Wise words for Boris from former CON leader Hague
After a disastrous few weeks for he PM it is inevitable that there is a lot of speculation about him being forced out something that is much easier under Tory party rules than with Labour. We have almost been seeing a negative story a day over the past week or so and a common theme is how he actually manages his affairs.
The worst thing, certainly in the eyes of several focus group participants, was his Peppa PIg speech to the CBI when he appeared to have lost it completely.
There has been a lot of talk about a leadership move at some stage next year which can be triggered by 54 conservative MPs calling for a confidence motion. It is said that maybe a dozen have already sent in letters to the chairman of the back branch committee calling for this.
A big event for the party and its leader will be the May local elections when all the signs are that the Tories could suffer quite serious losses that inevitably will be blamed on Johnson.
In the betting, it’s now a 54% chance that Johnson will be going next year but I am not fully convinced. He has a great survival Instinct and will do what it takes to stay there if that indeed is what he wants to do.
Meanwhile, there’s some good advice for Number 10 from the former CON leader, William Hague, who had the misfortune to be in the job when Tony Blair was right at the top. Hague writes in the Times:
… orderly government is very sequential, requiring minutes, rules, discipline, standards of conduct and advice duly weighed. While much of that has survived, the errors are happening when such processes are weak. Wise heads have observed that Boris will never change…We have to hope, though, that he can see amid all the latest chaos that even the most outstanding of new advisers can succeed only if he gives them the authority to create the order and consistency that governments need to succeed…I have watched and listened to MPs in every leadership crisis of the past three decades or so, including the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher. They have always moved slowly and agonisingly to act, torn by inner conflict and uncertainty about what to do..This time I detect a cold anger, shorn of much of the agonising, as they begin to set their own private deadlines for the narrative of chaos to end. They are not yet reaching for the assassins’ knives but they are checking, with a business-like efficiency, that they know where they left them.