Re: Boris Johnson's persona

I don't like discussing modern politics on this list, but do feel the need
to reply to Michael Smith.

There is an organisation called 'Labour Leave', consisting of Eurosceptic
members of the Labour party, of whom the best known is the admirable Kate
Hoey, an MP so good that even Tory supporters in her constituency vote for
her. She has, of course, been deselected by Corbyn's Marxist entryist group
Momentum, along with the equally decent Frank Field. And now that Corbyn,
after years of dishonest shilly-shallying, has decided to plump for Remain,
Labour Leave is probably doomed.

You really cannot say that the present Tory party is the party of Margaret
Thatcher, except of course in historical sequence. It is the party of those
who plotted against her and eventually brought her down. If it is the party
of anyone today, it is the party of Tony Blair (who was, of course, a
Labour prime minister) -- ex-PM David Cameron actually described himself as
'the heir to Blair'.

I think it fair to say that no one of any political shade trusts Boris
Johnson. He has wobbled in his support for leaving Europe for too long, and
even now, having presented himself as the Leave candidate and won on that
ticket, he is backing away from the clean break that is urgently needed. I
say 'urgently' because if we do not get out of this corrupt, dictatorial,
undemocratic and wasteful bloc before 2020, when the Treaty of Lisbon kicks
in and effectively reduces European nations to regions of a superstate, it
will be very hard to leave indeed -- harder than it was for the southern
United States to secede from the Union, and look how that turned out.

All that can be said for Boris is that he is not the unspeakable Theresa
May, who can reasonably be described as the worst prime minister our
unfortunate country has ever had. But if he does not get us out, the
desertion of Tory voters will ensure that his party is crushed as badly as
the Canadian Tories were in 1993, and we will likely see an even worse PM
in the appalling Corbyn. This is not a good time to be British.

RH