Today is the eightieth anniversary of the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany. The Conservative Prime Minister had championed and overseen a ruinous foreign policy that had brought the United Kingdom and most of Western Europe to disaster, and things got a lot worse. Conservative MPs who criticised this policy were denounced in the media and ostracised. Sound familiar? But enough about Brexit, even Boris Johnson does love a good Brexit is like WWII analogy.

I’m of the opinion that No Deal will not present many problems at the start but if No Deal becomes sustained there will be a lot of cumulative problems later on and that should see support for Boris Johnson, his party, and Brexit collapse, it will be the winter of discontent for a new generation. Boris Johnson will need a catastrophic error from his opponents, something like Herr Hitler’s needless declaration of war on America or a morale boosting course changing victory like the second battle of El Alamein.

What should alarm Boris Johnson is how rapidly Chamberlain was ousted when the phoney war ended and the reality of the policy failure kicked in. Indeed there is precedent that the leader of the party with the most seats (in fact an actual majority) was bypassed by Parliament and replaced as Prime Minister while still being party leader.

Although if Boris Johnson does want to emulate Winston Churchill perhaps he’ll lose 189 seats at his first general election as leader, or perhaps like Churchill he’ll fight three general elections and lose the popular vote in all three.

TSE

PS – There’s a bitter sense of irony and outright hypocrisy that at some time today or tomorrow Boris Johnson will expel Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, from the Conservative party for doing what Boris Johnson and other cabinet ministers have done repeatedly.