He took a razor-thin majority and turned it into a huge one. He’s PM because he ruthlessly executed a plan to become it. He won almost every brinkmanship point with the EU that he took on over the last year.
He’s not who I want as PM, and I think his record is dismal, but if you think he “fumbled and stumbled” his way in then you’ve fallen for his con: he’s bright and ruthless.
He did so against the weakest opposition, overwhelmed with infighting and a lacklustre leader, seen in a generation, campaigning solely on the notion of "Getting Brexit Done (tm)" (barely) after 4 years of MPs arguing about it. Traditional Labour seats were lost based on Brexit fence-sitting. They will revert, especially as those constituents are slowly realising that getting Brexit done meant screwing them over. Johnson's Tories didn't so much win, it was essentially a one horse race.
*Edit: That said, speaking as a staunch remainer, as much as we need to accept that we can't have our cake and eat it, the EU must recognise the same. It's their own fault that they're in this position.
May squeaked by because hardline brexiters (Johnson/Rees-Mogg/Farage acolytes, of which there are fighteningly many) saw her a someone pandering to Brussels and remainers. She was an unpopular PM on all sides, where as Johnson is just a populist.
> ...he’s not a sharp political mind with a keen sense of the political mood is insane.
He's a chancer. As an example, he refused to go on the Marr Show, relenting to only to capitalise on a national tragedy so that he could wave his populist flag. You could call that 'sharp', I'd call it cowardly. His saving grace was Cummings, and with him mercifully out of the picture, we'll see the real Boris.
As far as I can see he was greatly helped into power by Labour repeatedly choosing an unelectable leadership in the form of Corbyn, Abbott, McDonnell, et al.
They were extremely popular with a small vocal minority but when you’ve got Dianne Abbott having say she no longer believes that “every defeat of the British state is a victory for us all” why would anyone vote for them to be in charge of the British state?
So instead we’ve got the Tories and ministers like Nadhim Zahawi, who changed his family office rental company into “Warren Medical Limited“ ...right around the time he was put in charge of vaccine contracts.
It was a choice between the openly corrupt right and anti-British, student politics of the hard-left.
> As far as I can see he was greatly helped into power by Labour repeatedly choosing an unelectable leadership
I don't disagree on this, but Corbyn predated the Brexit referendum, and BoJo made his series of choices that left him in power knowing full well what the opposition looked like. He certainly had a fair share of luck, but the idea of him bumbling accidentally into No 10 is both naive and playing exactly into his hands.
You only have to look at the way he tried to manipulate the search results on the whole bus thing by later claiming he liked to paint buses on broken packing crates.
Or the speeches he made in favour of the EU but later reversed when he saw he could turn Brexit to his favour.
I think he’s a very calculating and manipulative man, and not to be trusted or underestimated.
A man (or a woman) can be very calculating and manipulative, sly as a fox and fast as a rabbit, but at the same time a greedy fool who stubmles and fumbles and never gets what he wants:
Or, most of the time, gets exactly what he bargains for. In the case of Johnson, that's being Prime Minister in the middle of Brexit and just before an unforeseen pandemic that kills dozens of thousands of his citizens.
He must be thaking god very hard for AstraZeneca right now.
Boris Johnoson is an educated man and I don't doubt his intelligence. What I was referring to was his decision to back Brexit and go against David Cameron during the 2016 referendum, which to my mind is what put him in line for the premiership. The way I see it -it's entierly an interpretation from what I've read in the news- Johnson had wanted to be Prime Minister in the place of the Prime Minister ever since he joined the Tory party. When David Cameron proclaimed a referendum, Boris Johnson spent some time on the fence, trying to decide whether he should back Brexit, or back Cameron. His criterion must have obviously been the chances of becoming Prime Minister in the place of the Prime Minister, depending on the choice. Eventually he decided to go against David Cameron and back Brexit, which from my recollection was seen as a big bail on Cameron. I believe, neither Johnson nor anyone else could predict the outcome of the referendum at the time, so Johnson basically gambled. He would very likely be sidelined for a long time if he chose wrong. He happened to choose right, fell on the side of the penalty kick and positioned himself in the line to the throne.
But none of this happened thanks to his careful planning. Johnson was lucky to be associated with the Euroskeptic Tory right as an attack journalist writing defamatory pieces for EU institutions, before he joined the party. Then he struck gold when David Cameron put his head in the mouth of the wolf with the 2016 referendum.
He took a razor-thin majority and turned it into a huge one. He’s PM because he ruthlessly executed a plan to become it. He won almost every brinkmanship point with the EU that he took on over the last year.
He’s not who I want as PM, and I think his record is dismal, but if you think he “fumbled and stumbled” his way in then you’ve fallen for his con: he’s bright and ruthless.