Send in the Clowns: Britain Faces Gallery of Fools, Flyweights, and Fake Conservatives as Next Prime Minister

Johnson
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Jack Montgomery

Boris Johnson has been forced out as leader of Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party by an internal coup, and his time as Prime Minister will soon be over – but what do his potential successors have to offer a weary public?

While many Conservative voters are angered at the way Johnson has been ousted by a few dozen politicians after winning the first substantial parliamentary majority for his party since the 1980s only in late 2019, others are not particularly sorry to see the man who claimed he would govern as a libertarian and “take back control” of Britain’s borders go after years of draconian lockdowns, leftist greenery, and record-breaking immigration — both legal and illegal.

However, those same critics are now looking at the politicians said to be potential successors to Johnson are sifting through the field and asking ‘who among them will be any better’ — and, in some cases, ‘who is this?’.

For your edification, Breitbart London breaks down some of the people who the British people might be stuck with as Prime Minister in the near future:

Ben Wallace

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is currently the favourite to succeed Johnson as Tory leader, enjoying a boost in both his public profile and his popularity more or less solely by virtue of the fact that he happened to be manning the desk when Russia invaded Ukraine.

He is perceived to have performed well during the crisis, despite one mishap in which prank callers were able to dupe him into thinking they were Ukrainian government officials and the fact that, for all the ups and downs of the conflict, Russia still remains content to pour men and materiel into the conflict.

A former soldier, Wallace is perceived as a serious and somewhat uninteresting man — an asset in the current climate — he has few determined detractors because few know what he really stands for.

However, he was a Remain campaigner during the Brexit referendum, an opponent of ‘No Deal’ Brexit during the years post-referendum when Brexit was in limbo, and has mocked the idea of full border control as “ridiculous” — making him unlikely to deliver for Leavers and conservatives in policy terms.

He is particularly unlikely to end Northern Ireland’s position as quasi-colony of the EU half-in, half-out of the United Kingdom, having once penned a long article for David Cameron’s government listing ‘Ten reasons why Northern Ireland is safer, stronger and better off in the EU’.

Dominic Raab

Dominic Raab, Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor, has served as Acting Prime Minister at various times — for example when Boris Johnson was incapacitated by a Wuhan virus infection — and may be viewed by some as a pleasingly inoffensive successor to the bombastic Johnson.

Raab is generally regarded as too uncharismatic and cognitively insubstantial for the top job, however, having once been roundly mocked for stacking two little piles of books on a window sill on either side of his head during a videolink interview to try and lend himself, it was presumed, some gravitas.

Raab is a former Brexit campaigner, which counts in his favour, but also a notorious flake, having switched from Boris Johnson’s camp to Michael Gove’s camp the same day a newspaper article he had written supporting Johnson was published, during the Tories’ fractious 2016 leadership contest.

He appears to have given himself up to the left-liberal establishment consensus on mass immigration and forced diversity, too, having said he was “delighted to back Diversity2Win’s five pledges, to ensure diversity increases in our party and across our country” — which involve forcefully boosting ethnic and racial diversity and a “new immigration policy that reflects global Britain” — in 2019.

For what it’s worth, Raab has ruled himself out of the race… so far.

Liz Truss

Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Secretary has had her sights set on the premiership for a long time, organising a number of glamour-style shoots with friendly press to boost her profile, her most recent venture — perhaps slightly too on the nose — seeing her perch herself on a tank in the style of Margaret Thatcher amid tensions with Russia.

She has not enjoyed the bump in popularity Defence Secretary Wallace has had from the Ukraine War due to a series of high-profile gaffes, however, including confusing the Baltic and Black Sea and endorsing Britons travelling to fight in Ukraine — a statement quickly walked back by officials and fellow Tory politicians, not least because her own departmental website warned such travel was against its advice and probably against the law.

Some Britons who did travel to Ukraine were sentenced to death by firing squad by Russian separatists in the months following her abortive endorsement.

In terms of her politics, Truss is a classic careerist chameleon, having been an ardent Remain campaigner during the EU referendum, when she was a minister in the George Osborne-led Treasury and appeared alongside him at campaign events threatening the public with ruin if they backed Brexit.

After the public voted for Brexit anyway, she staged a Damascene conversion to the cause, but voted for Theresa May’s proposed Brexit-In-Name-Only deal with Brussels every time it was put before the House of Commons.

