Letters from Vienna #204
Letter to Baron Bethell #25
Was Boris Johnson the Worst Prime Minister of All Time?
Dear James,
I don’t expect you to divulge any secrets but I do have to ask: Was Boris Johnson the Worst Prime Minister of All Time?
Roughly a year ago Dan Sabbagh asked a similar, related question: “Was Boris Johnson the worst prime minister of recent times? He squandered one of the strongest political positions held by an occupant of No 10 in record time. The authority gained after winning an 80-seat majority in December 2019 dissipated at extraordinary speed as he dealt with a series of scandals with a ham-fisted mixture of denial, disorganisation and even outright lying.”[1]
Peter Oborne is even more scathing: “Conservative rule is now synonymous with chaos, cronyism, moral corruption, personal greed and a shocking sense of entitlement. They have inflicted grave damage on the United Kingdom, and as a result, the country’s international reputation has never been lower.”[2]
The Observer recently opined: “We did not need the verdict of the privileges committee to understand the flaws in Boris Johnson’s character. It was clear long before he became prime minister how manifestly unsuited he was for any kind of public office, let alone running the country. But a cross-party group of MPs last week published a damning report that outlined how he deliberately misled parliament about the scale and nature of wrongdoing in Downing Street during the pandemic. He may now be gone from politics, but the serious questions for the Conservative party – how on earth so many of its MPs were willing to propel him to and sustain him in Number 10 during the worst national crisis in decades – remain hanging over Rishi Sunak’s premiership.”
“As the privileges committee outlines in its report, for a minister to deliberately deceive the Commons is a matter of great national importance. It undermines the very functioning of parliamentary democracy, whereby the elected legislature is responsible for scrutinising the work of government.”
“If MPs cannot trust ministers to tell the truth, parliament cannot fulfil its job in holding the executive to account. And it is most serious of all when it is the prime minister – the most senior person in government – seeking to obscure the truth from those to whom he is accountable.”[3]
Even the once loyal Times termed him: “A narcissist to the end”.
Yet, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, he still has supporters, such as David Frost: “Boris won that election in 2008, and again in 2012, by running as a fundamentally optimistic outward-looking politician. He neutralised the Labour attack, not for the last time, by his enthusiasm and his amazing ability to communicate. He will be seen as a great mayor – indeed the appalling Sadiq Khan administration shows every day what we are missing. He drove through the Elizabeth Line when many, especially in the Treasury, would happily have canned it. He helped show off London to the world in the 2012 Olympics. But he also realised what many ordinary Londoners wanted, which was a safe environment, and delivered it. Crime fell by 20 per cent during his tenure and the murder rate almost halved. Many forget his crackdown on the rioters in 2011 and many of us think he should have been allowed to keep the water cannon that Theresa May spiked and then sold…”
“…As foreign secretary, Boris deserves more credit than he often gets. It’s true perhaps that he wasn’t then a great foreign-policy thinker. He was often excessively influenced by cautious, sometimes unreconciled, Foreign Office mandarins, a trap he had learned to avoid by the time of the crucial decisions on Ukraine in early 2022. But he had an amazing ability to get on with people, to strike up relationships with the most unlikely interlocutors, and to fly the flag, which he did all round the world. And he got serious when the situation demanded it, as after the Salisbury poisonings where he drove through the diplomatic effort that was in retrospect the first real Western pushback against Russian aggression.”[4]
It seems that one of Johnson’s “crucial decisions”[5] on Ukraine in early 2022 was to scupper the peace deal, which, like Minsk, had actually been signed[6].
In May 2022, Jake Johnson reported: “The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.”
“Citing unnamed sources from Zelenskyy’s “inner circle” and advisory team, Pravda reported that “Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv”: “The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over,” is how one of Zelenskyy’s close associates summed up the essence of Johnson’s visit...”
“Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined.”
“Moreover, there is a chance to “press” him. And the West wants to use it. In public remarks during his trip, Johnson vowed that the U.K. – in line with the U.S., Germany, and other western powers – would continue ramping up its “military and economic support and convening a global alliance to bring this tragedy to an end, and ensure Ukraine survives and thrives as a free and sovereign nation.””[7]
Just how “free and sovereign” Ukraine actually is can be gauged by the fact that an American, Natalie Jaresko, ran its finance ministry between 2014 and 2016 and an American, Ulana Suprun, served as Minister of Healthcare between 2016 and 2019[8]. Her crowning achievement has been to make it legally extremely easy to harvest organs[9], with horrific consequences for Ukrainian children.
These are by no means isolated cases. As the UN reported in 2021: “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by the government or its agents; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees by law enforcement personnel; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; serious abuses in the Russia-led conflict in the Donbas, including physical abuses or punishment of civilians and members of armed groups held in detention facilities; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; refoulement of refugees to a country where they would face a threat to their life or freedom; serious acts of government corruption; lack of investigation of and accountability for gender-based violence; crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by anti-Semitism; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting persons with disabilities, members of ethnic minority groups, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons; and the existence of the worst forms of child labor.”
“The government generally failed to take adequate steps to prosecute or punish most officials who committed abuses, resulting in a climate of impunity. The government took some steps to identify, prosecute, and punish officials involved in corruption.”[10]
This should hardly surprise given that this has always been a Western sponsored Fascist government[11]. It’s comforting to know that we are wasting billions, risking World War Three[12] and destroying the lives of countless Ukrainians[13], all in the name of Fascism; such is the insanity and mendacity[14] of our age.
What makes it worse are the Orwellian Double Think and double standards. While the West wages war[15] and commits crime after crime against humanity with impunity there is a hue and cry when it comes to the Ukraine. War is invariably a crime, whether waged by West or East.
Any hopes of a Ukrainian victory have long been lost and, as Larry Johnson puts it: “Ukraine’s vain attempts to launch an offensive ostensibly to oust Russia from “conquered” lands in the Donbass reminds me of the Japanese Kamikaze bombers trying to impede the inevitable U.S. victory in the Pacific. It is needless deaths sacrificed in the name of national honor but, when it is over, is totally meaningless.”[16]
It’s Boris Johnson’s legacy that he’s directly responsible for all this needless death.
Best,
Michael
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/07/was-boris-johnson-the-worst-prime-minister-of-recent-times
[2] https://www.globalresearch.ca/boris-johnson-has-finally-quit-but-could-his-exit-break-tories-apart/5822278
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/18/the-observer-view-on-the-partygate-inquiry-verdict-boris-johnson-has-left-but-his-toxic-legacy-lingers
[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/06/10/boris-johnson-most-consequential-politicians-decades/
[6] https://tass.com/politics/1634479
[7] https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/06/boris-johnson-pressured-zelenskyy-ditch-peace-talks-russia-ukrainian-paper
[8] https://en.topwar.ru/149106-suprun-ministr-massovogo-zahoronenija.html
[9] https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-harvesting-children-organs-adrenochrome-labs/5822575
[10] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/313615_UKRAINE-2021-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
[11] https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-us-launches-a-fascist-government-and-world-war-three/5372945
[12] https://www.globalresearch.ca/preparing-to-wage-a-nuclear-war-nuclear-attack-f-16-fighters-to-ukraine/5821190
[13] https://www.globalresearch.ca/silent-slaughter-flower-ukraine-youth/5822883
https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-all-was-nothing/5822799
[14]https://www.globalresearch.ca/ten-inconvenient-truths-about-ukraine-largely-ignored-by-msm/5804973
[15] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/secret-war