UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We're actually in constitutionally uncharted territory right now: lengthy leadership elections are a relatively new innovation in British Politics and there's only ever been one full one (2019) for a government party. Previously transitions were quick as internal political processes were quick, which is why there's no tradition of caretaker Prime Ministers.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's no such thing as a standard form of No Confidence motion!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Its actually a mildly interesting trivia question - Sunak would be the shortest PM since when exactly?

Well Thatcher was shorter. If you limit it to shortest male PM, then I’m not sure.

Which is amusing as the outgoing PM is short enough himself. Naturally his claimed height is an obvious lie, but we really have come to expect that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Reading between the lines there it seems (as I suspected at the time) that they were seriously preparing for a Dismissal if it came to it. It is utterly extraordinary that we reached even that point - this is not a thing that is supposed to happen, ever.

Anyway for those who are not aware, one of the many peculiarities of this country is that the Eye is genuinely the best source for accurate and half-accurate briefings and gossip from the Palace and has been for decades. This is largely because the people who run the magazine went to the same Public Schools as all the senior flunkies and courtiers.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In what circumstances do you think they would have pulled the trigger?

We'll never really know for sure. He had technically crossed the line where it would have been constitutionally acceptable, but Brenda's default (quite correctly in my view) has always been not to act unless there's no alternative. I suspect it would have come if he had tried to wriggle out of the internal VONC procedures, which was looking briefly, horribly plausible. It's hard to express how utterly mad it is that this was an outside possibility and not an absurd hypothetical.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is a very random and off-topic (would have posted in Economics but no one reads that) question, but why does the UK government insist on reporting unemployment with only the raw numbers? I've noticed that in both the current day and the past, unemployment is always reported first and foremost with a raw number of unemployed and then you have to do a lot of digging to try to find the unemployment rate.

Tradition. It's like insisting on reporting on the size of an MPs majority at the last election in terms of raw numbers and not percentages. O/c unemployment stats in this country are now a complete joke.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Please give us the tea

Are you familiar with expression 'office bike'?

Of course it's more than a bit unfair that this is the sort of thing that tends to be held more against women than men - there have been leaders of both main parties recently with similar reputations (including o/c Johnson) and it never hurt either - but that's the society that we live in.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

(I think you might have to go back to Lloyd George to get a comparable senior figure)

Whose... er... exploits... were on a sufficient scale that the bizarre stereotype amongst upper and upper middle class people in England about Welsh men being rampant sexual predators who love nothing more than to have an affair with other people's wives dates to his time in national politics and not a moment earlier.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Please give us the tea

It has also been suggested that when Truss gets down to business, sometimes that includes energy and industrial strategy.

Niche joke, but I got it and laughed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Sunak is 5'7" and being talked about like he's Verne Troyer? Hell, he's taller than me.

Without putting too fine a point on it, he is not 5' 7''.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No photo-op of BoJo with the Lionesses yet? That's not really like him......

Wasn't at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games either, which has been noticed locally.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Different methodologies are one factor, but there are also some polls there with obvious bad samples (e.g. the most recent YouGov one). But polling over the Summer months tends to be a little pointless anyway.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Not terrible for Starmer.

37% 'ready' isn't bad compared to his predecessors particularly as the 'not ready' is low. Corbyn's score was the same for both elections despite one being significantly worse than the other.

He's doing far far worse than Tony Blair did, or even David cameron. He has comparable ratings to Ed miliband. Take that for what it is worth

Except that he doesn't: given how our electoral system works the negative numbers are as important as the positive ones. Amongst other things it has always been the case that a less polarised electorate is better news for Labour than anyone else.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I could make certain comments about both Plaid's internal structures and the quality of the sort of people they have giving them legal advice, but perhaps I'd best not. I'm easily identified and have enough going right now as it is.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Long ago and far away.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah it's a shame really, Johnson losing in '24 would've been more satisfying than Truss losing (assuming thats what happens)

On the other hand he will lose office in the most fundamentally humiliating manner of any PM since the 18th century, so...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Certainly the case for Mulroney (privatisation, the GST, NAFTA and environmental legislation all being major aspects of his policy legacy) but for Johnson? Other than 'getting Brexit done', it's difficult to think of any significant policy legacy that his government will leave behind.

Even then, well, the wheels were already set in motion one way or another. His main legacy (other than the manner of his downfall, which is notable, and the general incompetence) would be the new (permanent?) political crisis in Northern Ireland. Other than that there's... nothing. So much of his government's legislative agenda ended up being cancelled halfway through because he changed his mind about this or that, and extremely poor management of parliamentary time (perhaps in future pick a Leader of the Commons who is not fundamentally indolent? Useful advice for all would-be PMs I suppose, but it shouldn't be necessary!) has contributed further to that issue.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Brexit is a pretty huge legacy though.

But it isn't his legacy, is it? The general form that Brexit has taken was shaped by May and the general chaos of the 2017-19 Parliament: Johnson's only significant modifications were with respect to Northern Ireland.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He delivered it, so it is his legacy even if in a hypothetical world it could have been May's. May's deal also left open the terms of the trade deal, which under Johnson's government were quite hard, though this is easier to change than Brexit itself.

He signed the final treaty and the final vote through Parliament was during his administration, but I just don't see why this should be seen as being of great significance. Any Conservative majority administration would have been able to do the latter easily, and we can be fairly sure, given what happened, that any new Conservative leader would have won a majority at an election that year, so lacking in credibility were the principle opposition parties.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Except that all indications are the voters who have moved heavily into Labour's column over the past year are people who did not vote (or voted for minor parties) Labour in 2019 but were previously loyal supporters and people who voted Conservative in 2019 but who previously often (though by no means always) voted Labour. In a society in which half the electorate has no sense of identification or loyalty to any individual party and in which even those in the other half are a lot more conditional about the latter than was once typical, electoral volatility will always be capable of cutting in multiple directions and concepts like 'realignment' are not very useful as they imply a solidity and a permanence that does not actually exist. This also means that a lot of traditional British methods of analysing elections - largely developed during the stable and highly-partisan postwar period - are equally inappropriate. 2019 was a particularly strange election as not only was at an Issue Election (a very rare thing in British politics this side of the 1930s), but, by that point, the principal opposition party was in the odd position of being unusually attractive to some parts of the electorate that are generally marginal supporters at best while being unusually unattractive to parts that are usually quite firm supporters. In general I would say that psephologists would be better off accepting the chaos and trying to find out the patterns that govern it, rather than try to insist on the existence of an order, a structure and a teleological direction that does not exist and no longer can.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course these moments of crisis have been common enough in modern British history, though this is the first since Black Wednesday to be to a large extent self-inflicted. It's right to be pessimistic about the short-term, but there's no reason to be for the future beyond that. We've been here before: younger posters might not be aware quite what an absolute state this country's public realm was in for most of the 1990s for instance.