Today Boris Johnson has been elected leader of the Conservative party, and tomorrow he will be crowned Prime Minister.
I’m a lot more optimistic about Boris than many people seem to be. On Brexit, certainly, I think he’ll do the right thing — not least because all the other options have been exhausted.
But I’m also prepared to be disappointed.
So which will it be? Bold Boris or Useless Boris?
We’ll know soon enough. Here are some of the problems he’ll need to tackle successfully in order to fulfil his Churchillian destiny.
1. Deliver Brexit
Brexit-in-name-only won’t be enough. Theresa May tried and failed several times to get that one through and the people weren’t having it. Boris has committed to leaving the EU with or without a deal on October 31st. And if he doesn’t it will be career suicide.
Chances of Boris delivering 9/10
2. DeBaathify the Conservatives
The first sign we’ll have that Boris is going to fail is if Amber Rudd appears prominently in his Cabinet. Look, Boris: I understand your desire to be liked and you fear of going out on a limb, but as Tim Stanley argues so persuasively here, now is not the time to compromise by reaching out to your enemies and bringing them into the One Nation fold.
That’s what the parliamentary Conservative party has been doing since Thatcher; that’s why it has failed so dismally — too many closet Lib Dems and Greens have been promoted at the expense of actual Conservatives. There is plenty of sound talent out there: Liz Truss; Priti Patel; Steve Baker; Esther McVey; Andrew Bridgen; Owen Paterson and, of course, the matchless Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Why spoil a good thing by rewarding holdovers from the discredited old regime who despise everything you stand for and who are only sucking up to your now because their miserable livelihoods depend on it.
Chances of Boris delivering 5/10
3. Drain the Swamp
A senior Conservative minister once complained to me that it was impossible for the Conservative government to do anything Conservative because the civil service, politicised by Tony Blair, is so irredeemably left-wing.
Same goes for all the quangos which David Cameron promised to put on the bonfire but never did. Instead, the Conservatives have only exacerbated their problems by suicidally appointing leftists – such as Green party activist Tony Juniper, head of Natural England – to run regulatory bodies that should be being run by conservatives.
The rot extends from the nauseatingly right-on (and anti-Trump, pro-EU) Foreign Office to the incompetent and biased Electoral Commission, the Charities Commission, the Information Commission and beyond, plus of course departments such as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which are run by doctrinaire eco-loons. This is the Deep State which really runs Britain. Unless Boris can summon the courage and will to tackle it, he will always be fighting his battles with one hand tied behind his back.
Chances of Boris delivering 4/10
4. Law and Order
Rampant knife crime, the obsession with policing hurty tweets, skateboarding displays at Extinction Rebellion protests, virtue signalling at Pride rallies, the deliberate withholding of evidence proving the innocence of young men facing rape convictions, the vindictive pursuit of journalists for doing their job, the failure to deal with Muslim rape gangs, the harassment of Tommy Robinson, the police chief who wouldn’t intervene when one of his officers was being hacked to death by an Islamic terrorist outside parliament, the millions squandered pursuing the “credible and true” claims of a deeply suspect lying paedophile about a high up paedo conspiracy including former Chief of the General Staff Field Marshall Lord Bramall and various other innocents…
Britain’s policing has become a national embarrassment which requires root and branch reform. Yes, the police need more resources to do their job: but only if it goes on beat officers pursuing actual crime rather than politically correct nonsense.
Chances of Boris delivering. Depends on his choice of Home Secretary. I’d say 6/10.
5. Economy
Britain’s tax burden has reached a 50 year high. (Thanks Chancellor Philip Hammond. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!)
This is both unconservative — whatever happened to the notion that individuals know how better to spend their money than faceless government apparatchiks? — and economically illiterate. If the British economy is to prosper after Brexit, it will need to foster a climate where entrepreneurship can thrive and where people are incentivised to work.
Tax cuts and a bonfire of regulations will do this nicely. Nor would the odd freeport zone do any harm – especially if Boris wants to revive the regions and stop Britain’s economy being quite so London-centric. Lots of third-rate newspaper hacks have been able to extract far too much mileage out of Boris’s “fuck business” remark. (He meant big business: the pro-EU, anti-democratic, anti-market corporations – and he was right).
With red meat Austrian types like the Mogg, Baker, Truss etc on his side, this is one area where Boris could really deliver.
Chances of Boris delivering: 9/10
6. The BBC
Almost everything wrong with Britain today is ultimately the fault of the BBC. That’s because, with its market dominance and its cradle to grave broadcasting coverage, the BBC steers Britain’s political consciousness in a relentlessly leftwards direction.
Its default position – “Why isn’t the government doing more to solve this problem?” – is a recipe for ever higher expenditure, ever greater meddling, ever more nauseating virtue-signalling from Conservative politicians chasing popularity with the left that will always delude them. The BBC is now so rampantly woke, pro-EU, anti-free-markets, pro-identity-politics, anti-Trump it fails in its claim to represent the nation.
Removing its sinecure — the compulsory licence fee — will concentrate its poisonous mind.
Chances of Boris delivering 2/10
7. Universities
Tony Blair’s sinister master plan has come to fruition: Britain’s universities are now largely woke madrassas inculcating half the population in politically correct values.
Most – including Cambridge and Oxford – are simply no longer fit for purpose as training grounds for the intellectual elite, not least because the post-modern values they instil – “Rhodes must fall”, “decolonise the curriculum” etc — are anti-intellectual and because they are so biased against privately educated kids they no longer admit on merit. Universities need to be hit where it hurts: in their budget.
This will force a paring down of Mickey Mouse courses for people who shouldn’t be at university anyway. Also, it would be nice if at least one Oxbridge head of college wasn’t ex-Guardian, ex-BBC or an ex-Civil Service lefty.
Chances of Boris delivering 4/10
8. Schools
As Katharine Birbalsingh has shown at her Michaela School, it is perfectly possible to deliver an Eton-quality education to kids from the poorest backgrounds without increasing state spending. It’s just a question of discipline and attitude. Whoever takes over Education should make Michaela their model. Oh — and leave grammar schools and public schools alone. Competition means standards rise and anyway we’re a free country so we ought to have a variety of educational options for our kids.
Chances of Boris delivering 5/10
9. Theresa May
Scrap every policy she has introduced in her three years in office. Salt the earth in the fields around her house; poison her wells; strike her name from the records; exile her to somewhere like Ouagadougou.
Chances of Boris delivering 0/10, unfortunately
10. HS2
White elephant. Hugely expensive; environmentally damaging; entirely unnecessary. Scrap it immediately.
Chances of Boris delivering 9/10
11. Armed Forces
Heaven forfend that we should ever find ourselves in a proper shooting war. Britain’s military has been emasculated, not just in terms of men and materiel but also philosophically: too many senior officers seem more interested in breast-beating about diversity and the vital importance of letting Muslim recruits get out their prayer mats on exercise (see advert) than they are about killing our enemies.
We have virtually no Royal Navy – certainly one not big enough even to perform routine tasks while protecting shipping in the Straits of Hormuz. This is one of the few areas where government spending MUST be boosted dramatically. It’s the Conservative thing to do.
Chances of Boris delivering 7/10
12. Environment
Anyone of an even half-way conservative disposition has known for years that the Climate Change Act (2008) was one of the most pointless, expensive and counterproductive legislative suicide notes ever inflicted on the UK economy. Yet rather than see sense and repeal this disastrous hangover from the dog days of Labour, successive Conservative administrations have doubled down with ever more fatuous schemes to decarbonise the economy – culminating in the ridiculous Maybot creature’s Net Zero carbon dioxide target.
A significant chunk of Britain’s economy is being held prisoner by green ideologues like Greta Thunberg and the whispery-voiced, gorilla-hugging, walrus-slaying Malthusian Sir David Attenborough. Of course nature and the environment matter but here’s a thought: why not start by avoiding policies – renewables, biofuels – which actually harm nature and the environment.
