"At Last The PM Has Said Something . . . "

Boris Johnson Bashes the BBC

Stop This ‘Cringing Embarrassment About Our History’

Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London

Prime Minister Boris Johnson lashed out at the BBC over its decision to remove the lyrics of Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory from its broadcast of the Last Night of the Proms, calling for an end to the constant “self-recrimination and wetness”.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, the Prime Minister said that “they (presumably his political advisors) are trying to restrain me from saying this, but if it is correct — which I can’t really believe that it is -- that the BBC is saying that they will not sing the words of Land Of Hope And Glory or Rule, Britannia! as they traditionally do at the end of The Last Night of The Proms.”

“I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, and about our culture, and we stopped this general bought of self-recrimination and wetness,” Johnson proclaimed.  “I wanted to get that off my chest,” the PM added.

On Monday night, the BBC announced that it would indeed be scrapping the lyrics of the patriotic songs in its Last Night broadcast, after pressure from Black Lives Matter supporters, including from the 35-year-old Ukrainian-Finnish conductor of this year’s ceremonies, Dalia Stasevska, who reportedly is a “big supporter of Black Lives Matter”.

The statement from Mr Johnson was met with glib praise from the leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, who wrote on social media: “Hooray, at last, the PM has said something.”

We Hoped For Better Things

Boris the Clown Has Turned into Boris the Dictator

James Delingpole
Breitbart News


Boris, Spoiler of Summer Holidays; Boris, Calorie-Counting Nanny Statist; Boris the Dictator.

Did anyone vote for any of these grisly characters in the General Election last year? I know I didn’t. When I held my nose and put my cross in the Conservative box, I did so for two reasons. First, I thought it was our best shot at breaking the Brexit impasse and finally leaving the European Union. Second, I fondly hoped that after the disappointments of David Cameron and Theresa May, we might finally have a Conservative prime minister worth the name. Sure, Boris might not have the courage, principles and tenacity of Margaret Thatcher. But at least he’d inject our dreary, earnest political scene with a much-needed sense of fun…

Boris, we are repeatedly told, has libertarian instincts. When in April he first put Britain under lockdown he did so, he told us, with great reluctance.  Funny what a taste of untrammelled power can do to a man, though, isn’t it? In the space of six months Boris Johnson has mutated from loveable clown to blustering dictator.

Britain has the strictest lockdown rules in Europe. You can now get a fine of up to £3,200 simply for refusing to wear a muzzle, despite the fact that a cloth face covering is next to useless against Covid-19. If you go on holiday somewhere deadly like Spain or France, you are now expected to quarantine yourself at home for 14 days, unable even to go to the shops, on pain of more fines running into the thousands.

Not content with grotesquely overreacting to Chinese Coronavirus, Boris has also taken it upon himself to police our diets too.  His latest wheeze, according to the Sun, is to ban adverts for some or all of the following foods from daytime television because they are unhealthy: 

Sausages; fish fingers; pasties; English mustard; ketchup; Marmite; bacon; cheese; humous; potato salad.

This is exactly the kind of political correctness gone mad that Boris would once have satirised heartily in his lavishly overpaid Daily Telegraph column. The Spectator’s diarist Steerpike has collected six examples of this: Boris saying it’s your own fault if you’re fat; Boris attacking TV chef Jamie Oliver for trying to make school meals ‘healthier’; Boris warring against the EU’s attempts to make child booster seats in cars compulsory; Boris decrying plans to restrict river swimming; Boris using his mayoral powers to stop a proposed ban on smoking in parks; Boris criticising George Osborne’s sugar tax as ‘continuing creep of the nanny state’.

In one of these articles, he lamented ‘the namby-pamby, risk-averse, mollycoddled airbagged approach that is doing so much economic damage to Britain’.  How could the person wise enough to have written those words have mutated in such short space to the very embodiment of the overweening nanny statism he once deplored?

The Boris Johnson we voted for was the Boris Johnson who got stuck on the zipwire; the Boris Johnson who executed that comically brutal tackle in the celebrity football match against Germany; the Boris Johnson who successfully threw a basketball hoop backwards over his head on the Embankment near London’s Tower Bridge.

The Boris Johnson we now have in charge — the bullying, nannying, enviro-loon dictator — is a very unpleasant and very disappointing imposter.

Please can we have the amiable buffoon back, sharpish?

