The outrageous ousting of Boris Johnson

Of all of the claims and counterclaims within the Partygate affair, this one caught with me. Harriet Harman, the veteran Labour MP who’s been chairing the parliamentary probe into whether or not Boris fibbed to the Commons about lockdown-era events in Downing St, shared a weblog publish by Alastair Campbell final April. Boris and his then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, are ‘mendacity charlatans’ who ‘should be swept away’, mentioned Campbell in his regular crass type. ‘They lied. Repeatedly’, Campbell cried, inflicting 100 thousand Iraqis to show of their graves. Two months after reposting this deranged screed, this febrile pronouncement of guilt, Harman was appointed to chair the Partygate committee.

So that is Britain. A rustic the place a person whose fact-lite spin led to some of the catastrophic wars of the trendy period can scream ‘liar!’ at a PM whose alleged fibs have been solely a few birthday do and backyard drinks throughout lockdown. A rustic the place consuming birthday cake in Downing St can result in your expulsion from public life whereas spinning harmful myths a few overseas nation makes no dent in any way in your profession as a vulgar media dispenser of anti-Tory, anti-Brexit platitudes.

A rustic the place a supposedly honest committee on whether or not a PM lied might be overseen by somebody who publicly shared the view that he had; that he ‘constructed lie upon lie upon lie’ after which ‘dragooned’ his minions to ‘exit and lie for the liars’. Oh, and Harman was solely appointed to guide the probe as a result of her fellow Labour MP, Chris Bryant, needed to recuse himself, having brazenly decreed that Boris was – you guessed it – a ‘confirmed liar’.

You don’t need to be a member of the BoJo fanclub to suppose this affair stinks. It’s an affair that has scalped Boris’s political profession. It price him his premiership, and now it’s price him his seat within the Commons. Yesterday he resigned with ‘quick impact’ as Conservative MP for Uxbridge after the Partygate committee discovered that he misled the Commons and proposed punishing him with a prolonged suspension from parliament. He most well-liked to droop himself, with a 1,000-word fuming resignation letter by which he branded the probe a ‘kangaroo court docket’.

All the standard suspects are celebrating. However to my thoughts, the political fallout from Partygate has all the time been way more scandalous than Partygate itself. Overlook the occasional breaking of lockdown guidelines in Downing St and Boris’s presumably less-than-honest recollections of these incidents. It was the media elites’ cynical use of this trifling affair to wound an elected PM, the Remainer institution’s milking of each drab element to tear down the person they maintain answerable for Brexit, that was actually sinister. They will gown it up as a cool, impartial investigation of a PM’s unhealthy behaviour as a lot as they like – to the remainder of us it smacks of a bureaucratic coup towards a reasonably and freely elected chief.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re keen on Boris or detest him. Whether or not you’re a Boris cheerleader who thinks he saved Brexit or, like me, a Boris sceptic who was by no means satisfied by his populist posing and upset along with his metropolitan reluctance to battle the tradition struggle. The actual fact stays that he was put into energy by the votes of 14million individuals and chased from energy by the Whitehall blob. Made PM by democratic means and undone by Machiavellian means. Chosen by the individuals to make politics extra populist after which ousted by technocrats who imagine that they, the adults, ought to be in cost, not us, the youngsters.

We’re witnessing the victory not of the tempering mechanisms of parliamentary democracy, however of Boris Derangement Syndrome. Take into consideration how the odd Zoom quiz and a quick birthday gathering might result in the removing from public lifetime of a politician who, lower than 4 years in the past, received the most important electoral majority for the Conservatives in nearly half a century. There may be nothing ‘pure’ about this. It was a constructed scandal. Cultural influencers used their agenda-setting powers to show a traditionally minor matter into the burning subject of the day. The media, most notably the BBC, exploited their command over the stream of knowledge and opinion to show Partygate right into a Profumo-level scandal. Labour spoke of little else for months, spying a possibility to slay the person who had parked his tanks on its Pink Wall lawns.

Paperwork and hypocrisy swirled round Partygate. Who can overlook the dearth of media outrage when Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have been cleared by Durham cops for doing just about the identical factor Boris had – having a beer and a curry within the workplace throughout lockdown? Then there have been all of the probes. Sue Grey, the civil-service powerhouse, carried out the unique and really important investigation of Partygate, within the course of contributing to Boris’s ‘downfall’ as PM, within the phrases of the BBC. Now Grey is changing into chief of workers of the Labour Social gathering. If in some other nation there’d been the ‘downfall’ of a democratically elected chief as a consequence of the machinations of his opponents, we’d elevate an eyebrow. However in post-Boris Britain, we’re meant to have fun such questionable behaviour.

Boris says he’s been the sufferer of a ‘witch-hunt’. It’s laborious to disagree. We all know that the vote for Brexit in 2016 and the vote for Boris in 2019 – actually one other vote for Brexit – drove sections of the political class mad. They agitated for years to void the Brexit vote, after which they turned their consideration to ridding politics of Boris through the tactic of scandal-mongering. They have been profitable on the latter. And the votes of the 13,966,454 individuals who thought that Boris – not Sue Grey, not Harriet Harman, not the BBC – ought to decide the way forward for the nation? They don’t matter. They have been incorrect. Void their ballots.

That noise you’ll be able to hear is the crowing of the technocrats. They’ve acquired Trump on the ropes within the US, with a federal investigation into the labeled docs present in his Florida dwelling. And so they’ve chased Boris from politics right here. We are able to now return to ‘regular’ politics, apparently, which for us poor Brits means having a alternative between two shades of gray: Starmer or Sunak. The triumphalist anti-democrats are in for a impolite awakening, I feel. They may quickly uncover that Boris was not the writer of the populist second – removed from it – and that the lots’ want for a shake-up of political life lives on. And one purpose it does is as a result of, in Partygate, we’ve simply witnessed how far down the street of anti-democratic intrigue the chattering lessons are ready to go to get their method.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political author and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Present. Subscribe to the podcast right here. His new e-book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is accessible to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And discover Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy