Backbench Tories owe Boris everything – they have never looked so petty, so spiteful and so pathetically insignificant
WHEN Boris Johnson quipped “Hasta la vista, baby!” and stepped into history, the enemies of our tousled-haired hero never looked so petty, so spiteful and so pathetically insignificant.
What a miserable bunch of has-beens and never-will-bes!
The backbench Tories who owe Boris everything.
Sour-faced Starmer and his hatchet-faced comrades.
Theresa May, her arms so stiff by her side during Boris’s farewell round of applause that she could have had rigor mortis.
The shrieking Scottish Nats. The hardcore Remainers on every side.
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All of them so miserably reluctant to give credit where it was due.
And massive credit is due to Boris Johnson.
Boris buried Jeremy Corbyn and the hard Left’s lunatic recipe for national ruin.
Boris ended the political paralysis that was killing this country.
Boris stuck by Ukraine when Washington and Brussels wanted to hide behind the sofa.
Boris unleashed the money and science that produced the Oxford- AstraZeneca vaccine and our world-beating roll-out.
These triumphs are all historic.
Yes, Boris could be a maddening figure.
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He habitually turned every little petty drama into a full-blown crisis.
From Dominic Cummings to Matt Hancock to Chris “Arse” Pincher, Boris dithered about dumping errant colleagues when he should have immediately pressed the ejector button.
And feverish promises made in the heat of Brexit romping were frequently forgotten in the cold post-coital light of morning.
But the British people put Boris Johnson into power — and it is not them who have kicked him out.
Perhaps they would have at the next general election. We should have had the chance to find out.
Boris deserved to be Prime Minister until the next general election.
Not because he has a unique charisma, or because the roly-poly reprobate makes us chortle, or because he accepts even the hardest of knocks with good grace.
He deserved to be PM until the 2024 General Election because he has bloody earned it.
If the downside of Boris was all too much for voters — the sleaze, scandals, the big spending and high taxes — then we could have always voted for someone else, or stayed home that Thursday and voted for no one at all.
But if you put a loaded gun to my head, I could not tell you why Boris is going, apart from the fact that many of his own MPs thought he was becoming an electoral liability.
So let’s not pretend the demise of Boris has anything to do with morality in high office.
Weeping with laughter
Look at all the smears, dirty tricks and rigged voting patterns around the Tory leadership beauty contest.
Politics is a full-contact sport.
The Boris haters should dial down the self-righteous gloating. For in 2019, Johnson’s Tories won 43.6 per cent of the popular vote — the highest percentage for any party since 1979.
That should matter at least as much as an illicit slice of cake during lockdown.
This bleak moment is far bigger than Boris Johnson.
Almost 14million men and women voted to make him Prime Minister.
And just 160,000 card-carrying Conservative Party members will vote for either Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss to occupy 10 Downing Street.
The notion that Boris Johnson’s name should be on the Tory ballot paper with Liz and Rishi is wishful thinking. Boris is history. Boris is done.
But Boris will be fine. He will get to spend time with his young family.
He will have them weeping with laughter on the lucrative lecture circuit. He will write a bestselling memoir that is actually worth reading.
And he will become rich for the first time in his life.
But I don’t believe he will ever return to politics. His life from now on will be too sweet, too happy and too well-paid.
So it is not the betrayal of Boris that should rend our hearts today.
It’s the shameful betrayal of British democracy.
Beeb's 27-year sorry
THE BBC’s most famous interview in its history was constructed on a web of lies.
Martin Bashir persuaded Princess Diana to sit down for his 1995 Panorama confession with grotesque falsehoods, including the lie that Prince Charles was having an affair with William and Harry’s former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke.
The BBC’s gutter journalist showed Diana a fake letter as proof that the “affair” resulted in an abortion.
All lies, as was confirmed in court this week when the BBC was made to make a grovelling apology to the blameless Tiggy Legge-Bourke and ordered to pay her £200,000 in damages.
What is truly shocking is that it has taken a staggering 27 years for the BBC to apologise.
Even more remarkable, nobody at Broadcasting House has ever been charged for these cynical lies, or for the subsequent cover-up.
Do you reckon a newspaper would get off so lightly?
Rishi's cash problem
IF the bookies are right – and the bookies are always right – then Liz Truss is currently walking away with the contest to be our next Prime Minister.
The race should be a lot cl//mcb777.site/topic/labour-party/oser. And the reason it is not is, I strongly suspect, because of Rishi Sunak’s family wealth.
Yes, it would be a difficult look for Rishi to tell you to tighten your belt when his are all made by Prada, Hermes and Gucci.
But Sunak, a former investment banker, is a self-made man.
As is his fabulously wealthy father-in-law, N.R. Narayana Murthy – “the Bill Gates of India”.
We know that the middle-class activists in the Labour Party are eaten alive with envy and spite.
But aren’t the Tories meant to believe in doing well for yourself?
Queen cheer leadership
WHEN the Queen was meeting stage-4 cancer patient Graham White in a Maidenhead hospice, his mobile phone went off just as introductions were being made.
The Queen inevitably saw the funny side.
“People think the Queen is all stiff upper lip, but she has a sense of humour,” said Graham’s wife Pat.
For the Queen’s generation, the ability to laugh in the face of tragedy was always the foundation of their famous stoicism.
I remember walking into church with my mum at my dad’s funeral.
The pall bearers paused at the entrance to the church but my mum, her head bowed in sorrow, kept walking until her skull collided with her husband’s coffin.
My mum almost killed herself laughing.
Ironically, the Queen was having her chuckle in a hospice around the same time as Prince Harry was giving the most doom-mongering speech ever heard at the United Nations – ironically in honour of Nelson Mandela, one of the most joyous and optimistic men who ever walked this planet.
“How many of us feel battered, helpless in the face of the seemingly endless stream of disasters and devastation?” sighed unhappy Harry, a man who could wipe the grin from even Nelson Mandela’s face.
It’s difficult to imagine Prince Harry having a bit of a laugh in a cancer ward.
In fact, it is becoming increasingly hard to imagine this po-faced prince ever smiling again.
Fix of foxes
CITY folk are smitten with urban foxes.
Even when they kick over our bins, take a dump on our doorstep and rifle messily through the contents of last night’s Deliveroo – we still adore them.
So I am with Kate Beckinsale all the way. The actress has been widely slated for befriending a fox in her mother’s London garden.
“It’s nauseating,” gags one critic, as Kate offers cold meat to her “little orphan bestie”, who she calls Peepo.
City dwellers like Kate know – objectively! – that the fox is a wild animal and not the family pet.
We understand that the fox is – technically! – chicken-killing vermin, and not remotely related to Fluffy, Fido or Tiddles.
But we can’t help it. One swish of that bushy tail and we are smitten.
So who can blame Kate for being enchanted?
And I don’t blame Peepo for craving civilisation.
Who would not want to be hand-fed shredded ham by Kate Beckinsale?
Brad's skirt
AFTER the hottest day ever, many men are reflecting on the skirt that Brad Pitt wore to the premiere of his new movie, Bullet Train.
“It’s all about the breeze,” said Brad – meaning his skirt, left, not the film.
Don’t be tempted, men. He’s Brad Pitt.
We are not.
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Georgia goal makes women's football a winner
THE blistering goal that Georgia Stanway scored for England against Spain in the Euros quarter-final was worthy of Roy of the Rovers.
Should that be Joy of the Rovers? There are plenty of lifelong football fans, like me, who previously thought they had scant interest in women’s football. In an instant, that glorious goal by Georgia has changed their minds for ever.