Britain and a Liberal World Order

The Great British Comeback

Critics thought that post-Brexit Britain would fail to stand up for the liberal world order. Boris Johnson proved them wrong

By Mathis Bitton
National Review Online


Many commentators thought that Brexit would mark the end of Britain’s involvement in foreign affairs. Embracing the siren calls of nationalism, the reasoning went, the British people had decided to turn inwards, to retreat, to isolate themselves, to reject international alliances, and to focus on domestic problems. This analysis was understandable, particularly given that the shadow of past foreign interventions has haunted the British political establishment for years. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proven these commentators wrong. Over the past few months, Downing Street has shown itself capable of working with other democracies to fight for the liberal world order without relapsing into reckless interventionism.

The past ten years have seen a decline in British diplomatic involvement. Successive governments have reduced defense budgets, shut down military bases, and distanced themselves from playing an active role on the international stage. The Iraq War left an ineffaceable mark upon the British public, which has come to view NATO as a convenient way to justify otherwise unjustifiable interventions abroad. Voters no longer want their country to be America’s wingman, to get carried away in decade-long conflicts that do nothing but destabilize foreign lands and exacerbate anti-Western passions. The ultimate failure of the Libyan intervention reinforced that sentiment. Once more, the all-too-noble but unsuccessful desire to topple a murderous dictator came at the cost of British blood. Chaos ensued, the military dictatorship was replaced by a de facto Islamist theocracy, and the U.K. became even more hated in the region than it was before. One after the other, foreign interventions provided the British people with countless reasons not to trust the promises of their leaders. In 2013, the House of Commons refused to authorize air strikes against Bashar al-Assad — after he used chemical weapons against peaceful Syrian protesters. This vote, many thought, signified the beginning of the end for British influence abroad.

While popular discontentment vis-à-vis foreign interventions was more than warranted, Britain’s gradual retreat did no favors for its reputation as a military power. International observers derided the U.K. as a country obsessed with domestic politics, and Brexit appeared to prove them right. For months, mainstream newspapers and think tanks lamented the perils of isolationism. After centuries of dominance, Britain would disappear or get stuck between competing blocs. David Cameron’s attitude towards China corroborated the sense that the U.K. had abandoned its defense of liberalism: Unconcerned by the Chinese threat, Cameron welcomed Chinese investment in British infrastructure, including in strategic facilities such as nuclear-power plants. In 2015, he went so far as to call our present moment a “golden age” for Sino-British relations.

His successor, Theresa May, was no better.

Boris Johnson Jumpiness Undermines The Nation

There’s Powerful Evidence This Great Panic is Foolish 

Our Freedom is Still Broken and Our Economy Crippled

Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday

As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night, I felt revulsion, anger and grief – as anyone brought up when this was a free and well-governed country would. I also felt terribly alone.

You could not have known, from anything broadcast that night or printed the following day, that anyone was unhappy with these events. But they were.  So, above all things this week, I would like to thank all the kind, perplexed people who have got in touch with me by so many means, to say they share my doubts about the Government’s handling of Covid-19.  There are, in fact, many of us. If you feel this way, you are nothing like as solitary as you think.

Next, I would like to thank all those who disagree with me, who choose to abuse me, often with lies, personal smears and swearwords. Your childish, intolerant reaction has strengthened me in my conviction that mine is the better case. If your policy is so good, why can you not defend it like civilised adults? Do you really think that I regret needless deaths any less than you? Can you not accept that I also have good motives?

I now suspect this dark season might get still worse before we see the clear, calm light of reason again. The greater the mistake we have made, the less willing we are to admit it or correct it. This is why I greatly fear worse developments in the coming few days.

When I predicted roadblocks in my column two weeks ago, which I did, I did so out of an instinct that we were entering on the craziest period of our lives since the death of Princess Diana. And now there are such roadblocks, officious, embarrassing blots on our national reputation.

But even I would not have dared to predict the mass house arrest under which we are all now confined.

The Eco-Fascists Still Slurping At the Trough

Net Zero Is the New "Remain"

It Will Destroy Boris’s Conservatives


James Delingpole
Breitbart London


Net Zero is going to destroy Boris Johnson’s administration in the way that Brexit destroyed David Cameron’s. None of Boris’s clever advisors and colleagues — not Dom Cummings, not Michael Gove — appears to have understood this yet. But others can see it coming a mile off.

But the most gloriously damning analysis of the Conservatives’ looming catastrophe comes from Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs who says ‘the political storm over green targets will be even bigger than Brexit.’

She’s dead right.

