How good a job has Bojo and his team done so far

All of the above, surely!

As above I don’t think Corbyn would be a good PM, I’m pretty sure Abbot would be a disaster as well.

Nandy, hmmm, maybe.

It is a team, not an individual and Boris Johnson picked cronies and renegades. His team was chosen to blag their way through brexit, not to deal with a serious crisis.

His biggest fault to me was not recognising that he needed some serious weight in his cabinet at the beginning of last year and bring in people with some real experience, and ditch people like Cummings who may be great for winning elections but not for delivering difficult policies in difficult times.

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It is, however the team needs a cox, not a cock.

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Every team really needs a COX!

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But the problem with understanding the UK’s poor performance in terms of individual competences is that it is superficial. That’s the curse of centrism - just as irrationality is the curse of the right - which illuminates the superficiality: Johnson’s incompetence is not accidental, not personal - it is ideologically linked with that of Trump, Bolsonaro, etc, - and to all that right-wing reality-denying ‘it’ll go away’ ‘it’s a conspiracy’ ‘profit before people’ nonsense.

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Geof, best laugh of the day. :joy:

To add to that, compared to Cabinet dross like Raab, Sharps, Williamson, Coffey, Kwartheng, Truss, Jenrick and devious liars like Gove and Patel, the vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi seems quite straight and competent. Or am I setting the bar too low?

And you can add to that the extreme left fails because when the leaders get into power they look after themselves and not the people.
Strange that you forgot to mention that.
By the way Bo Jo is not centrist, he is to the far right of the Tory Party and we are in the mess we are in because of his recurring sense of optimism and failure to face reality, which was well known before the Referendum vote and the last Election by those who chose to be informed.
It doesn’t say much for the common sense of the Red Wall in the North, much to my chagrin.

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I stumbled across this clip of Johnson in the earlier stages of developing his bumbling, amiable, hail fellow well met persona. I think it’s quite a good clip because it shows how clowns (in this case two) can play a naive audience.

To be fair to Johnson, the only thing he cares about is himself and his optimism on that count has proved correct. Otherwise I think his “optimism” is just telling people what they want to hear.

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True and he is like Trump in that respect. He wants to be loved and hasn’t got the backbone to face reality.

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lower than a snake’s belly is not low enough :rofl:

I thought the French documentary on him was great in this regard! Spot on.

I started to watch it and got distracted (a common occurrence in advancing age I believe. :slightly_smiling_face:). I’ll watch it later.

I think Rory Stewart would have been excellent.

Too much intergity. The ERG would have filleted him.

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Too little experience. I’d add too much  experience with a hookah but Grove has adequately demonstrated that class A drug abuse is OK if you are an MP :slight_smile:

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I’ll have to stop typing prone with the laptop on my chest (probably not good for the pacemaker either).

Have you followed this lady’s Ch 4 contributions. She’s seemed like a font of wisdom to me.

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I’m a natural Labour voter but one person who would have dealt much more effectively with the pandemic would have been Margaret Thatcher. She would not have countenanced weakness and indecision. I can’t think of a Labour politician who might have done well. Any of them would have been an improvement but to have been able to carry out a coherent policy would take someone exceptional, and for all her faults, she would have been the best person for the job.

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