘following the science’ with the result that politicians, media and public were unable to challenge their recommendations since, in a climate of fear, they were all unwilling to overrule the perceived authority of this supposedly expert elite.

In reality the science of covid was very uncertain in the early stages. Nobody really knew how contagious it was, who it was most likely to affect, what caused the spread of the virus, or how serious it would be when caught. The panic began in Italy with images of people dying on trolleys after hospitals were overwhelmed. The Italian government imposed a national lockdown, and similar lockdowns were quickly implemented in other European countries. By the time the virus caught hold in Britain the media and opposition parties were all clamouring for a lockdown. In March 2020 the government duly imposed a national lockdown for three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’.

It would be pointless with hindsight to criticise the government for this decision, as they were under enormous pressure faced with a new virus of unknown severity. They quickly introduced a number of new temporary ‘Nightingale Hospitals’, but in the event these were scarcely used. Meanwhile the NHS prioritised treating covid patients, thus creating the current lengthy backlog of cases as the treatment of patients with less serious medical conditions was delayed. It would be nearly three months before the lockdown was lifted and restrictions were gradually relaxed during the summer 2020.

Infections fell to a very low level in summer 2020 but bizarrely the government chose that moment to mandate the use of masks on public transport and in shops. No reason was ever given for this change, and no evidence has been provided since that masks make any difference to the spread of the virus. This was confirmed by the Danish study, the fact that infections decreased rapidly in the spring of 2020 without masks, the fact that they rose sharply in the autumn of 2020 when mask wearing was compulsory, and later in the pandemic, when Scotland retained compulsory mask wearing when it had been abandoned in England, yet Scotland still suffered the highest rates of infection in the UK. More disturbingly mask wearing became a virtue signalling fetish for those on the left of politics. Witness the absurd spectacle of the opposition benches fully masked up after the restrictions were lifted, at a time when the Conservative benches were almost mask free.

We are supposed to be living in a freedom loving democracy but during the period of covid alarmism the government was able to impose the most draconian restrictions on the population at the stroke of a minister’s pen. What was worse was the almost total compliance by the public who accepted all the restrictions on their freedom with relatively little challenge. Anyone unwilling to conform to this agenda was quickly denounced as a ‘covidiot’, someone supposedly prepared to take risks with the public’s safety for their own selfish ends.

There was little debate as to whether the restrictions themselves might be a bigger threat to the public than covid. Adverse consequences were ignored such as delayed diagnoses and operations, loss of education to school children, permanent damage to the economy, the loss of many small business in hospitality and retailing, the devastation of the travel industry, the adverse effect on the mental health and wellbeing of the nation, and the curtailment of living a normal life for a whole population placed under what amounted to house arrest. The fear generated through covid alarmism trumped all of these concerns.

Yet despite all these adverse consequences the government imposed two further damaging lockdowns , aided and abetted by the opposition parties and the BBC who all wanted earlier, deeper and longer restrictions. The Welsh authorities imposed a well publicised ‘circuit breaker’ which achieved nothing but this did not prevent the alarmists calling for England to follow their lead. The Scottish regime as a matter of principle consistently imposed longer and deeper restrictions than England but in the end they made no difference to the eventual outcome.

So all the evidence shows that the lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing and endless testing made little difference to the eventual outcome. Infections in Britain were close to the average, Sweden with far fewer restrictions did better, Peru with some of the severest restrictions ended up with the highest level of infections in the world. The death rate was about 0.3% of the population, almost all of whom were over the retirement age or suffered from long term conditions such as obesity or diabetics. So the government should now ‘do the right thing’ and issue an amnesty for all those convicted of a breach of covid regulations and return their fines.

The most disturbing element of the covid hysteria was not so much the totalitarian nature of the government’s response, but the self abasement of the public, happy to collaborate in their own subjugation. The explanation for this mass aberrant behaviour was the campaign of fear drummed up by the government, the opposition parties and the mainstream media, most particularly the BBC. The ramping up of fear has been the playbook of totalitarian regimes throughout the ages, and the authorities had no qualms about employing this technique to impose their will over covid.

The biggest danger for the future is that the political establishment, now realising how easy it is to manipulate the public into compliance with their agenda, will regard the covid response as a precedent and employ similar authoritarian measures in the future. So expect campaigns from vocal woke obsessives demanding similar levels of state control on such issues as the climate change hoax, homosexual proselytising, delusional transgender beliefs and still further capitulation to militant feminists, Islamists and black activists.