Here are some of the highlights from her scorcher of a piece: 

Beyond the Red Wall are rumblings of a new revolt, utterly unanticipated by No 10 and overlooked by a liberal media still shell-shocked by the election. With its drive to “green” the economy at any cost, the Tory party has seemingly decided to celebrate its populist landslide by bogging down the country in zero-carbon paternalism. And so we career towards another People vs Establishment conflict that could be more explosive even than that sparked by the referendum.  

and

It is becoming disturbingly apparent that the Government prizes green targets over “unleashing” Britain’s potential. The cast-iron case for a road-building revolution, for example, clangs a little too harshly against the hollowness of eco-politan sensibilities. Whitehall is genuinely convinced that Red Wall utopia is cycling to work from a rabbit hutch on the outskirts of Birmingham. They find the idea that people might actually aspire to drive to their downtown office from their semi-detached in Dudley, and at the weekends cruise, sunroof down, to the Bullring for shopping, completely ghastly.

Yes. Jacobs is well worth reading because, as a working-class Midlander, she understands much better how ordinary Brexiteers think than does almost anyone in the Westminster bubble.

An Unexpected Transformation Scene

Britain Is the First Country to Turn Back the Liberal Tide

Oliver J J Lane
Breitbart London


The United Kingdom bucked the global trend by being the first nation to reverse the march of liberalism but the “profound danger” of woke politics backed by a displaced religious zeal threatens these developments, constitutionalist Dr David Starkey has said.

Speaking to Breitbart London’s James Delingpole, British historian and broadcaster Dr David Starkey noted the sudden and remarkable appearance of woke culture in British and American universities. It was a unique combination of cultural factors in the Anglo-American that allowed this to flourish, he said, remarking:

“The worst excesses of ‘woke’ only happen in the Anglo-Saxon world… one of the driving forces of this, and why it is so prominent in America, one of the elements of it is it professes to be reason, but it is driven by religion. It is a mistaken religious impulse — all of these things are powered by puritanism. It is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon and American phenomenon.”

Dr Starkey noted the treatment of prominent left-wing political figures as modern-day saints in the new woke-green religion, such as “child saint” Greta Thunberg and UK hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. “This is the profound danger we have now, the grotesque excesses of the left are imbued with religious certainty. Corbynism was manifestly a religious movement — look at them all at Glastonbury [chanting Jeremy Corbyn’s name — ‘JC’, like Jesus Christ]. It is this weird displacement of religion”, he said.

But while the Anglo-American sphere produces a breeding ground for radical wokeism, it also provides a unique political system where change is possible without revolution. Pointing to the remarkable survival of British political institutions for 800 years while all others across Europe were pulled down to manifest change, Dr Starkey said this ability of the English constitutional system to adapt to change was not a mere accident of history, but instead a key quality, and one that was recognised and capitalised upon by the nation’s most astute conservative leaders.

Rolling Back Environmentalist Taxes in the UK

Eco Loons Spit Green Bile

Boris Saves Budget Airline Flybe

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

Who represents real Britain?

a) Solitary Green MP Caroline Lucas; Guardian readers; other tofu-munching eco-freaks; anyone else who lives in Brighton or Totnes; Greenpeace; Fiends of the Earth; Greta Thunberg; Extinction Rebellion.

b) Normal people who like driving in their cars, taking regular holidays, being able to afford to keep their houses warm when it’s cold, and who are bored rigid with being lectured by hectoring little nobodies with crappy pretend science degrees from the University of East Anglia about how the planet’s dying and it’s all their fault and something must be done by yesterday or we’re all doomed.

Boris Johnson is no fool and he seems to have worked out using his Oxford Classics mega-brain that the correct answer is b). At least this is what we can infer from his most significant environmental decision since his landslide general election victory — bailing out the stricken airline company Flybe.

Flybe is the kind of cheap and cheerful budget airline that normal British people use for their holidays. That’s why it is so important that it should not be allowed to die, and why Boris Johnson has just done the right thing by saving the cash-strapped airline with a government rescue package.

Welcome Progress At Last

Hidey Hi, Brexit

Just 1,295 Days After the Referendum, Brexit Deal Finally Passes House of Commons


Oliver JJ Lane
Breitbart London

The EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill passed a vote in the House of Commons last week, three and a half years, three Prime Ministers, and three national elections after the British people voted to leave the European Union in June 2016.

The bill, which will sign into law Boris Johnson’s hastily concluded withdrawal agreement with the European Union struck at the end of 2019 was passed in the House of Commons by a margin of 330 to 231 votes, a majority of 99. This means the bill has completed its third reading, will continue to Parliament’s upper chamber — the House of Lords — for review before becoming UK law, in time for the official withdrawal day of January 31st.

