David Craig, on January 26th, 2022Wednesday/Thursday blog
The main purpose of this blog is to try to pass on information that the mainstream media either won’t cover or else about which the mainstream media lies. Oh, and I also hope that the occasional reader might be tempted to buy a copy of my latest book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – either for themselves or to send to a friend or enemy or even to their local MP.
It is not my intention to give opinions on stories the mainstream media is covering. There are already enough attention-seeking, overpaid buffoons voicing off on 24-hour news. But today I thought I’d deviate from my main purpose and suggest an explanation for the disastrous failure of our current government
A Greek Tragedy?
Collins dictionary defines a Greek Tragedy as: (in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstanding personal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal.
A successful PM?
I believe that the (IMHO) currently lying, squealing, wriggling, greased piglet Boris Johnson could have been a successful PM. He has repeatedly shown – in two London mayoral elections and one general election – that he can reach parts of the population that no other Conservative since Thatcher could reach. Moreover, given the disaster he was handed by the horrific Theresa May, who sacked two Brexit Secretaries in her desperate attempts to keep Britain in the EU, I believe Johnson did the best that could be done in the circumstances. Yes, Brexit is an unseemly mess. But we are more or less out of the EU and will over time drift further apart.
Chaotic, incompetent, priapic and vain
Unfortunately Boris’s weaknesses – his fatal flaws – are probably too numerous to list fully here. So, I’ll just mention incompetence, indiscipline, a lack of attention to detail, vanity, a congenital liar and a tendency to follow the demands of his helmeted warrior of love rather than his brain.
But these weaknesses could have been compensated for if Johnson surrounded himself with a competent, effective team of underlings. I believe he had that when he relied on the Dominic Cummings team which helped win the Brexit referendum and then helped carry Johnson to a massive 80-seat general election victory.
Lady Macbeth?
As the wife of the play’s tragic hero, Macbeth (a Scrottish nobleman), Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes Queen of Scrotland.
Enter Carrie Johnson (aka Princess Nut Nut)
Just as Lady Macbeth goaded her husband to kill the Scrottish king, I believe that (IMHO) ecoloon Princess Nut Nut goaded Johnson into firing the Dominic Cummings team and replacing them with her progressive, liberal, lefty, holier-than-thou, virtue signalling, BBC-adoring lickspittle chums. Given Boris BJ Johnson’s many fatal flaws, this was a recipe for disaster. Not only did Johnson lose an effective team that could counterbalance his many fatal flaws, but he was also pushed into abandoning any semblance of being a Conservative. This was perhaps best seen by his obsession with supposed catastrophic climate change and his Flop 26 Glasgow conference. Had Flop 26 been a success, vain, self-regarding Johnson would have turned up at the final session to claim all the glory. His absence tells us all we need to know about the Glasgow disaster.
Moreover, I suspect that Carrie Macbeth’s influence was so great, that many Downing Street staff were unclear who they were actually working for – Lady Macbeth or the greased piglet. And no man can effectively serve two bosses.
We know how Greek tragedies end
As a Classics scholar, BJ must be uncomfortably familiar with how Greek tragedies end. I’ve no idea whether he will survive the next few weeks as PM or will soon be humiliatingly booted out of Downing Street. But in his rise due to his many strengths and his fall due to his fatal flaws, in particular his fawning obedience to his Lady Nut Nut Macbeth, I see all the elements of a classic Greek or Shakespearian tragedy.
It may take days or weeks or even months. But with Johnson’s inevitable fall, Britain’s catharsis is coming.
Category: 
Cummings could be Brutus
Not sure Cummings was the loyal competent administrator who diligently worked away behind the scenes in the same way as Sir Edward Lister did whilst Boris was Mayor of London. Lister of course was ex leader of Wandsworth.
Cummings is loyal to Gove and saw himself at the centre of a liberal technocratic 10 Downing Street. But ultimately he was another big picture person just like Boris.
Boris delivered a sort of Brexit. But he needs to trigger article 16 which is why i assume Frost stepped down – its far from clear if he, a remainer, stepped down because Boris was about to trigger or because he delayed it. The delay before Christmas was pathetic.
The coordinated partygate attacks with Cummings at the centre must also make one wonder how loyal Cummings was to Brexit. If their purpose is to oust Boris about to trigger then partygate is purely to derail Brexit.
Not Brutus, who was persuaded by others to put the dagger in. Rather, the lean and hungry Cassius, watching and waiting for Mark Antony’s call to “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.” Ever since the dismissal which followed his infamous trip to the Specsaving wonders of Barnard Castle, Cummings has been watching and awaiting his opportunity to put the boot in. He’s known all along where the bodies are buried and now he’s disinterring them one by one. Boris should have remembered that old sage about keeping your friends close, but your enemies even closer. Even John Major knew that when he spoke about the relative advantages of where to empty the bladder when on a camping expedition!
