Anyone for Prime Minister?

 Anyone for Prime Minister?

Here we are looking forward to what could potentially be the hottest week so far in Britain and the latest Punch and Judy seaside show is about to get underway. The Tory politicians masquerading as the people with only our best interests at heart, are now gnashing their teeth, rubbing their hands with glee and taking a sadistic thrill out of the misfortune of now former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In the last couple of days they've been jostling for the best position, pushing each other aside, promoting themselves in tacky videos and generally behaving like children nagging their parents for more sweets. This is the beauty parade that could get very ugly and nasty. Britain is by now accustomed to the presence of these preening, posturing charlatans, these self obsessed egomaniacs, the chancers, the opportunists and our self regarding government ministers who seem to spend most of the days just underestimating the intelligence of the public. But surely we know much more than they'll ever know even if they think otherwise. 

Ever since Boris Johnson strode towards the famous microphone stand outside 10 Downing Street and declared he'd forgotten how to lead the country, the clamour has grown quite vehemently for his successor as soon as possible. Politics can be such a messy business, the kind of profession that only the most hard headed could possibly tolerate for any length of time. In fact if you fancy five years of character assassination, constant criticism, persistently negative commentaries from all directions and a barrage of verbal poison then this could be the job you've always wanted.

And so it was that Johnson succumbed to the inevitable and for a while it looked as if there had been a ceasefire at Westminster. Poor Boris has been subjected to so many deadly bullets and missiles that there must have been private moments when he must have wished he'd never contemplated doing the job in the first place. So when that precious moment of release came, Johnson probably and begrudgingly accepted his fate and just wanted an empty room alone with his congested thoughts.

To say that the last two and half years have been hectic and tempestuous would be the greatest understatement ever made in public. When Johnson won the 2019 General Election by a substantial margin he must thought this Prime Minister lark would be a piece of cake. Little did he know that that cake would be of the rock variety. It wasn't particularly palatable and completely indigestible. This was not plain sailing and who ever thought realistically that it would be?

So from very late 2019 the problems came thick and fast. And then they became completely unmanageable, rather like the mountain of filing your boss gave you when they were in a bad mood. In March 2020 things reached a calamitous pass. By the end of that March Boris must have felt like a wartime general throwing up his hands in horror and just allowing the tide of events to just overwhelm him. The coronavirus lockdown would define his leadership of the country. Three years down the line and Johnson must feel like a severely wounded hospital patient with both legs hanging in plaster.

This has not made for gratifying viewing and by the end of last week, Johnson, apart from those ever present feelings of persecution, must have felt relieved that things could hardly have got any worse. Every week from those early days of Covid 19, our Prime Minister bravely faced the music at tea time on a daily basis. He stood at the lectern with his trusty government doctors or scientists and just nodded in bewilderment, trotting out a vast spreadsheet of facts and figures, barely able to recognise the immensity and tragedy of it all.

So he hung his head, glanced from side to side, referring to those in the know and tried to pretend that he wasn't terrified when we knew he was. Every day he expressed his despair, a horribly forlorn figure who thought that somebody had handed him a bomb. But now on the warmest day of summer 2022 there is a sense that we may be over this one. And last week it all came to a grisly and gruesome end for Boris Johnson. As we knew it would.

After a relentless bombardment of resignations, obvious shows of no confidence and sheer disenchantment, Johnson threw in the towel. He didn't really want to go and you couldn't really blame him for being just a tad bitter and resentful. In fact the Prime Minister had been hounded out of office, a case of history repeating itself ad nauseum. First there was Margaret Thatcher and then there was Theresa May who rightly felt hard done by since they must have believed they hadn't done anything drastically wrong.

But the history books will tell us that Boris Johnson did everything to upset everybody, rock the boat, polarise Britain and then made a rod for his own back. Clearly the man was just a foolish, deluded liar who, when faced with the knowledge that he'd got his hands in the cookie jar and then got his fingers burnt painfully, kept apologising and being extremely remorseful. To this day even Johnson must have thought none had noticed his blunders and that everything would be hunky dory. 

Sadly the air of fallibility and vulnerability that almost characterised his job as Prime Minister was exposed for what it was. There were the embarrassing denials, the admissions of guilt, the insistence that he didn't mean to do it but did. Of course there were the parties, the gatherings, the cheese and wine that may have been consumed and then the recognition that he may have been ill advised. It all came out in the wash, the damage limitation, the childish pleas that for another chance, please.

And last but not least there was the Boris Johnson ultimate party trick, so to speak. This became another protracted saga of absent mindedness, confusion heaped on confusion, the willingness to come forward and hope the country would forgive these rushes of blood to these head. Besides being Prime Minister can't be easy when you're suddenly confronted with perilous moments of crisis that had just got out of control. 

So it is that the election of a Prime Minister. In no particular order of merit there is Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Grant Shapps, Lynne Truss, Ben Wallace, Rishi Sunak and Uncle Tom Cobley with his gang of troublemakers. It occurs to you that the great Harold Macmillan, who would become one of the finest and most venerable of  Prime Ministers, may well be spinning in his grave. The man who turned into a Tory grandee in later years may well have been livid, mortified to know that Boris Johnson had really left a repulsive stink in the House of Commons.

Still here we are in the muddled aftermath of it all and for the British government these must be deeply worrying times. The constitution is still intact if only just. But the infrastructure is creaking horribly and the girders are far from safe. This is not the way we expect our politicians to behave and yet they continue to do so. Of course Boris Johnson will now embark on that familiar joy ride of hugely lucrative after dinner speeches for which we can only assume his considerable bank balance would quite clearly benefit.

Johnson will then embark on another colossal journey of copiously detailed memoirs, more books and regular appearances on TV chat shows and who knows perhaps a chat show of his own. His recently written biography on Johnson's all time hero Sir Winston Churchill will now be followed by another on William Shakespeare and perhaps world domination will be his by this time next week.

Some of us still have vivid memories of the former Prime Minister sliding on a Zip wire across the London landscape waving a flag, Johnson proudly boasting that the London Olympics would finally be here and table tennis suddenly turning into wiff waff. Then there were those golden years of Mayor of London when everything he did was either moderately good or just plain awful. There was that dreadful moment when he rugby tackled a youngster and came across as very macho, a figure of well respected masculinity. 

Now though two and half years since becoming Prime Minister is back to where he was originally. He's out of 10 Downing Street, no longer Prime Minister and wondering why everybody kept picking on him and besides it wasn't me guv. Perhaps Johnson was complex and unfairly misunderstood. But you're still left with the enduring impression of an old Etonian who simply regarded the Prime Minister's job as some fantasy public school prank that went terribly wrong. Any volunteers for the 10 Downing Street job? You don't have to be a masochist but it does come with a significant health warning.