The easy passage of the bill thus far is a massive departure from the repeated defeats of Theresa May in her time as Prime Minister, when she tried and failed three times to get her version of the Brexit deal through Parliament before finally stepping down as Prime Minister in 2019.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that a new Brexit deal has been brokered between the UK and the EU.

The End of a Misbegotten Fifth Column

Brexit, for Real This Time

The Conservative-party electoral win puts an end to years of attempted sabotage

Douglas Murray
National Review Online

Here are two quotes about Brexit. I will tell you whom they are from, but try to guess the date.

The first is from the European Union’s Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt:

“Brexit will now happen. . . . The EU must now focus on building a new close, fair and lasting partnership with Britain. It is in our common interest.”

The second quotation is from the U.K.’s former Conservative deputy prime minister and fanatical pro-EU campaigner, Lord Michael Heseltine. “We’ve lost. We have to face up to that. We’re going to leave the European Union.”

Neither statement is in itself remarkable. The sole remarkable point is the date of each of these statements. Neither was issued on June 24, 2016, the day after the British people voted in a referendum by a majority to leave the European Union. The first quote — from Verhofstadt — was tweeted out on December 13, 2019. The second — from Heseltine — comes from an interview he gave on December 14 of the same year. That is, both came in the immediate aftermath of Boris Johnson’s huge 80-seat-majority win in the British general election of December 12, 2019.

In most regards the result of that election has caused unalloyed celebration for people on the political right. It is not only that the Conservative party now has a parliamentary majority larger than at any other time since Margaret Thatcher. Nor is the joy occasioned only by a Labour loss worse than at any other point since 1935. Perhaps the biggest joy — or relief — for those in the political center as well as the right is the fact that Jeremy Corbyn and the movement he briefly created may now be confined to the dustbins of political history. Corbyn never came close to power. But for someone who has spent his life emboldening anti-Jewish racists of every stripe and whose political beliefs are predictable solely by the question of how anti-Western a thing is, Corbyn got nearer to power than he ever should have done. The memory should cause shudders and reflection across British politics for some time to come.

So in most regards December’s election result presents an opportunity for celebration. But the one cloud on the horizon comes from remarks like those of Verhofstadt and Heseltine: The regretful whisper of what might have been.

Over the last three and a half years, the British political class — and the wider culture — tore itself apart over the issue of Brexit.

Good Signs

Boris Johnson Set to Repeal Brexit-Delaying Fixed-Term Parliaments Act

Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is starting to implement his Conservative Party agenda, including repealing David Cameron’s Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which stymied and delayed the Brexit process earlier this year.

After securing an 80 seat majority in last week’s general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to abolish the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. The removal of the piece of legislation will be a part of the agenda to be laid out by the government in the Queen’s Speech next week, reports The Times.

The act has been a target for removal by Conservatives, who see it as having unnecessarily delayed Brexit and an impediment to their ability to retain control of the government.  Constitutional Historian David Starkey speaking at the New Culture Forum in Westminster said the act was “a classic illustration of the catastrophe of trying to fuse Conservatism and Liberalism”.

Starkey said that the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act was crafted to undermine the constitutional principles established in the United Kingdom.

Whew. The UK Dodged a .50 Cal Round

Thank Goodness Boris Won

The victory of Boris Johnson and the Conservative party is a majestic accomplishment.  If it had turned into a defeat, or an emasculated victory, the costs would have been too dire to contemplate.  

Kiwi in America describes what was at stake:

Boris had to thread a very complex needle to get to the point where even a General Election was callable. Corbyn, assuming that Boris would petulantly defy Parliament and try and crash out without deal, said Labour would vote for a new election only if Boris came back with a new deal. With the Irish backstop the major intractable sticking point for May’s team, Boris proceeded in the shortest of time frames to negotiate a new deal that almost all major players agreed to (the EU, the Eurosceptics in his own party and crucially, the Republic of Ireland). Corbyn could no longer prevaricate and moderates in his party persuaded Labour’s front bench to allow a fresh election to be called.

Blocking the will of the people as expressed in a democratic vote is a fool’s errand. Leave won because Brits wanted their country back. Yes – fear of untrammeled immigration (best personified by the floodgates of new migrants entering Germany and other continental western European nations) was a potent factor but in reality, THE most potent issue behind the Brexit vote was the loss of sovereignty manifested by more and more court cases decided by the European Court of Justice and more and more legislation passed by the UK Parliament rubber stamping laws required to be passed by the EU Commission that was simultaneously unelected, unaccountable, bloated and corrupt.

