BOris Johnson’s total lack of shame has long been one of his defining narcissistic traits. His willingness to betray his family, friends, and colleagues for immediate personal gain is well known. Likewise, his incompetence – his inability to understand the basic details – was also brought into the equation, as no one on the Tory benches really cared about that. Boris was just Boris.
But something changed over the summer. Johnson is no longer seen as the person with the winning touch. In fact, quite the opposite. Many conservatives are slowly waking up to the fact that he can be a burden. Many prime ministers have found that it takes a different skill and mindset to occupy a top position than to reach a top position.
The difference with Boris is that he shows no signs of wanting to learn how to adapt to change. Rather, he is getting worse and worse as prime minister. Limitations are increasingly manifested in laziness, irascibility and forgetfulness.
The Prime Minister’s questions are often ignored as a theater performance. Something interesting only for those inside the Westminster Bubble. And there is some truth in this. But they also open a window to a leader’s soul, revealing qualities such as empathy, wit, intelligence, and humility.
And on all counts, Boris fails: his inability to assess not only the mood of others. the House of Commons but the nation is also a borderline sociopath. As if he sat down in a bunker, surrounded by “yes men” – there are almost no women in Boris’s inner circle – who tell him only what he wants to hear.
On the contrary, Keir Starmer learns quickly. His first PMQ visits were never less than competent, but they were awkward. It was like he was working out how to play the role of the man elected as the leader of the Labor Party. But now we are starting to see a real man. His questions are similarly focused, but he now has the ability to think tirelessly and respond to the prime minister’s lies and misinformation with genuine disbelief, anger and – if necessary – humor. There is only one person in PMQ who looks like the right person to run the country, and that is not Boris.
It wasn’t then that the Labor leader was not spoiled by lines of attacks on the prime minister, and, as one would expect, Starmer chose to plunge into chaos in the exams. Either Boris knew about the problem and chose not to know anything, or he did not know about it, although he had to do it. Simple question: what was it? As you might expect, Boris resorted to bullshit and bragging. Labor never wanted children to go to school again. An outright lie as Starmer was unequivocal in his support for the students returning multiple times in May and June.
After that, Johnson had a complete collapse. Even the few Tories in the audience had the grace to be embarrassed. At first, Boris accused Keir of opposing Brexit – as if leaving it meant that you automatically want tens of thousands of people to die from the coronavirus, and less affluent students demoted in their A-levels. He then accused Starmer of being an IRA supporter.
This was too much for both the Labor leader and Speaker Lindsay Hoyle. Hoyle has been reluctant in the past to challenge Johnson as he walks into a tangential mega-tirade, but this time he quickly reined in him.
For obvious reasons, Starmer looked furious and reminded Boris that, as the head of the prosecutor’s office, he had brought charges against many terrorists. He could also point out that he was not the one who recently proposed the peerage to Claire Fox, who defended the Warrington bombing in 1993 when she was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
“If he was a decent person, he would apologize,” Starmer said. But Boris is not a decent person, so he didn’t. Instead, he continued to run. The vacation scheme will not have any expansion, because it will simply encourage people to stay at home and do nothing. As if the prospect of being unemployed is the lifestyle of millions of workers.
In the end, Starmer asked why Johnson is now refusing to meet with the families of those who have lost loved ones to Covid-19, promising to do so on television just days before. Remind me, was this the 12th or 13th reversal in the last six weeks? It’s time for Boris’s sad face. Or, if it doesn’t work, a serious person. But he can’t do the same, so he just smirked slightly. The reason he was not going to see the deceased was not because he cared too little, but because he cared too much. Their stories can make him unhappy. In addition, it would be inappropriate, since the victims were in litigation with the authorities. There was not, but what other lie among so many?
The recession caused by Starmer lasted until the end PMQ… Boris seemed to have no idea that there were a huge number of industries, such as aviation, tourism, and hospitality, that weren’t going to bounce back anytime soon.
He also didn’t know that Matt Hancock had just renewed several local bans at the very moment he said more people should return to work. One day it may occur to Boris that some companies might not want to criticize the health of their employees, forcing them to return before the workplace is properly protected. But today is not that day.
Rather, it was the day that Boris’s guardians tried to get him out of the House of Commons before he did any further damage to the country or the Tory party.
It was also a day for those watching PMQ to ask themselves how they deserved a leader who is falling apart noticeably week after week. There was never anything very clever about Boris: now there is nothing even funny. Of all the coronavirus joints in all cities in the world, it enters ours.
