“THE pantomime has to end,” an exasperated senior member of the 1922 Committee said this week. The MP, once a keen supporter of Boris Johnson, was lamenting Mr Johnson’s refusal to lie down quietly — and instead to keep popping up like Mr Punch to whack people with his stick.
Panto is not a bad metaphor for the current state of the Conservative Party, in view of the débâcle over the dishonourable former Prime Minister’s doling out Honours to his cronies — and then making an early exit stage right, with a passing swipe at his successor, Rishi Sunak.
After all, Priti Patel is now a Dame. Oh no, she isn’t! Oh yes, she is! And so is Andrea Jenkins, the former minister best known for making an obscene gesture to anti-Boris demonstrators outside Downing Street.
We have Rishi-Washi as the hapless hero, Jeremy Hunt as the faithful retainer, Jacob Rees-Mogg as the Demon King, Kwasi Kwarteng as the bumbler who mixes up the bottles marked Elixir and Poison, Suella Braverman as the Bad Fairy, and Sue Gray as the Fairy entrusted with the task of ensuring that in the end We All Live Happily Ever After. As for the pantomime cow, there are numerous candidates in the Cabinet for the front end and the back.
Then there is the comic routine of the present and past PMs’ trading blows over who said what, or didn’t, inserting and deleting various rude mechanicals, on and off the Resignation Honours list. Great slapstick, or slapdash in the case of Bungling Boris. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
Mr Johnson was sober enough in thinking through his shock departure, though. Beneath all the bluster about witch-hunts and kangaroo courts, he had shrewdly perceived that further humiliations lay ahead.
Tory MPs would have backed the Commons Privilege Committee’s finding that he had lied to Parliament. Voters in a subsequent by-election might well throw him out; the latest poll by Opinium showed that 69 per cent of voters thought that he should go. Best to depart now in a dust-cloud of obfuscation.
When news of his resignation was announced to a live audience on Radio 4, they clapped and whooped in delight. The delusion that Mr Johnson is still popular with ordinary voters has finally evaporated.
There was something else on the radio last week. On a phone-in, a woman rang in and told a harrowing tale of how she had received a call from her distressed daughter during lockdown. She had phoned the police to ask permission to travel to see her. After being told that it wasn’t “an essential journey”, she had asked the police to go round to check that her daughter was OK.
She heard nothing. She phoned again. Eventually, the police went and discovered that her daughter, Natasha, had killed herself. “We could have got there,” her distressed mother said. “Our daughter died while they were partying. I will never forgive the Government for that.”
The UK’s Covid Inquiry, which opened this week under the redoubtable Baroness Hallett, will hear many more stories like that. They will be a steady reminder of the terrible consequences for the British people of electing a clown to the highest office in the land.