Here was the cradle of democracy being told what to do, here was the great island nation that was first to tame the absolute power of the monarch, the first to pass the power of taxation to an elected representative body, the first to empower a neutral civil service to administer laws, the first to properly protect property rights, patents and enable the swift and enforceable transfer of assets through a relatively uncorrupt legal system slowly losing its sovereignty. Here was the mother of all Parliaments being emasculated by bureaucrats in Brussels.

Britain had fought and defeated the Spanish Armada, numerous French monarchs over the centuries, Napoleon twice and headed off Nazi Germany when all of Europe fell to Hitler’s advances, but was seeing its once vaunted fishing industry decimated by edicts from Strasbourg. And when Britain’s very own legislators became a party to this democracy destroying travesty, when the opportunity came to put an end to this chicanery of thwarting the will of the people, people were happy to back Boris in his effort to Get Brexit Done because he not only was one of the most public faces of the original Brexit referendum campaign but he resigned his position as No. 2 in May’s Cabinet as her Foreign Secretary and risked being ousted by voters as the shortest serving Prime Minister by submitting his plan for Brexit to the will of the people.

The author identifies other critical issues and concerns which helped deliver the keys of the kingdom to Boris Johnson.  The whole piece is well worth a read. 

 

At Last, Brexit Beckons

Judgment Day U.K.: Tories Win Big

By Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review Online
December 13, 2019

Boris Johnson bested Jeremy Corbyn by rejecting the cultural extremism of the left but abandoning the politics of austerity. Now Brexit is finally imminent.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson ran a Tory campaign that was a rebuke to his two Tory predecessors, David Cameron and Theresa May. He campaigned for getting Brexit finished and talked endlessly about his plans to invest and spend on the National Health Service, with none of the usual Tory promises to “reform” or “streamline” it. In other words, he was not going to be embarrassed about carrying on Brexit, as May had been. And he was going to reverse the policies of austerity that had existed after the financial crash under both the Cameron and May governments.

The result is a thumping majority of 78 seats for the Tories, who won seats deep in traditional Labour heartlands. This is a majority large enough to break the parliamentary deadlock into which the first Brexit deal had fallen. Even more crucially, it is large enough to allow Johnson to freely shape the next stage of Brexit negotiations — on the future trading relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Realignment and rejection

In this space, we predicted after the 2017 snap election that the tectonic plates of Brexit — the sentiments of Leave and Remain — would begin to grind underneath Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn could not find, in this election, a coherent position on Brexit. The resulting earthquake will end his leadership of the Labour Party. He has brought them to the lowest result since before World War II.

The election is a massive national repudiation of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It was often said that Jeremy Corbyn was a “throwback” Labour leader, that he reminded people of the days before Tony Blair took the party in a less socialist and more Clintonite direction. Blair’s transformation of the Labour party in the 1990s was an ideological development that weakened the importance the party’s attachment to the working class. But the truth is that Corbyn’s ideological cohort in the 1980s had done the same, but in a different direction and to different ends.

His was the hard edge of the party that defined itself by its support for Third-Worldist socialist movements, and every challenge to the imperialism of the United Kingdom. He was no Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson. In the end, Corbyn appealed neither to the upwardly mobile metropole voters of the Blair coalition nor to the actual working class in northern England and in Scotland. In this election, the most decisive factor was that Labour finally lost the Labour vote to the Tories in England, and to the Scottish Nationalists in Scotland.

Under Corbyn’s watch, Labour became a party in which anti-Semitism started to have free rein. At first this seemed simply baffling. Surely, in a party committed to diversity, anti-Semitism would be an easily fixable programming error. But the problem has only persisted and grew under Corbyn’s leadership. Former London mayor and Corbynite Ken Livingstone seemed to blame the “Jewish vote” for Corbyn’s defeat last night, despite the fact that Jews are less than 1 percent of the population of the United Kingdom.

Johnson ran on a message of finally delivering on the result of the largest democratic mandate in British history: the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. He made this the center of his campaign and won a commanding majority.  Still, those on the center-left and progressive sides view this election as a reversal for democracy itself.

It is no such thing. Brexit is the most significant event for Western democracy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the great dangers in Europe and increasingly in America is the emergence of a political class that acts as a nomenklatura, that is motivated by its teleological belief in a fixed course for History itself. Brexit was a repudiation of this class and its version of History.

Until this election, elite Remainers were pioneering a playbook for subverting even such a stunning referendum result as Brexit. The playbook included hysterical and false accusations that the result was rigged by a hostile foreign power. (Russia, naturally.) It included simple fraud and misrepresentation. Tory and Labour candidates who preferred Remain simply lied about their commitment to implementing the result in their manifestos in 2017. When Labour did surprisingly well on a manifesto that promised to deliver Brexit that year, the media reinterpreted it as a rebuke to Brexit.