Chances of Boris delivering 1/10. Unfortunately, his bird’s a greenie, like his Dad, and the BBC is making all the running when it comes to pushing the alarmist message.
13. Energy
Frack baby, frack. It’s what the UK economy needs: cheap, readily available, homegrown, abundant, relatively low-carbon energy which lies in stupendous quantities in the form of gas and oil in reserves like the Bowland Shale. What the UK economy (and environment) doesn’t need is any more expensive, intermittent, unreliable, subsidised, bat-chomping bird-slicing eco crucifixes.
Chances of Boris delivering 5/10. (Or perhaps more: Boris did once write an encouraging article – in 2012 – which began: ‘It’s green, it’s cheap and it’s plentiful! So why are opponents of shale gas making such a fuss? In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news.’)
14. Defang Islam
No mainstream UK party dares even pretend there’s a problem here. But it would help if Boris at least addressed the widespread public concern that there is one rule for the Religion of Peace (Sharia courts; an ingrained fear in the police of any action that might be deemed Islamophobic; blatant ballot-rigging) and another for everyone else.
Chances of Boris delivering 3/10
15. Immigration: Quality not Quantity
A points-based system, please, designed to screen out the kind of Ilhan-Omar-types who are only here to subvert us or kill us, while giving us the pick of all those talented foreigners who just want to integrate and help make Britain Great Again.
Chances of Boris delivering 4/10
16. Kill Foreign Aid
Scrap every last penny. The ring-fenced foreign aid budget was just a stupid, virtue-signalling idea of the useless David Cameron. Spend the money building trade relationships instead.
Chances of Boris delivering 3/10
17. Reduce Nanny State/Political Correctness/Free Speech/Elf ‘n’ Safety
This amorphous blob probably does more than any of the above to immiserate people’s daily lives and make them feel like it’s no longer a free country.
And if that’s how they feel, they’re quite right too. The censorious, cry-bully snowflake culture has seeped out from universities into HR departments and thence into our workplaces and beyond. It has even infected our newspapers (whose job it supposedly is to stand up to this kind of thing, not see it as a road map of best practice).
Anything containing the words “sustainability”, “equality” or “diversity” needs to be written out of our culture – and sharpish – basically. Also, we need an end to politically correct sugar taxes and wars on salt and fat and alcohol because the only people who want this kind of thing are meddling, puritanical killjoys with dubious degrees in ‘public health.’
Chances of Boris delivering 5/10. He’ll try hard because his cultural instincts are optimistic, anti-cant, libertarian. But the problem is probably too entrenched and the system will beat him.
18. Deal with the activist judiciary
I really don’t know how Boris can deal with this – but it’s a massive problem. English common law is no longer the envy of the world because the people interpreting it and ruling on it are a bunch of Guardian-reading, human-rights-obsessed, lefty-loons.
Chances of Boris delivering 1/10
19. China
Don’t knock an economy with 1.2 billion potential customers, but don’t kowtow to it either. Its instincts – see Hong Kong; Africa – are authoritarian and expansionist. Theresa May should never have made that deal with Huawei.
Chances of Boris delivering 6/10
20. Donald Trump
When someone this friendly, ideologically onside and powerful wants to do beautiful business with you – form an alliance. A marriage even! Make the Anglosphere Great Again.
Chances of Boris delivering 9/10
In summary: pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will. I like Boris – he’s funny, optimistic, anti-Nanny-State, irreverent and he believes in Britain. Sure he has his flaws – the ones that worry me most being his need to be liked and his lack of ideological backbone – but I think with both the European Research Group (the right of the Conservative party) and the Brexit Party standing either side of him holding his feet to the fire, I’m confident that his time in office will deliver more hits than misses.
Good luck, Boris old bean. You’re going to need it. There is much work to be done and it all starts NOW…