- Wed Jul 07, 2021 4:42 pm
#5958
Something I think Johnson has failed to take into account with his desperate dash to "normality" and backbench appeasement: he has literally fuck-all else other than vaccination success (itself mainly attributable to the NHS). Every other aspect of covid has been a mismanaged disaster by his government. All their other policies are horse shit. Everyone is wise to the phoney culture war concoctions. All his ministers are at best barely competent and at worst downright idiotic, and even the less awful ones are all still corrupt to varying degrees.
So now all he has is an increasingly irrelevant fall-back line that itself might prove to be an albatross round his neck if dropping all protective measures results in a strain that has significant vaccine escape (so we need to start all over again), and...nothing? Can't talk about brexit as then he can't claim it's done and can't claim anyone else raising it is trying to restart the debate. can't talk about the successes of being out of the EU because there are far, FAR more negatives. Can't talk about jobs and the economy because that's stagnating and job losses are beginning to mount up. Can't talk about foreign policy as that's just cutting aid budgets. Can't talk about domestic policy as schools are fucked, Patel is rampantly incompetent and they're all about brexit again. There's nothing they can touch on that isn't going to backfire. He'd have been better to keep measures and keep the conversation about covid. But of course that would require him to think long-term (by which I mean a month or so) when he can appease some people and get them off his back today.
His foot is on the petard. It's now only a case of when it decides to hoist him, and how high.