The playbook included the usurpation of democratic institutions by judicial ones. In recent months the United Kingdom’s supreme court discovered powers to revise the royal prerogative and parliamentary procedure when it was acting on behalf of Remain. And of course, this class sought to deploy the tried and true methods of the European Union, which simply forces nations to hold referendum again until the pre-determined, pro-European result is given. This is over and done. The clock of History is well and truly smashed now. The political classes of the West are on notice: They can no longer govern against the consent of democratic peoples forever. . . .

The election is good for conservative nationalist reformers everywhere in the West. Certain trends have dominated Western politics since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s and early 2000s this included the dominance of center-left parties who tacked to the center and away from socialism on economic issues. Now we see a photo negative of the trend. Johnson’s ability to firmly detach Labour voters from the Labour party is another indication that center-right parties are ascendant when they reject the cultural extremism of the left, but abandon the politics of austerity and aspirations for a laissez-faire economy.

Identity Problems

Will the Real Boris Johnson Please Stand Up

Excerpts from "Boris's Blundering Brilliance"
Andrew Sullivan
The Intelligencer

It’s hard to take the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, completely seriously. Just look at him: a chubby, permanently disheveled toff with an accent that comes off as a parody of an upper-class twit, topped off by that trademark mop of silver-blond hair he deliberately musses up before venturing into the public eye. Then there are those photo-op moments in his long career that seem designed to make him look supremely silly — stuck dangling in midair on a zip line with little Union Jacks waving in his hands; rugby-tackling a 10-year-old in Japan; playing tug-of-war in a publicity stunt and collapsing, suited, onto the grass; or declaring at one point that he was more likely to be “reincarnated as an olive,” “locked in a disused fridge,” or “decapitated by a flying Frisbee” than to become prime minister.

And yet he has. And more than that: This comic figure has somehow managed to find himself at the center of the populist storms sweeping Britain and the West — first by becoming the most senior politician in Britain to back Brexit in 2016, and now by plotting a course that might actually bring the United Kingdom out of the epic, years-long, once-impossible-looking mess he helped make. Just over four months into office as PM, he appears poised to win an election he called and, if the polls are anywhere near correct, score a clear victory and take Britain out of the E.U. by the end of January. . . . 

Here is what the opponents of Boris darkly report:

Fire Up the Cigars; Enjoy the Scent of Victory

Stop Worrying. Brexit Will Happen

Boris Will Win Big.

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

So Britain won’t, after all, be getting Brexit by Hallowe’en, do or die.

This ought, in theory, to be a fatal blow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson: did he not stake his credibility on delivering Brexit by October 31?  But politics, as we should all have realised by now, isn’t about reality. It’s about perception. The perception of the voting public — so the opinion polls tell us — is that Boris is not to blame for the recent run of Brexit delays. On the contrary, the more meddling and procrastination and cheating there has been by the Remainer Establishment, the more Boris’s stock has soared.

Here is how James Forsyth and Katy Balls put it in the Spectator:

And Now . . . Some Good News On Brexit

Boris Johnson Is Close To Getting Brexit Done

Sumantra Maitra
The Federalist

It is still too early for surety, but this three-year national humiliation might be over soon, as Britain reaches a deal to get out of the EU, and trade freely with the rest of the world.


One of the most baffling reactions among liberals since 2016 was to compare Boris Johnson to Donald Trump. I reside in England, and saw tweet after tweet from the Max Boots and Tom Nichols of the world on why these two, and Brexit and the election of Trump, are exactly the same.

The reality, as always, is a lot more complicated. There is of course similarity in both events. Both were a rebel yell against orthodoxy in the respective countries. In the United States, it was by masses of people who oppose the elites’ conventional wisdom, from mass immigration from Latin America to foreign intervention in the Middle East. In the United Kingdom, it was about the ever-closing European Union. The British, and mostly the English, did not want to be vassals of an empire.

But that was where the similarities end. Trump is mercantile, Boris is a free trader. Trump is a businessman from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who wants the United States to end what he perceives to be free-riding from allies and focus on China as the peer competitor, given that America’s favorable balance is fading fast and there’s a time to draw a line in the sand.

Boris, a classics scholar from Oxford, can recite The Iliad in ancient Greek, talk about ascending tricolons in rhetoric, and is a former editor of The ​Spectator with books on the Roman empire and Winston Churchill under his belt. He is at heart a historian who wants to break open the EU monopoly and open up trade to turn London into a Singapore upon the Thames. That’s something Germany’s Angela Merkel is extremely worried about, as she considers post-Brexit Britain, alongside the United States and China, to be “an economic competitor for the EU.”

