I was thinking of blogging again. The defeat - for this is what it was - by leaving the European Union - ended me having anything to say. It was up to those least divided and so taking a majority to carry out the will of the voting system.
The Northern Ireland Protocol is a kind of figleaf for the exit, to keep a borderless Ireland that has meant a border of sorts in the Irish Sea. The government now does not like its own handiwork. Lord Frost, negotiating it, hoped it would allow the UK to become a Singapore off Europe, being an economic liberal Tory.
But economic liberalism has had nothing for the Covid pandemic, and why we have had a centrist and even social democratic government under Johnson. Johnson's centralism doesn't mean he doesn't care about the Conservative Party - his one big plan was to bring UKIP deserters back to the fold. But he cares little about anything else. Indeed a lot of what he does is about what Carrie Johnson wants, his highly political wife.
He's a good communicator. Even charlatans have to be good communicators, otherwise they get nowhere to practise their craft.
What does if for Johnson this time is that hiding behind the Sue Gray inquiry into parties won't work. It's too binary. Either he (and his wife) were there, or they were not, and being there in that manner was illegal. The inviting email is the gun that went off. This happened when people were suffering.
The replacements aren't too hopeful, right wingers again on the newer Cameron school, whereas Johnson is (I suggest) more of the Peter Walker school of Tory history. He's just so shabby, so without honour.
Carrie Johnson will want him to continue, and that's his personal motive to continue, otherwise he might just give up for more lucrative work. If he goes, she's got nothing, and will have to redesign her life to find political influence.
