Little surprise that the plight of Boris Johnson dominates as a topic for the opinion pages, after MPs voted to ‘take back control’ of the Brexit process and to reject his subsequent demand for a general election. But some saw a strategy behind the chaos.
The Guardian
Headline writers in many papers characterised Mr Johnson as ‘cornered’ by MPs. Zoe Williams calls him a “a hostage prime minister, with no meaningful option available.”
His strategy, Williams says, is coming apart. While there is risk for Labour in delaying an election, it is the PM who should fear a drawn out contest most, despite his “public-schoolboy” derision of Jeremy Corbyn as a chicken or a ‘big girl’s blouse’.
“His project works best when it is unchallenged, and even the briefest brush with parliamentary realities leaves it looking absurd. A prolonged contest will unmask its less pretty elements, exhaust his honeymoon and ready the forces ranged against him,” she concludes.
The Mail
There is a spectrum of opinion among the analysts, though. Stephen Glover ponders. “How did it go wrong for Mr Johnson so quickly?” He blames the reckless suspension of parliament and an overaggressive strategy behind which he claims to detect the influence of the PMs adviser Dominic Cummings. By sacking MPs who did not back him, Mr Johnson has deprived himself of potential supporters and could have alienated voters too. “He risks jeopardising the backing of Tory electors who don’t like to see previously loyal MPs being hacked to pieces.”
Glover fears Johnson doesn’t realise how perilous the predicament is. But he does think there are solutions – which he says include sending Cummings on a one-way trip to Outer Mongolia.
More importantly, he needs to let us see ‘good’ Boris rather than ‘bad’ Boris. “I’m not asking Mr Johnson to change his character. I want him to draw on his better nature an listen to people who wish him and the Tory Party well,” he says.
The Telegraph
No such ambivalence from Alister Heath in the Telegraph, who urges readers to ignore the temporary crowing of ‘remainers’. “The Tory Party is dead; long live the Tory Party” he says arguing not only that everything is still going Mr Johnson’s way, but also as he planned it. “Boris hasn’t been ‘humiliated’. He hasn’t been ‘wrong-footed’.”
Knowing he already led a minority government in all but name, the PM has simply formalised that. “The semi-prorogation didn’t ‘backfire’, it flushed out his hardcore opponents and allowed him to expel them.”
While ‘remainers’ see the loss of Tory favourites as a cataclysmic blow: “losing anti-Brexit irreconcilables, especially overrated establishment figures, is a huge step in the right direction and proof of Boris’s seriousness.”
According to Heath this was all a spectacular gambit, and it could yet deliver both Brexit and an eventual election victory. “Johnson’s gamble was breathtaking in its ambition: he would take over a fatally divided Tory party with no majority, forcibly reform it in his image and gain a pro-Brexit majority. For all the madness of the past few days, I’m still predicting that he will pull it off.”
The Scotsman
While a number of the columnists reflect on the extent to which the chancellor’s spending review has been overlooked amid the feverish coverage of parliament, most agree that is understandable with uncertainty over both an election and Brexit.
Laura Waddell in the Scotsman claims we should be more concerned at the prospect of food shortages post Brexit - and even rationing. With the British Retail Consortium flatly contradicting Michael Gove’s assertion that there will be no food shortages, one bookmaker offering odds of 9-1 on its reintroduction.
But this time without the ‘dig for victory’ sense of solidarity of the 1940s, she writes. “This time there is no war, except on sanity, and nothing to win” she says.
And who can doubt, Waddell adds, that the poor will bear the brunt. As part of the wartime rationing even restaurants frequented by the well off were barred from serving meals which were too costly or too with more than one meat or fish course. “Can you picture today’s craven Government today putting measures in place to restrict wealthy chums from buying their way to a greater share?” she says. “It is almost beyond imagination.”
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