You know things have got weird when Ben Elton starts praising Margaret Thatcher. The comedian and writer was on the telly the other day and was trying to express just how low his opinion of Boris Johnson was by comparing him with previous Prime Ministers. “I didn’t agree with Thatcher,” he said, “but she was a woman of integrity.”

You may be surprised by Elton’s comment, you may not. You may see it as a sign of how low we have sunk when the scourge of Thatcher thinks she wasn’t so bad after all. But his slight reassessment of the past is actually quite a common effect. Psychologists call it Declinism – in other words, the feeling you get when things are so bad that you start looking at the past in a more favourable light.

We’re all prone to it. In fact, in the 80s, Elton’s fellow comedian Alexi Sayle once speculated how bad things would have to get before he started thinking positively about Thatcher. “Every Prime Minister makes the one before look good,” he said. “Can you imagine what the next Prime Minister is going to have to be like, to make Thatcher look good? ‘I didn't used to like Thatcher, but since the Intergalactic Zombie Lords seized control and started sucking everybody's blood out through their eyeballs, well, I don't think she's so bad anymore’.”

And perhaps he’s still right. Perhaps only Intergalactic Zombie Lords would make the current shower seem not so bad. Would the Zombie Lords tell us not to party while cracking open the cheese and wine for themselves? Would the Zombie Lords lie about who paid for the wallpaper in their Zombie Lair? Maybe the risk would be worth it for a month say, or a week, a day even, free from crisis and chicanery.

The questions that Conservatives should also be asking about it all is how much they should be willing to put up with; what is the price worth paying for Johnson’s supposed election-winning abilities? I have to say the crisis has also got me thinking about my own relationship with the party. Over the years I’ve voted for every single party at least once – yes, including the SNP when, believe it or not, Nicola Sturgeon was my MSP – but I think it’s fair to say that my disposition is conservative. I’m cautious about change. I prefer minimal government (the pandemic has been difficult for me). And I believe spending and taxation should be kept as low as it fairly can be.

But what I also want – and need – is someone, anyone, who can put those principles into operation in a competent, able, truthful and responsible way. I suppose what I’m expecting is someone who has some of that word that Ben Elton used: integrity. In other words, someone who’s pretty sound and straight. Someone who’s incorruptible. And someone who has a good relationship between what they say and what they do.

I don’t, as it happens, believe, as some might do, that this is impossible and that a Tory with integrity is an oxymoron (and neither does Ben Elton). Whatever you thought of Thatcher’s policies and their consequences, she had the qualities – in spades – that make an effective and great Prime Minister: she was bright, she was hard-working, she was straight-talking, and she was able and competent. And, as Elton points out, she had integrity: she had a set of values that generally guided her actions and decisions and you pretty much knew where you were with her, like her or not.

Her successor John Major – who Ben Elton also singled out for some praise – may not have been as competent as Thatcher (his other great weakness was the fact he was overly sensitive). But he too had plenty of qualities which Johnson lacks: again, he was straight-talking, well-meaning, hard-working and, despite all the shenanigans over Back to Basics and Cash for Questions, he was incorruptible. I accept that there may be a bit of Declinism at work here but the point is sound.

The problem for Conservatives, or conservatives, or anyone like me with a conservative disposition who might vote for the party at some point, is that Johnson lacks all of these qualities. We are supposed to find his chaotic, bacchanalian, lotharian qualities amusing or endearing and perhaps combined with competence they might be. But Johnson is not only a mountebank and deeply unreliable, he is also very, very bad at his job and in a way, it is this that hurts the most.

Perhaps in the end, the best way to understand the man is to compare him not to Thatcher or Major – a comparison in which he loses badly – but to Lloyd George. Lloyd George, remember, was the Prime Minister who told his wife that his “supreme idea” was to get on. “To this idea I shall sacrifice everything,” he said, “even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” It is a philosophy which Johnson appears to have followed too; others have jumped on the juggernaut; some are still clinging to it, but where is it taking them?

I’m not suggesting by the way that if Johnson was better – and more honest – a huge chunk of the British population would suddenly start to appreciate him – of course not, politicians are by definition divisive and Tory politicians particularly so and especially in Scotland. All I’m suggesting is that conservative-minded voters do not have a Prime Minister with the qualities suited to do the job and apply conservative instincts and principles effectively and well. In other words: he’s rubbish.

I suppose the question then is what can Conservatives do about it. At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, I found myself in the strange, and unpleasant, position of nodding along to the SNP’s Ian Blackford. Mr Blackford was addressing the Conservative benches and told them that they should consider their responsibilities. It is time for Tory MPs to act, he said, and if Boris Johnson doesn’t resign, then he must be removed.

Which takes me to the strange place I’m at right now: a new low in my relationship with the Conservative Party – I’m not alone – and a new uncomfortable point of agreeing with Ian Blackford that the Conservative Prime Minister is unfit for office.

But it's the truth. Boris Johnson is not competent or able. He is not principled or truthful. There is no reliable relationship between what he says and what he does. He is a bad Prime Minister. Terrible. The pits. He lacks everything needed for the job and even for conservatives, he does not and cannot give them what they expect. Perhaps only the Intergalactic Zombie Lords could be worse. It has to stop. He cannot continue. He has to go.

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