I have decided to write a second volume of my life of Johnson, who has always been an affront to serious-minded people’s idea of politics.
Johnson’s election manifesto promised to remove the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, among other pledges.
Disraeli’s impudence and audacity, demonstrated in this collection of his sayings, cast light on the present Prime Minister’s conduct.
Plus: In my view, there is no case at all to merit a decision to do anything other than keeping the lockdown, maybe with a few tweaks.
The Conservative victory in the general election of 2019, on a promise to Get Brexit Done, was a crushing defeat for them.
Ed West describes in his new book how the Left has established “a moral monopoly”. It describes the mentality of a Tory who will not be imprisoned in a system.
The latter will make much of the Government’s Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission – promised in the Conservative Manifesto.
Many of those who self-identify as being on the Left also back key Conservative policies.
It is a reversion to the old tribal idea: this people good, that people bad. It challenges the notion that we are all individuals, responsible for our own behaviour.
The former may have won a battle, but the latter will win the war. Diverse, inclusive, victimhood culture is the future.
Only one in three Party members, according to our poll, are unambiguously lined up behind the idea.
If Boris Johnson now gives real political substance to what has become an overused catch-phrase, he will recreate the Tories in the image of “ Honest Stan” Baldwin.
The scale of his domestic ambitions and the legacy of the Iraq War suggest that his ambitions will be limited – for the moment at least.
In this new political battle, the greatest tension will not be left v right or even fiscal
doves v economic hawks. It will be a battle between creativity and convention.
Here is a Tory Democrat who with sublime impertinence has stolen the socialists’ clothes.