Boris is gone...

Bureaucracy and hypocrisy swirled around Partygate. Who can forget the lack of media outrage when Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner were cleared by Durham cops for doing pretty much the same thing Boris had – having a beer and a curry in the office during lockdown? Then there were all the probes. Sue Gray, the civil-service powerhouse, carried out the original and very critical investigation of Partygate, in the process contributing to Boris’s ‘downfall’ as PM, in the words of the BBC. Now Gray is becoming chief of staff of the Labour Party. If in any other country there’d been the ‘downfall’ of a democratically elected leader as a consequence of the machinations of his opponents, we’d raise an eyebrow. But in post-Boris Britain, we’re meant to celebrate such questionable behaviour.

Boris says he’s been the victim of a ‘witch-hunt’. It is hard to disagree. We know that the vote for Brexit in 2016 and the vote for Boris in 2019 – really another vote for Brexit – drove sections of the political class mad. They agitated for years to void the Brexit vote, and then they turned their attention to ridding politics of Boris via the tactic of scandal-mongering. They were successful on the latter. And the votes of the 13,966,454 people who thought that Boris – not Sue Gray, not Harriet Harman, not the BBC – should determine the future of the country? They don’t matter. They were wrong. Void their ballots.

So this is Britain. A country where a man whose fact-lite spin (Alastair Campbell) brought about one of the most catastrophic wars of the modern era can scream ‘liar!’ at a PM whose alleged fibs were only about a birthday do and garden drinks during lockdown. A country where eating birthday cake in Downing St can lead to your expulsion from public life while spinning dangerous myths about a foreign country makes no dent whatsoever on your career as a vulgar media dispenser of anti-Tory, anti-Brexit platitudes.

That noise you can hear is the crowing of the technocrats. They’ve got Trump on the ropes in the US, with a federal investigation into the classified docs found in his Florida home. And they’ve chased Boris from politics here. We can now go back to ‘normal’ politics, apparently, which for us poor Brits means having a choice between two shades of grey: Starmer or Sunak.