Philosophical Apprentice comments.

After this collection of David Cameron’s successors: Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Adrian Wooldridge, in the role of ‘Bagehot’ announces:

Britain | Bagehot

Headline : Reading the death certificate on Boris Johnson’s political career

Sub-headline: The political legacy of Britain’s former prime minister has already disappeared

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/06/15/reading-the-death-certificate-on-boris-johnsons-political-career

‘Bagehot’s’ ire at Johnson seems a bit overdrawn, given Boris past shenanigans! Cameron, Teresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are really about a completely disconnected Tory Party, from the realties of British life. And the whole of the British Media’s lies, confected about Jeremy Corbyn as public/political menace:

None the less, Bagehot takes off at a gallop!

The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title mps accept, according to Britain’s absurd constitution, in order to resign. He went because an inquiry into whether Mr Johnson deliberately misled Parliament found that he had. Not only that, he’d also impugned the investigating committee and joined a campaign of abuse and intimidation against it. Mr Johnson faced suspension as an mp for a remarkable 90 days. Given forewarning of the report, the former prime minister quit.

A funeral for Mr Johnson’s career had taken place some days before in a stuffy conference centre in Doncaster. The annual meeting of the Northern Research Group (nrg), a cartel of northern Conservative mps who owe their careers to Mr Johnson, was supposed to be a celebration. Instead it was a premature wake.

The miserable gathering was the best place to survey his political legacy. The nrg, rather than Britain’s departure from the European Union, represented the apogee of Mr Johnson’s political career. It emerged after the 2019 general election, when the party won an 87-seat majority under Mr Johnson as voters across northern England backed the Conservatives for the first time in living memory. In 2005, the Conservatives had 19 northern mps. Then in 2019, they managed 68, with voters enticed by Mr Johnson’s promise of nothing less than a realignment of British politics.

Bagehot wants to bury Boris deep, to expunge him from Political Memory: Bagehot in this regard is a Stalinist. And the ‘Brexit Vote’ was a political self- expulsion from the utterly un-governable E. U. Paradise?

The Reader approaches the remaining 745 words, of the Wooldridge/Bagehot meditation on British Politics, is about the toxic remainder of Boris, he’s its vital political actor in absentia? To engage in the high-toned rhetoric of a highly self-conscious Oxbridger: Caesars assassins cannot withdraw to work of their knives?

Out of self-defense, let this Reader engage in some careful pruning of this essay, while retaining its argumentative integrity, or at the least an attempt at such.

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Now, however, the realignment has reversed. Conservatives are losing everywhere. But support is falling fastest in the northern constituencies the party was so proud of winning.

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Four years on, northern voters who backed the Tories have little to show for it. Conservative mps were happy to give excuses.

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Problems were more fundamental than mere faulty execution. Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson had made impossible promises.

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Brexit has weighed on growth. This meant a government committed to cutting immigration instead had to boost it, to give the economy a hand.

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Instead, mps offered bromides that would be best left in an airport self-help book. “It’s about being a victor, not a victim,” said Nick Fletcher, the mp for Don Valley, a post-industrial constituency on the outskirts of Doncaster.

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“Hands in the air if you think the north is awesome,” pleaded one chairwoman at a fringe event, channelling a children’s television presenter.

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Any cause for optimism came, in the self-help vernacular, from a negative place. Voting Conservative for the first time was a big deal.

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Labour will have to lose because the Conservatives are not trying to win. The party is on defensive manoeuvres. That means placating voters in the south-east. In the latest budget, the government promised more money for child care, which is most unaffordable in the south-east.

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The Conservatives need to win voters in the north of England to hold power. The party needs to maintain voters in the south to exist.

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I know it’s over and it never really began

Rishi Sunak, Mr Johnson’s successor, talks a good game when it comes to the north. He wears the fact he represents a northern seat rather heavily, labelling himself a “prime minister for the north”.

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Instead, Mr Sunak’s speech to the delegates in Doncaster became an accidental eulogy for the form of Conservativism that Mr Johnson personified in 2019 but which is dead today.

Philosophical Apprentice