It Cannot Be Untied, so . . . Bring Out the Sword

The Brexit Knot

By Douglas Murray
National Review Online

[An excellent summary of Brexit and its opponents; the issues and the pettifoggery. Ed.]

Being a classicist, Boris Johnson would be familiar with the Gordian knot. But for anybody whose schoolroom memories need refreshing, the knot in question was put in place by Gordius, king of Phrygia. Reputedly only a ruler of Asia would be able to untie the knot — making it a slightly less glamorous version of King Arthur’s sword in the stone. In any case, when confronted by the knot, Alexander the Great is said to have spotted the fast way to undo the problem and simply whacked at it with his sword, so proving that he should become the king of Asia.

If ever there was a fearsome knot in modern politics it is the question of Brexit. Not that the knot was as completely tied in 2016, when the British people were given a straightforward choice. The question the public was then asked was whether it wanted to “remain” in or “leave” the European Union. The public voted by a majority (52 percent to 48 percent) to leave, though it has since appeared that for those who set the question this was the wrong answer. Or at least not the answer that the political class expected the public to select. And so the knot tightened and became ever more knotty with each resulting effort to untie it.

The civil service, it turned out, had not been instructed to prepare for the eventuality of a “leave” vote. Then–prime minister David Cameron and his colleagues may simply have expected the “remain” side to win. Or they may have feared that if word had got out that the civil servants were preparing for the possibility of a “leave” vote then that would have bolstered that side of the campaign. Whatever the reason, on June 24, 2016, Whitehall turned out to be unprepared for what was one of only two possible results.

With Cameron having resigned just hours after that vote, the stunned victors plunged into a bout of fratricide. The lead Brexiteer — Boris Johnson — was politically assassinated by his own leadership-campaign chief, the second most prominent Brexiteer — Michael Gove — who then made an unsuccessful bid for the leadership himself. Unsuccessful because, with the victors in disarray, a path through the middle of the Conservative-party membership (who vote in leadership elections) was created for Theresa May. And so the former home secretary who had given a single half-hearted speech in favor of Remain ended up becoming the Conservative-party leader, the prime minister, and the person responsible for making sure that Britain exited the European Union.

Trying to Make Sense Of It All

Boris Johnson Is Stymied, but So Are His Opponents

By John O'Sullivan
National Review Online


The anti-Brexit coalition is split on how soon to hold a new election and on who their candidate should be.

After delivering a Tory conference speech that knocked off the nation’s socks yesterday and presenting a new U.K.–EU Brexit deal today that might conceivably be endorsed by Parliament, Boris Johnson should perhaps be enjoying a good press. But the message of most media commentary is that Boris is stymied yet again, or still, or maybe forever — the Prisoner of Downing Street kept confined by a slim majority of MPs united on nothing except their opposition to him, to Brexit, and to holding a new election.

So Paul Goodman’s epigram that Boris and the Tories can’t win an election without getting Brexit and they can’t get Brexit without winning an election remains the only significant truth as other events related to Brexit come and go. What is less noticed, however, is that Boris’s enemies in the anti-Brexit coalition (henceforth the ABC coalition) are equally stymied. They can’t win an election if they vote Brexit down and they can’t vote Brexit down without winning an election. That’s because most of the signs are that Boris would win an election in which Brexit was at issue.

Indeed, the longer-term prospects for the ABC coalition are even more discouraging. Even if they manage to halt or reverse Brexit, they would have to hold an election not long afterward, which Boris would be heavily favored to win. If elected, he could then simply cancel their cancellation and bring in whatever kind of Brexit he wanted. He would then have five years in power to make Brexit work.

In these circumstances, the interests of the ABC parties favor keeping Boris in power (i.e., by not passing a vote of no confidence in him) but tying his hands ever more securely so that he can do little or nothing to obtain either Brexit or the election he craves. Their device for doing so is the so-called Benn bill, which instructs the prime minister to request an extension of U.K. membership in the EU to next year, to avert the prospect of a no-deal Brexit.

At least their interests did favor that. But in the last few weeks the ABC parties have thoroughly frightened themselves with a new Project Fear: They have convinced themselves that Boris might produce a rabbit from a hat that would finally get Brexit done — or, rather, two rabbits from a hat.

