“Who would have thought that electing a cowardly, talentless, bone-idle, self-serving, narcissistic Old Etonian serial liar in thrall to a ruthless, arrogant career psychopath and backed by millions from Moscow could end so badly?”, John Graham-Hart quipped on Twitter.
Just months on from the Conservative’s landslide general election victory and almost four years since the Brexit vote and Britain finds itself engulfed in a war with its leadership.
Polling released today suggests two-thirds of the British public believe Dominic Cummings should resign over his round-trip to Durham, while 63 per cent say the Prime Minister should sack him. A further eight in ten are convinced that the PM’s de-facto chief of staff broke lockdown rules and seven in ten say the Johnson administration acts as if ‘it is one rule for them and other for everyone else’.
This is all pretty extraordinary pic.twitter.com/9MYvofe5Hz
— Tom Wilson (@feedthedrummer) May 26, 2020
Out of step
Yet the response from the government has been resolute.
Cummings refused to apologise on Monday telling press that he behaved “reasonably” and did not regret his actions, while Johnson stood behind his man saying he acted “responsibly, legally and with integrity”.
You might ask how we have arrived at a point where we are governed by people who are so out of step with the public mood.
To wit the answer is; you get what you voted for.
Long before the election
Indications that Johnson and Cummings play to their own rules had surfaced well before the general election, and indeed the Brexit vote, had took place.
Their ‘win at all costs‘ mantra saw a combination of emotive sloganeering and highly-focused brazen lies win over the electorate, peddling promises they could never deliver without an ounce of shame.
We must remember that these are the people behind the £350 million for the NHS bus, who prorogued parliament to force through their agenda and used tactics such as fake fact checking sites and video tampering to win the last election.
As Yorkshire Post editor James Mitchinson pointed out at the time, the campaign had been laced with “spin, conjecture and downright deceit”.
Little wonder, in that respect, that we have arrived at the situation we find ourselves in now.
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