When Boris Johnson stepped up to the podium at Number 10 Downing Street there was a hint he might call an election. But commentators were not surprised he stepped back from the brink. The loss of Ruth Davidson, doubts over timing and internal conflict in the Conservative Party make him weak, despite a series of apparently bold moves.
The Times
Rachel Sylvester was typical. “Sun Tzu’s advice to warriors was ‘appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak,” she wrote. “The prime minister has been praised for his decisive leadership but his shock-and-awe tactics are covering up enormous vulnerability.”
The Financial Times
Steve Richards, who has authored a book on prime ministers says every new leader enjoys a poll boost. “As a result, new prime ministers often feel close to omnipotent as they make their early moves.” Mr Johnson’s honeymoon has been particularly vivid, Richards suggests. “He takes the early sense of omnipotence to a new level of intensity.... Until Tuesday, MPs will have sat for only one day while Mr Johnson has been prime minister. For the summer he has had the political stage to himself.” This has allowed him to appoint hard Brexiteers to his cabinet, prorogue parliament and threatened rebels with expulsion. But the PM should beware the pitfalls calling elections, as Theresa May and Gordon Brown found to their cost. Meanwhile the seeds of the demise of Harold Wilson and John Major and even David Cameron were sown while they were still politically strong. “For prime ministers, political honeymoons are blissful and deeply dangerous.”
The Guardian
Should Conservative MPs block a no-deal Brexit? It is now or never, Polly Toynbee writes, for backbenchers, “a rare moment with a vote on a nation-changing question of such gravity that it takes their beliefs beyond the reach of whips.”
Toynbee isn’t suggesting it is an easy choice. For some this could be a career ending decision, she acknowledges. “Losing the whip, being ejected from their party and deselected from their seats will be a bitter end, but this one act of defiance will count for more than anything else they do.”
So would Johnson and his cabinet dare call an election for November, knowing Britain will crash out of Europe in the midst of of campaigning? “These lawless wild men might – though mayhem at ports, in shops and pharmacies just before election day could be punishing.”
There’s a problem, though, Toynbee says. They can’t call an election without Labour’s backing. “Jeremy Corbyn started [Monday] saying ‘any time’, bring it on. Fortunately that was later qualified: not if an election is used to block the Brexit delay.”
Meanwhile, despite the honeymoon popularity, Johnson can’t bank on electoral success, she says. “Go before Brexit and Farage eats up his votes. Go after a no deal, and Project Fear will have become a terrible project truth.... He is no surefire winner.”
The Daily Mail
For a different take on Project Fear and an insight into the mindset of the Brexit cheerleaders in the English tabloid press, Richard Littlejohn’s column was enlightening. It was devoted to ridiculing “someone claiming to be a Dr David Nicholl,” for warning mortality rates will rise as a result of Brexit.
Dr Nicholl, a consultant neurologist with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, helped draft the Government’s ‘Operation Yellowhammer’ papers, which outlined the threat of shortages of fuel, food and medicines, when we leave the EU. Characterising him as ‘Doctor Death’, Littlejohn paints Nicholl as a pro-EU fanatic and a proponent of ‘Project Fear’.
Peppering his points with 40 year old pop-culture references to Peter Cook and Creedence Clearwater Revival, he treated the warnings about the NHS as high comedy. “Was the good doctor really suggesting that people were going to DIE because Boris had prolonged the parliamentary recess for four or five days more than usual?” he wrote? Indeed, Dr Nicholl was. “I’m not sure precisely why we’re all going to die, because I was convulsed with laughter.”
You might want to treat Littlejohn’s analysis with caution, though. “I hadn’t been paying much attention. Frankly, I’m as bored with the Brexit shenanigans as most of you,” he admits.
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