"You Are Now the Nation's Greatest Grievance"

The Current Shambles in the UK Parliament

Conrad Black
National Review Online

. . . The current absurd state of affairs arose when former prime minister David Cameron (2010–2016) promised a referendum on staying in Europe or leaving, certain that there could not be a vote to leave.  But there was, 52 to 48 percent, in 2016. Cameron had to resign and was replaced by Theresa May, who claimed to be leaving when she was really advocating an arrangement of remaining in Europe with some modifications.

She never indicated there was any chance of leaving without any departing arrangements, so Brussels made minimal concessions on behalf of the EU. Mrs. May’s proposed deal, which would have been approved if Cameron had taken the trouble to negotiate it, was rejected by Parliament three times, all after she called an unnecessary election and lost her majority.

Theresa May finally had no support left and retired earlier this year, and former London mayor Boris Johnson was chosen by the Conservative party to replace her. He has said he will try to negotiate a satisfactory arrangement with Brussels, but that he will leave without a compromise departure arrangement if he can’t reach an acceptable one. . . .  (H)e will not seek another extension of the departure date, which was supposed to occur last March.

A bloc of 21 of his M.P.’s defected on the issue of possibly leaving without a negotiated agreement after Johnson secured Queen Elizabeth’s agreement to prorogue (suspend) Parliament from next week to mid-October, just two weeks before the October 31 departure date.  The Conservative rebels have joined with the five opposition parties (one Scottish and two Northern Irish parties and the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties) to deny the government’s move to dissolve Parliament for new elections. They are going to legislate a requirement that there not be a “no-deal Brexit,” as “crashing out of Europe” is called.

Thus the opposition groups who could not agree on much else, will try to dictate and adopt legislation without attempting to remove the government. This is now the most absurd depth British parliamentary government has plumbed since the English Civil War in the mid-17th century.

UK Now In Uncharted Territory

Making Sense of the Brexit Chaos

Madeleine Kearns
National Review Online


Cast your mind back, if you can bear it. Back three years to the summer of 2016, after the people of Britain made history in voting to leave the European Union. Back to when every political party promised to honor the result of that vote. Back to when we Brits had something resembling a functional parliamentary democracy, and something resembling a room full of adults leading it.

The years that followed were the “surely” years. Surely “taking back control” of our money, borders, laws, and trade — as was promised by the Leave campaign — means being outside the EU’s single market and customs union. Surely the Remain-voting Theresa May is sincere when she says time and time again that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Surely all parties will honor the referendum result as they’ve promised to, delivering a moderate Brexit while unifying the country.

Well, my dear reader, surely has left the building. In fact, last I heard, surely had boarded a boat with some elves and was sailing off into the Middle Earth sunset.

Parliament this week is a picture of pure chaos. MPs voted yesterday to take control of the parliamentary agenda. The government withdrew the whip from 21 of its own rebels, effectively kicking them out of the Tory party. Today, MPs voted 329 to 300 to back a bill designed to force Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay Brexit if Parliament cannot agree on a way forward by October 19. It was the first of several legislative steps they are expected to take that would block the government from forcing through a no-deal Brexit, in effect once again postponing Brexit altogether. Johnson has responded in the only way he can, signaling that he intends to call an election.

Making Sense of UK's Prime Minister

Boris Johnson: Hope For the Best, Prepare For the Worst

Politics have become a bit more interesting in the UK--what with Brexit and all.  The media coverage in NZ appears systemically biased (with one or two exceptions).  To gain a more even handed approach--albeit in the right corner--follows:

PM BoJo Slams Tory Rebels for Anti-Brexit Plotting, Rejects Early Election


Breitbart London
Oliver JJ Lane

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused Parliament rebels plotting to vote against the government and Brexit on Tuesday of working to cut the legs out from beneath the national interest, and told the nation he did not want to see a general election.

The address was made at the Prime Ministerial podium Monday evening and followed an emergency Cabinet meeting, fuelling speculation that a snap election may have been on the cards. Despite bookmakers slashing the odds on an election over the course of Monday, Boris Johnson insisted he didn’t want a vote, making clear he realised the country as a whole doesn’t want another election either.

Parliament is expected to vote against the government tomorrow, a move which could severely delay the Brexit process. Boris appealed to MPs to vote with the government so it could deliver the will of the British people as expressed in the 2016 referendum, where the nation voted by a margin of over one million votes to leave the European Union.

The government has launched a "Get Ready" for no deal Brexit campaign, signalling Johnson's dedication to delivering Brexit on October 31st.

Despite Johnson’s words on a general election, one may yet come — if Parliament votes against the government in a vote of no confidence, calling a snap election may be Johnson’s only hope of survival.