The term “Resignation Honours List” has taken on a new meaning. It is an honour to resign from Johnson’s government.
You get the BEM – the Boris Exit Medal – for walking away from his Eton Mess.
Even before mini-Trump took over in Number 10, ministers were quitting in droves, headed by rival wannabe leader Jeremy Hunt.
The list is long and not all were household names (not even in their own homes) but their departure signals a big political shift.
Boris’s Brexit Band is the most right-wing, hard-line government in my lifetime, and I’ve seen a few.
Norman Tebbit has been reincarnated as a woman, with once-disgraced Priti Patel as Home Secretary.
She’d bring back the hangman if she could – probably for opposing No Deal departure from the EU.
The rest of them are the Prime Minister’s old mates, sycophants, fixers and professional turncoats like Amber Rudd, who stays at Work and Pensions to impose universal credit misery across the nation.
She’s also Minister for Equality, despite ruling that there is “no prospect of change” in her discrimination against women born in the 1950s forced to wait until 66 to get their pension.
An ex-banker at the Treasury, a Thatcherite lawyer who hero-worships Ronald Reagan in the Foreign Office, an over-promoted ex-fireplace salesman sacked for security leaks in charge of schools and a man who once carried Esther McVey’s bag at housing and local government.
And courtesy of his nanny, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the high priest of No Deal, in charge of managing government business in a House of Commons where the Tories have a vanishingly-small majority.
This isn’t a GOAT – a government of all the talents. It’s a bull in search of a china shop.
And the Prime Minister has no mandate from the electorate.
If he’s so confident that he represents the British people, bad-joke Johnson should go to the country.
Now.
