Boris Johnson Evokes in His Rivals a Lean, Hungry Look

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So accustomed are we these days to baleful “breaking news” — with coronavirus dominating the television broadcasts and racial protests dominating the streets — that the “silly season” of suspicious stories that trail the dog days of summer are lost among competing catastrophic headlines. Can anyone who follows Brexit, though, ignore the latest rumors out of Britain?

The New York Post reports that the father-in-law of the Prime Minister’s chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, has predicted that Boris Johnson “will stand down in six months” due to lingering ailments following his contracting coronavirus earlier this spring.

“If you put a horse back to work when it’s injured it will never recover,” Sir Humphry Wakefied purportedly confided to a Times of London reader, who promptly passed along the information to his favorite broadsheet.

Mr. Johnson denied his imminent retirement by calling the gossip “absolute nonsense.” But he would, wouldn’t he? Nothing so scuttles government policy as the whiff of change at the top of Benjamin Disraeli’s “greasy pole.” The last thing the Prime Minister wants is to become a lame-duck premier, just when the Conservative government must give the European Union every indication that it speaks with one voice in its current negotiations to secure a trade deal by the end of the year.

A hostile Brussels could be the least of Mr. Johnson’s worries. He remains vulnerable, even though his popularity remains surprisingly high. One poll shows that he and the Tory party still best the opposition. The Prime Minister has a 13-point lead over Sir Keir Starmer (43 to 30), with the Tories leading Labour by five points, 42 to 37.

Nevertheless, Boris’s Conservative colleagues smell blood in the water. Among the discontented are those who believe Brexit is more than simply a break with over-government from the Continent. For them, it is but the beginning of rolling back the state, with politicians at Westminster and bureaucrats at Whitehall next on the chopping block.

Instead, Mr. Johnson yields to his worst instincts, wanting to be popular while promoting “progressive” politics — whether it be increased spending on infrastructure boondoggles, climate change, or “nanny-knows-best” legislation.

Government mismanagement in containing the coronavirus only highlights his ineptness. Sensible guidelines to stop its spread were scuttled once Mr. Johnson himself caught the virus. Then, tactics changed to a “no-holds barred” approach toward authoritarianism, with fines extracted for being out-of-doors without “sufficient” reason or without mandatory facemasks.

Peaceful public protests against such draconian measures were met by constabulary clamp-downs — provoking a past Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, to equate Britain to a burgeoning “police state” — while unlawful mob gatherings that vandalized statues and threatened bodily harm were downplayed and excused by craven journalists and politicians alike.

Some Conservative Party stalwarts tore up their membership cards in disgust, while ambitious Tory MPs took note. First among them is Michael Gove, who stood alongside Boris at the Leave campaign in 2016 but broke with him in the subsequent party leadership race, effectively handing the keys to Downing Street to the hapless Theresa May.

Though Messrs. Johnson and Gove reconciled their differences, the Prime Minister can hardly forget that his erstwhile ally has about him that “lean and hungry look” and “thinks too much.” As Shakespeare warned, “such men are dangerous.”

Curiously, it was Mr. Gove’s wife, the outspoken columnist Sarah Vine, who fired the first shot in this cold war, tweeting a riposte to the Government’s heavy-handed coronavirus response. “We all have to die sooner or later,” she fumed. “I certainly don’t expect the entire nation to bankrupt itself to save my sorry ass.”

No less a figure than Nigel Farage, hero of Brexit, is now warning that the Prime Minister’s support will evaporate unless the government reforms its migration policy in the face of increasing numbers of illegal and legal immigration.

Boris Johnson himself has never shied away from the limelight. Its luminescence lures him like a moth to the flame. With his leadership hanging in the balance, though, he must dread the persistence of rumors of his retirement. He cannot help but be conscious of Disraeli’s warning: “The more you are talked about, the less powerful you are.”

________

Mr. MacLean, a freelancer based in Nova Scotia, writes the Brexit Diary for The New York Sun.


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