A week after we were supposed to see the Sue Gray report in full, a report which was going to tell us what we already know, namely that Boris Johnson is a lying entitled rule-breaking hypocrite, we are still waiting, and the lying entitled hypocrite is still firmly ensconced in Downing Street. Thanks to a jaw-dropping intervention from that same Metropolitan police which has refused to investigate well-grounded allegations that the Conservatives have been illegally soliciting donations in return for peerages, it now seems that we will only be seeing a heavily redacted report, which means that we will get a report into allegations of lock down busting parties in Downing Street which is stripped of any references to lock down busting parties in Downing Street.
No wonder Johnson and his allies are starting to believe that the mendacious abandoned mattress will survive this mess, thanks to a Metropolitan police force which has succeeded only in giving the impression that it is as institutionally corrupt as the Conservative party. The inexplicable decision of the Met to decide at the very last minute, just as the Gray report was about to be published means that it could now be weeks or even months before the full report is published, by which time much of the political and media heat will have gone out of the affair, which is very much to the advantage of Johnson and his cronies.
I’m so old I can remember when your average Tories were just basically reasonable people with some really crap ideas about economics and the role of trade unions, and not an out and out festering mass of chaotic and corrupt anti-democratic xenophobic flag shagging authoritarian hypocrites who wouldn’t accept the truth if it slapped them in the face with a birthday cake. It is now clear that the corruption, chaos, and rank incompetence which characterises the Johnson government has also infected every other institution of the British state, rot does indeed set in from the head down.
The Tories chose Johnson in part because he’s a loose cannon, unlike the buttoned up and boring carefully managed and curated charisma free voids which most politicians have become these days – Rishi Sunak springs to mind, a man who gives off the vibe of someone who thinks he’s living it large and dangerously if he puts milk in his hot chocolate that’s twelve hours past its best by date. In their arrogance, they just forgot that the point about a loose cannon is that eventually it will go off in your direction and take you out too. Johnson has not yet taken the Tories out of power, but what he certainly has done is to destroy what is left of public confidence in the institutions of the British state.
Back in 2014, in what seems like a different era, the supposed world class quality of British institutions and the robustness of British democracy were major arguments of the Better Together campaign in their attempts to fend off rising support for Scottish independence. We were told that Scotland depended upon the Westminster Parliament in order to guarantee democracy itself. Without Westminster, apologists for British nationalism – which they insisted was not nationalist at all- warned that Scotland would soon descend into an authoritarian dystopia of nationalist intolerance.
Yet as we see yet more flag shagging and royal events being planned by a corrupt Conservative Government which breaks the law with impunity and which introduces yet more measures to demonise migrants, to restrict the right of protest, and to neuter any body capable of holding it to account, it’s clear that the authoritarian dystopia of nationalist intolerance is already here, and it’s demanding union flags on car licence plates and God Save the Queen every night on the TV.
Johnson’s survival will also destroy the Conservative party in Scotland, whose leader lightweight Douglas Ross is in the impossible position of being the leader of the Scottish arm of an aggressively Anglo-British nationalist party who has declared the British Prime Minister and UK leader of the Conservatives to be unfit for office. To make matters worse for Ross, he backed Johnson in the Conservative leadership contest and owes his own job as Scottish Tory leader to an undemocratic coup orchestrated by Downing Street and Ruth Davidson.
During the Conservative leadership contest in July 2019 Ross announce that he was supporting Johnson because, “It’s Boris Johnson who can deliver most for the four nations of the United Kingdom,” and added that one reason he was supporting Johnson was because, “Across the United Kingdom people want to see politicians keep their promises.” Well that’s aged well hasn’t it Douglas?
No wonder the Scottish Tories are doing their utmost to keep a low profile just now. Not even the intellectual vacuum that is their contingent of MSPs are willing to put their heads above the parapet, some of them may be the kind of person who is so clueless they probably think that gonorrhoea is the name of a diarrhoea medication, and all their thoughts are in comic sans, but even they know that they cannot defend the indefensible offence against decency that is Boris Johnson.
Against this backdrop it is welcome news that the Scottish Government has restarted planning for the independence referendum that it intends to hold towards the end of next year in line with the commitment made during the Holyrood election of May 2021, a campaign which was dominated by the issue of a second referendum and which returned the largest pro independence majority in the history of the modern Scottish Parliament despite a concerted anti-independence tactical voting campaign funded by Conservative dark money.
Johnson has also managed to destroy the argument that the Conservatives have been deploying constantly against another referendum – even though the people gave their answer in May 2021 – and the anti- referendum Tories, Labour, and Lib Dems lost the argument.
The Conservatives can hardly claim that the Scottish Government ought to be concentrating on dealing with the pandemic and planning the recovery from it when they themselves have been concentrating on having parties, on deciding whose turn it is to take the Downing Street suitcase to the off-licence, and then on spinning lies about their selfish self-indulgence in the hope of not being caught.
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