I don’t agree with your view about Johnson. Plato described our situation. He saw the problems with democracy and described it with references to selecting someone to be the navigator of a ship. He said democracy selects the most charismatic person without considering their competence to do the job, and so the ship will end up on the rocks. That is how Boris was elected to mayor and he claimed he was a successful mayor in his campaign for party leadership but the competition wasn’t great. I have never been impressed and I would not have voted for anybody at the last election but voted Tory in the hope that he might get us out of the EU.
Thatcher was successful because she had a vision, was competent and had a competent cabinet. Boris has no vision, is incompetent and surrounded by fools and listens to fools. A competent cabinet would never accept an incompetent leader. Animals always have the most competent to lead the herd otherwise they would not survive.
The problems we have today are related to our political system and democracy. The party system is divisive because it is based on disagreement. We need our elected representatives to work together for us, not the party. The MPs opposition to the EU referendum was proof that they are not interested in our view and their reluctance, in all parties, to accept the decision of the referendum is further proof. We vote entirely based on the propaganda from the parties and know little about the candidate we are voting for. Most people will name the party leader or the party when asked who they vote for. This is where it all goes wrong.
I don’t know what Boris thinks about the EU but I believe he gambled that supporting the referendum result would get him elected and it worked. I heard a comment saying that he is negotiating trade agreements with other countries in the same way as the EU and that is why Lord Frost resigned. No details were given. If Boris goes there is a chance that the EU membership will be raised again. Is there someone brave enough to reverse the decision without another referendum?
Blair, the usual suspect when the collapse of effective British government is concerned, was responsible for promoting a government culture in which unelected ‘advisers’ were given unprecedented power and influence over elected public servants.
The problem with the Trump administration in the US was that Trump, as an outsider, had built up no following of professional politicians and administrators who he knew he could trust during a conventional political career. Thus he had to rely on the advice of others to choose a competent and loyal team, and was all too often betrayed, resulting in an administration that was constantly sabotaged from within.
I think that a similar situation has prevailed within the Johnson administration, he being a relative outsider with a reputation as something of a ‘chancer’, and apparently without much of a following in the House. Cummings obviously had personal appeal as he’s an opportunist just like Johnson, but he was plainly a loose cannon with loyalty only to himself. His carefully-timed drip-feed of partygate revelations shows just what a nasty piece of work he actually is.
It’s high time that these unelected advisers were done away with. We have a Civil Service that, for all its faults, has a recognised code of practice and a system of internal discipline. These are the only people that a Prime Minister and Ministers should be taking their advice from – not a team of opportunist PR types who have no legal or ethical responsibility to anyone or for anything they do.
Jeffrey makes a good point and Thatcher’s downfall might have started when she listened to Alan Walters rather than Lawson. It’s fine to listen to others but she undermined her chancellors.
As a Scrot, I feel abandoned by you well governed English chaps as I watch the SNP spend £25 million to translate Robert Burns into something like Rab Inferno.
Great article David.
Also, Great comments above.
Trust Boris the Turk to give us a Geek tradgedy.
Boris could still pull himself back from the brink were he to apologise outright for his lies about Downing Street parties (after all, we all suspected before electing him that he was congenitally economical with the truth), blame his lock-down and Plan B policies on a naive but now revised belief in the prognostications of doom by SAGE et al, write-off and/or reimburse every single fine outrageously imposed by Plod on ordinary citizens alleged to have “contravened covid laws”, junk Zero Carbon and its associated costly and disastrous consequences for ordinary householders and drivers, and finally deal definitively and effecrtively with illegal cross-Channel immigration. Never mind the left-wing woke brigade Boris, just get it done! Angry as many of us are with Boris at this moment, as we contemplate the days, weeks, months during which we were forbidden to see our closest family members, hold weddings or attend funerals, the hard fact is that there is no one else amongst Tory MPs who could or would do any better. Most would either do worse or are regarded as unelectable because they lack voter appeal. Then there’s Heseltine and whoever else in the Party he can rally to his Remoaner cause, ever ready to put the boot in, lurking in the wings, just waiting to stir the mix and reverse Brexit. As for Sainsburys and the John Lewis lot (mainly Waitrose I suppose for the ordinary shopper), insisting still on shoppers being muzzled, well they can keep their groceries and their impositions. I was in a Tesco hypermarket on Tuesday, where a large proportion of shoppers were unmasked and many staff shelf-fillers had pulled their mandatory masks below their noses and even their mouths. And good luck to them thought I! I certainly wouldn’t want to push a loaded trolley of goods around a supermarket, constantly bending down or stretching up to load shelves, scarcely able to breathe because of a filthy saliva and mucus-soaked bandage around my nose and mouth! So keep your groceries, Waitrose! You’re far too expensive anyway. I know where I’ll be shopping!