Iain Macwhirter on how Boris Johnson's replacement will be worse

Now, I can fully understand why people are upset about Number Ten parties. Especially folk like 82-year-old Maureen Hogg from Eaglesham, who was reportedly fined last year for attending a birthday party for an elderly friend. However, I suspect even she would not equate Boris Johnson's misdemeanours with appeasing Nazism. But this apparently is where we are now.

The ever-proliferating partygate scandal, the flames of which have been fanned by Dominic Cummings, has become a bizarre self-parody. Everyone dancing to the tune of the “career psychopath” who broke lockdown himself and who the Sunday Times accused of being happy to “let old people die”.

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Tory MPs claiming are they're being bullied by the party whips. Is the Pope a Catholic? An ultra-Brexit Tory crossed the floor to fall into the arms of the ultra-Remain leader of the Labour party. A photograph emerged of Sir Keir Starmer drinking beer with colleagues last year when mixing was supposedly banned except for work purposes.

It's not as if there aren't other things going on which you might think merited air time. Like the government's bill to curb street protests, which campaigners say will make climate demos illegal. Or the Chinese spies funnelling cash into the pockets of MPs.

Last week we learned that the Treasury has written off nearly £5billion in fraudulent furlough payments and loans – a sum equivalent to the axed Universal Credit uprating. Judge Anthony Cross QC said it “defied belief” that a criminal ringleader with 48 previous convictions had been awarded a £50,000 bounce-back loan.

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Earlier, another High Court judge, Finola O'Farrell, ruled that the awarding of some PPE contracts had been unlawful. Indeed, there seems to be an unspoken agreement that the whole Covid aftermath is as too boringly inconsequential compared to the heinous crimes of partygate. But do we really think that the May 20th garden party compares in infamy with the tragedy of elderly patients who that very month were being decanted untested into care homes?

Inflation is now reaching levels unseen for thirty years as Britain faces the greatest energy crisis since the 1973 oil price shock. The Northern Ireland Protocol remains stalled and tensions are building in the province as the Good Friday Agreement unravels. Oh, and then there's that awkward little war in the Donbas, to which the UK has just sent troops.

Vladimir Putin won a major propaganda victory last week. The increasingly addled President, Jo Biden, revealed that Nato was divided over Putin's troop build up on the Ukraine border, and he suggested that a “minor incursion” might be kind of ignored retaliation-wise. The NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, had to rush out a statement on Thursday insisting that it was not actually a green light for Putin to invade.

You might have thought there'd be questions to the PM about the rules of engagement for British troops there. Do they stand by, or are they supposed challenge the might of the Russian army if things get hot? Or is Ukraine, as Chamberlain described the Sudatenland, “a country far away of whom we know nothing"

Now, none of this excuses Boris Johnson misleading parliament as he evidently has. Whenever I suggest that politics has got its priorities askew I am accused of being an apologist for the PM. But I never thought he should have been prime minister in the first place, so they can stuff that. What I do think is that the left, who seem to believe that Johnson is the fount of all evil, should be careful what they wish for.

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The obvious replacement, Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is a former investment banker and Thatcherite who would likely reintroduce the tight public spending regime imposed after the 2010 financial crash. Boris Johnson has insisted he will “never return to austerity”. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is another Thatcher enthusiast who'd happily slash the “green crap” as David Cameron famously called the fight against climate change. Boris Johnson has committed the UK to the most ambitious decarbonisation programme of any developed country.

As this column has been pointing out recently, there has been an internal culture war in the Tory party and the PM is losing it. The politicians who are now leading the dump Boris campaign are hard-line Brexiteers like Steve Baker, David Davies, Lord Frost. The Tory press loathes Boris Johnson for imposing what it regards as Labour's tax and spend agenda. The right can't forgive him raising taxes to their highest level since the 1950s and spending more than even Jeremy Corbyn planned. They are angered by his pumping money into the NHS, which the Tory Daily Telegraph believes is a “bottomless pit”.

Brexiteers like Lord Frost, who resigned before Christmas, wanted a low tax, low regulation Brexit, a Singapore-on-Thames, and believe Boris has betrayed the faith. They also hate his green agenda, which Lord Frost thinks is a political liability and major contributor to inflation. Nor are the Red Wall Tories exactly Extinction Rebellion supporters.

The right hate Boris Johnson's hike in business taxes, want the National Insurance tax reversed and civil service numbers slashed. They think Boris Johnson has capitulated to “the blob” as it calls the elites in public service, education and “woke” tech corporations. The right are demanding some “red meat”, such a crack down on migrant boat people, cuts to inheritance tax, jail for BLM statue vandals.

The Tory MP who crossed the floor to Labour, Christian Wakeford, called for No Deal Brexit. The Bury South MP also moved a private members bill that would have forced MPs who change party to face a by-election. No, make this up, you could not.

I don't know whether Boris will resign or face a confidence motion after Sue Gray, the partygate inquisitor reports, this week, though I very much doubt it. He's probably dead meat anyway. Dominic Cummings, with his “smoking gun” emails, will not stop until the ”shopping trolley” is dumped in the canal. The brains behind Vote Leave also thinks Boris has botched Brexit.

Sue Gray will not call for the PM's resignation because, as this column made clear, it is not in her remit. This is first of all a disciplinary matter for the civil service and first head on block should be Martin Reynolds, the Principal Private Secretary in Number Ten. He it was who invited his colleagues to “bring a bottle”.

Ms Gray used to run a pub on the Northern Irish border. We're told that she's a tough cookie and the ultimate ethics "enforcer”. We'll soon see whether she calls time on partygate. But it is long past time the political classes realised that there are more serious crises on the horizon.

This article originally featured in our sister title, The Herald in Scotland. 

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