A few minutes consideration should convince even the most ordinary of voters that there must be a hundred or more members of higher intellectual calibre than Boris Johnson. Those interested voters who go a stage further and actually tune in to BBC Parliament from time to time know that, even in today's Tory party, there are also many with grleater integrity than the man who was foisted on the nation in 2019. This is of practical importance, because, with the state of the parties at Westminster and the date of the next election in the distant future, the office of PM is in the gift of the Conservative party.
A leading contender must be Tom Tugendhat who, backed by his foreign affairs select committee, has exposed government failures. This morning, in response to an urgent question on the rushed evacuation from Afghanistan, Foreign Office (FCDO) minister James Cleverly had said:
In anticipation of the situation, the FCDO had reserved the Baron hotel, so the UK was the only country apart from the United States to have a dedicated emergency handling centre for receiving and processing people in Kabul International airport. RAF flights airlifted people to a dedicated terminal in Dubai, reserved in advance by the FCDO.
Mr Tugendhat responded:
the reason we reserved the hotel and others did not was that the French and Germans had pulled their people out months earlier, and they had done so because the Americans had signalled the withdrawal 18 months earlier—or, if you thought that Vice-President Biden would become President Biden, 14 years earlier. This was not a surprise. The lack of a plan was a surprise. The failure to be present was a surprise.
The failure of integrity when discussing matters with the Select Committee was a huge surprise. For us, as representatives of the British people, the real surprise—the real tragedy—is not just the hundreds of lives left behind in Afghanistan and the people abandoned in neighbouring countries but the undermining of the security of this country and the defence of our people, which has come about through an erosion of trust. Our enemies do not fear us and allies do not trust us. That has been tested in Ukraine, and we are all paying for it in every gas bill and every food shop. That is the price of the erosion of trust, and that is why we need a fundamental rethink not just of our foreign policy but of how our country engages with the world. Those who, like our most senior diplomat, are the voice of our country in the world, need to be voices that we can trust, but I am afraid that the Committee that I am privileged to chair does not.
It used to be a standard criticism of the UK civil service that its modus operandi was to do nothing until there was a crisis, then manage the crisis. It was to be expected of elected government that they would provide the initiative and decision making. It is a mark of the Johnson government that they do nothing, and when the crisis comes they panic. It was how they responded to Covid-19 and, as we saw this morning, how they responded to threats to our friends in Afghanistan.
Defenders of Johnson believe that "partygate" is a dead issue, that his misuse of privilege, his lager-lout behaviour and his consequent prevarication have been forgiven him. He should be allowed to get on with running the country. However, even if "partygate" was the only mark against him, it surely exposed a failure of character unfitting for a leader of government. And it is not the only black mark, though the media have helped people forget the catastrophic Brexit deal, the lies he told about this, the failure to respond to Covid-19 in time and the failures in Afghanistan.
There is a crisis looming over Northern Ireland. We have not yet reached it. Are his party colleagues genuinely convinced that he is the man to handle it?
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