In her younger days she was a senior activist for the Liberal Democrats, which is fanatically pro-EU and socially leftist, although it occasionally adopts vaguely conservative policies on the economy.

Rishi Sunak 

Hailed as a very likely future successor to the premiership shortly after Johnson’s big election win in 2019, the now-former Chancellor of the Exchequer’s star has faded considerably over recent months, and may have winked out entirely with his resignation from Cabinet alongside Health Secretary Sajid Javid having likely lent inexorable momentum to the efforts to topple Johnson.

For all the mainstream media’s focus on partygate, dodgy home decorating payments, and the decision to make the now twice-disgraced Christopher Pincher a party whip as the primary causes of Johnson’s downfall, general discontent with his premiership among the Conservative Party faithful and Brexiteers who converted to his banner in 2019 stems from the fact he has not governed like a conservative, or even a libertarian, hiking taxes to historic levels and spending public money like water on the green agenda.

Sunak, as the de facto lead finance minister, has been a large part of this, and indeed his resignation was driven in part by disagreements with Johnson over whether it not might finally be time to give people some proper tax cuts or meaningfully shield them from the cost of living crisis.

One of the richest men in Parliament due to having married into India’s billionaire business aristocracy, Sunak faces an issue of not only being able to chart a path away from the leftish tax hikes of the Johnson era — he led them and wants more of them — but also of the fact that he was also fined due to partygate, so cannot shake that particular media monkey off the government’s back either.

Sunak is also one of many allegedly conservative politicians who is bizarrely reluctant to define what a woman is.

Nadhim Zahawi

Zahawi, then a humble backbench MP, backed Brexit in 2016. and has since enjoyed a fairly rapid rise from backbench obscurity to somewhat prominence, particularly after being appointed Under-Secretary of State for Vaccines.

Britain’s vaccine rollout is regarded internally as a great government success, although it is likely some members of the public who have issues with Covid vaccination will view him distinctly unfavourably due to his association, of course, and his infamous broken promise that there would be no “discriminatory” vaccine passports in Britain ever cast his honesty into permanent doubt.

Nevertheless, his performance in this role saw him elevated to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education, and in the hours following Sunak and Javid’s departure from the Cabinet he agreed to step in as Chancellor of the Exchequer — about as near the top of British politics you can get short of the premiership itself.

He has almost no legacy at Education worth mentioning, however, evidently doing little or nothing about the injection of Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and so on into state schooling by leftist teachers.

Moreover, within hours of agreeing to replace Sunak as Chancellor and indicating that there would be a tax-cutting sea-change at the Treasury under his leadership, he was joining a delegation of other top ministers to try and force Johnson out.

This has caused many who believe Johnson has been ousted by a media-engendered coup with an improper lack of reference to the electorate to look on Zahawi with scorn, and even people not well-disposed towards Johnson are suggesting he has behaved treacherously.

The belated leak of an alleged National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation into the Iraq-born Chancellor’s finances to The Independent website may have been punishment for this perceived treachery.

Sajid Javid

Javid, another one of the richest men in Parliament, has little to recommend himself to anyone in British politics.

Infamously, he tried to have it both ways during the Brexit referendum, saying that if Britain was voting to join the EU he would be in favour of staying out, due to the many drawbacks of bloc membership, but that he would be voting to Remain essentially because leaving was too much trouble after decades being in.

This had the effect of pleasing nobody, and his 2016 bid for the party leadership after voters did back Brexit and David Cameron resigned went nowhere fast.

Javid is vocally anti-Trump, going so far as to pen a poorly-aged article asserting that “Britain would be better off with Joe Biden” as U.S. President and praising him as a “foreign affairs veteran”– words which came to look rather foolish once he did enter office and the world was treated to the sight of helicopters rescuing U.S. personnel from their embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in a Saigon-like foreign policy disaster.

He was also one of the government’s harshest voices against the unvaccinated and vaccine sceptics during the Wuhan virus pandemic.

“I just cannot emphasise enough the impact that they are having on the rest of society. They must really think about the damage they are doing to society,” he said of the former at the end of 2021, upbraiding them on national television.

Even the double-jabbed were subject to threats by Javid, with the Health Secretary warning them they would have the Covid passports the government promised they would never impose revoked if they didn’t “get boosted”.

Penny Mordaunt

Mordaunt, who reached the heights of Secretary of State for International Development and, very briefly, Secretary of State for Defence under Theresa May, is today a junior minister in Boris Johnson’s doomed government with a fairly low media profile — but remains a perennial fixture in articles mulling potential Tory leaders.

