Samizdata

I put these remarks into a comment thread below but thought I might as well bung them here, loud and proud:

I am saddened that Boris Johnson’s administration has ended this way, but not surprised. His personal failings, such as inability to run and manage a team, meant that he was unable/unwilling to push forward on a handful of areas where a government can make headway. As a result, the “Whitehall Blob” was able to stand in his way. He had no talent for strategy and process. It sounds deadly dull and management-speak, but it is important. Dominic Cummings is an overrated character, who seemed to alienate people unnecessarily. He was a technocrat, not an original thinker. Even so, he gave a certain sense of drive to Johnson. Once Cummings left in the lockdown kerfuffle, things began to unravel.

I read the conspiracy theory sort of charge that the media and much of the political class who wanted the UK to stay in the EU were determined to destroy him, so angry were they that the UK has had the cheek to leave the tender cares of the EU. There’s some truth to this, of course. He achieved an excellent 2019 General Election result, and was also fortunate to be up against an extreme Leftist and anti-semitic guttersnipe such as Jeremy Corbyn. And he also got a tailwind from cultural realignments of political loyalties, with voters in the Midlands and North, for example, turning against Labour decisively. But from then on the fizzle went out of Boris. Yes, he signed a treaty to take the UK out of the EU, but work needed to be done on the Northern Ireland border, and if necessary, we should have threatened to abandon the deal. The EU did not think we would do so, and the likes of Barnier in the EU and Macron in France have weaponised the Northern Ireland border issue shamelessly. Johnson never quite gave the impression he was prepared to push back hard enough. (The idea that the NI border is some insuperable obstacle for a meaningful deal is bunk.)

And then there was covid. Unlike some, I don’t give him a hard time for the first lockdown, but the cronyism about medical contracts, the “save the NHS” sentimentalism, the failure to stress that furloughs were very temporary, was a mistake. As was the failure to do a proper costed analysis of lockdowns, and be honest, quickly, with the public about the costs. That was a failure of leadership. There were results on the vaccines, but even then, and without following the anti-vaxxers on this, I thought too much stress was put on these, rather than a range of treatments, including so-called “early treatments”. (Johnson also, like far too many other leaders, gave China an easy ride on what caused this clusterfuck and its culpability for said.)

Then there was the whole “Green transition”, “build back better”, “Great Reset” nonsense, at a time when the likely spike in inflation/energy costs could have been predicted by anyone who had not forgotten monetary realities. The commitment to Net Zero, as our late Samizdata commenter Brian Micklethwait told me not long before he died, was a fatal mistake for Johnson, as it will be for several other political leaders around the world.

Then there were the tax hikes to pay for unreformed public services, such as the rise to National Insurance Contributions, the freezing of tax brackets, etc. There were no clear attempts to recalibrate our universities and reduce an obsession with sending every student with a pulse to university. And finally, there was no concerted attempt to use the freedoms we regained outside of the European Union and its customs union to slash tariffs, repeal EU legacy legislation, and put sunset clauses into any new laws. (I liked the Trump idea that for every new regulation hitting the statute book, two must be removed.)

There was a lot to do after the GE in 2019, and it would have taxed the skills of the most effective of Prime Ministers, such as a Peel, Thatcher or Gladstone. Boris is a colourful character, whom I have met a few times, and like personally. It was plain he was not in the mould of such political statesmen and women, however.

It is also worth noting that some of the dislike seems to be borne of a priggish dislike of someone who seems to have had a gilded life, and I find that rather unpleasant.

A final, added thought here is that the zero-sum world of politics, with its plots, nastiness and scrapping for the spoils of office, its use of tax and spend to push this or that cause, contrasts with the positive-sum world of free enterprise, where success comes from adding value, not predation. For a person to live with honour, business is far preferable to politics.