While a Brexiteer once well-liked among the conservative grassroots, her popularity has declined along with her media profile, aided by woke pronouncements on social issues such as her insistence that “transmen are men” and transwomen are women”.

Brandon Lewis

The now ex-Northern Ireland Secretary was punted as a potential leadership contender after his resignation helped end Johnson’s resistance to resigning, but as a charmless and relatively unknown Remainer prone to wokery it is difficult to see how he could keep the Tory base and Brexiteer converts on-side in a general election.

During his time as Chairman of the Conservative Party, Lewis pushed Johnson — then on the backbenches — to apologise for denigrating the Islamic face veil and saying it made the women wearing it look like letterboxes, despite widespread support for the remarks among ordinary voters.

Lewis also complained that Britain’s fire brigades are too white and too male as a Home Office minister and vowed forceful action to change their demographics — the sort of ideological policymaking beloved of metropolitan elite left-liberals, not the Tories’ electoral base.

Priti Patel

Home Secretary Priti Patel was once the woman conservatives believed would save them from a party leadership indifferent to mass immigration, foreign criminals roving the country, and a Border Force with but little interest in enforcing borders.

Here was a politician who talked tough on immigration, grooming gang rapists, and crime — she even supported the death penalty! — who couldn’t be stopped in her tracks by accusations of racism. A dream to run policy areas close to the hearts of few in politics but many in the general population.

Such delusions have been shattered by the reality of Priti Patel at the Home Office, as the Channel migrant crisis gets worse than ever, deportations collapse from already low levels, migrants fill out plush hotels, and gigantic migrant camps are dumped on small villages with no facilities with zero consultation.

Breitbart London has itself found Priti Patel’s Home Office to be far more concerned with covering up its failings than delivering on her many promises, ignoring press enquiries and going out of its way to avoid answering Freedom of Information requests that might expose it to criticism.

Despised by leftists for her tough talk and by rightists for the fact that her tough talk is never backed by any action, it is difficult to see what Patel’s appeal could possibly be to any segment of the electorate at the ballot box.

Jeremy Hunt

Briefly Foreign Secretary and Britain’s longest-serving Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt has been in political exile since losing the last Tory leadership contest to Boris Johnson in 2019.

While the Remainer seemed for a long time to be a David Cameron-like “sphinx without a riddle”, focused solely on gaining high office for the sake of gaining high office and utterly devoid of vision of personality, Hunt’s bitterness in his banishment has revealed a fierce authoritarian streak.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries alleged that he pushed for Britons who tested positive for Covid to be forcibly removed from their homes and confined in China-style isolation hotels during the pandemic.

“I said that British people would never tolerate being removed from their homes and loved ones at which point you demanded I show you the evidence for that,” Dorries recalled.

It is therefore unlikely that a Hunt Administration would bring Johnson’s long-lost libertarian principles back into Downing Street.

Better the Devil You Know?

Does Boris Johnson deserve the loyalty of those people condemning his ouster as a Remainer coup stirred up by the media on trivial pretexts?

Not really, no. Voters are supposed to be grateful to him because he “got Brexit done”, but this is a bad joke in Northern Ireland, which has no regional government and is riven by division because the deals he signed with Brussels left it in many respects still an EU jurisdiction subject to EU judges — a situation Johnson had vowed he would never allow, including at a Democratic Unionist Party conference, when he was gunning for Theresa May’s job.

Fishermen were also left high and dry, again, and the EU was allowed to cut Gibraltar out to appease Spain — a situation that remains unresolved to this day.

What Britain won in exchange was essentially the same deal Theresa May had negotiated — which Johnson did vote for the third time she tried to force it through Parliament, lest we forget — with the multi-billion-pound divorce settlement, trade in goods but not services, and other disadvantageous terms all still in place.

Free Movement did end, but this has made no difference as Johnson has scrapped the longstanding — if never kept — party promise to reduce net immigration to the tens of thousands, and has indeed massively increased it.

The other great “legacy” his supporters are trying to promote is the end of lockdown — but he was the one who imposed lockdown in the first place, even as he allowed international flights from China and other coronavirus hotspots to continue unchecked and presided over lockdown rulebreaking at Downing Street.

Boris Johnson deserves to go — but whether Britain deserves any of his likely successors is another matter.

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
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