It’s Got to be Boris
I can see a lot of readers balking at that headline. Boris imposed three lockdowns on the British public, introduced vaccine passports and is a Net Zero fanatic. He’s unlikely to unify the Conservative Party, given that 57 ministers resigned from his last Government, making it impossible for him to carry on as Prime Minister, and if he does become the leader again some Tory MPs will probably set up a breakaway party, while others will simply defect to Labour and the Lib Dems. And hoping the electorate will forgive Boris for partygate and other sins and not simply wash their hands of the Clown Conservative Party at the next election is a massive gamble.
But my gut says that Rishi would be worse. During the last leadership contest he claimed to have been a lockdown sceptic all along, but that wasn’t very plausible. Not only did he support the lockdown policy – in public, anyway – but in his capacity as Chancellor he borrowed hundreds of billions of pounds so he could pay people not to work, which is the root of our current economic problems. And do we trust him on Brexit? The litmus test is whether he’d be prepared to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol and deal with all the political fall-out from that. I think Boris would. I’m not so sure about Rishi.
It’s true that the Tory Party will look absurd if it makes Boris leader again six weeks after defenestrating him. But it’s going to look absurd whatever it does. Would it be any less ridiculous to appoint a third leader in as many years? At least Boris can claim to have a democratic mandate, given that the Conservatives won an 80-seat majority with him as leader in 2019. What democratic legitimacy can Rishi lay claim to? If he becomes our next Prime Minister I think the pressure to call an immediate General Election – not just from all the other political parties, but from the Civil Service, the BBC, Sky News, the EU, the Bank of England… the entire deep state – will be almost impossible to resist. And the longer Rishi puts it off, the more frit he’ll look. But a General Election in the next few months would almost certainly see Keir Starmer installed in Number 10 as our next Prime Minister.
Even supposing Rishi did rule out a General Election until November 2024 and the howls of protest began to die down, is it conceivable that a Conservative Party led by him could win? To my mind, that’s a bigger gamble than plumping for the devil we know. Love him or hate him, Boris is a proven election winner. Yes, he doesn’t have as many fans as he did three years ago, but maybe he could win enough of them back to scrape in with a reduced majority in a couple of years. I’m not saying I think that’s likely, only that it’s more likely than Rishi winning a majority.
That’s a persuasive argument, I think. Suppose you think Rishi would be preferable to Boris. Maybe so, but would Keir Starmer be preferable to Boris? On lockdowns, vaccine passports and Net Zero he’s even more of a zealot than BoJo, and with Rishi at the helm Labour’s victory at the next General Election is almost inevitable.
Finally, just think of how angry all the Boris-haters will be. As I’ve written about before, the reason Boris is so unpopular with the Establishment – the reason he brings certain members of the ruling class out in hives – is because he’s the embodiment of Merrie England. They detest his devil-may-care attitude, his disregard for conventional morality, the fact that he has three wives and god knows how many children. He’s Sid James and Falstaff and Benny Hill rolled into one. He’s a saucy seaside postcard come to life. Watching all the purse-lipped puritans rub their bony hands with glee after Boris’s demise turned my stomach and I’d like nothing more than to see Billy Bunter cock a snook at them as he barrels back into Downing Street. It would be like the restoration of Charles II, except the Interregnum will only have lasted six weeks.
I’m sure many people are unconvinced and Boris hasn’t even said he’s going to run yet. But I expect he will and if he does I’ll be holding my nose and backing him.
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If Boris were to drive Rejoiners and globalists to leave the Party he would be doing it a favour. It might survive. If it tries to carry on as it is, riven with personal conflicts, ambition and Rejoiner globalist plotting, it is finished.
I CGAF about the Conservative Party. F O and die.
I sympathise with this sentiment. I dumped my Conservative party membership after lockdown 1. Toby is dreaming. I too would prefer the fat white latinist over the skinny brown globalist but what we want and what we will get are completely different sets of reality.
This whole messy affair was orchestrated to make the conservatives weak, ensure a globalist PM and put the blame for interest rates on Truss instead of Sunak.
I resigned the day the Maastricht Treaty went through the HoC, having been a member and activist for over 25 years (I joined young!).
The Conservative Party is finished. It’s been a long death since Major took over.
The best option is for a new Party. Current members resign and start – New Conservatives – run by rank and file and joined by the few decent MPs the old Party still has left. Then with true conservative principles and values start building membership. I think this would be attractive to a large part of the population.
And find a leader with some charisma, determination, ability to persuade, a fighter.
I’d love to see a split, but why not join a real right wing party like Reform?
I have.
Well done. So have I 🙂
Reform needs to contact every conservative MP in the house and ask them to defect to them, now. Instant credible party, rather than taking chances with a fickle electorate who doubt will get bombarded with the “vote anything but conservative, and you’ll get Labour rhetoric” from the usual suspects.
The last thing any new party requires is to be infected by some lazy, stupid has-beens from an old party. A new start requires a New Start.
But Reform needs a leader with panache. Richard Tice is a nice bloke, but he hasn’t got “It”.
He’s fluent, smart and knows his topic. Even if the Rerorm party is just a conduit to get some genuine right wingers into parliament and unsettle Labour/Lib dems I’ll settle for that. Lots of people say they’re politcally homeless and I think Reform is a genuine alternative 🙂
There are other centre Right challengers that are not controlled by closet Tories – Heritage Party and UKIP.
But there are more than two parts of the Conservative party. What about those of us who oppose the ludicrous Net Zero, who wants something actually done about illegal immigration, who consider HS2 a folly? Among the members we may even be a majority. But no leadership candidate for us. No sirree.
If I’m ever in a foxhole with the odds massively stacked against me, I definitely want someone like Toby with me. Indefatigable almost to the point of delusion.
“Come on lads, we can still do this..!!”
It’s over Toby. The Conservatives are going to be dead for a long while. They may re-emerge once they are prepared to properly represent the majority of Britons who want to live a free and independent existence. Until then they’re dead and deservedly so.
Yep, spot on. The Conservatives have died and have to go through some sort of purgatory if they are to have any hope of rising again.
Would have to be a new phoenix not the same Tory Party rebranded. Cameron cocked it up by lowering the standards of candidates, going woke about same sex marriage and in bed with the worst party – Liberals.
Decency and integrity in the Party would be a good start. Doing something about properly reorganising health provision not more plasters; making the police force protect our values of safety and property ownership; return to teaching the 3 Rs in schools; turn 50% of the universities back to technical colleges for practical job training; stop supporting woke values like non binary sexes and and cancelling free speech …… and on and on
The Reform Party already exists and fits the bill. I’m sick of waiting for a Tory breakaway, it’s not going to happen.
Let me simplify –
Tories are Toast.
Essentially Toby is correct with Johnson as leader electorally they’ll do much better. I hate the Tories but from a survival point of view Johnson is the best choice clearly. Hopefully the idiot mps won’t see this. Sunak is an electoral disaster visible from space.
This is a joke, right?
My thoughts exactly! I’m actually still trying to recover from what my eyes and brain have just processed!! 😮
Johnson is now bookies’ favourite to win. I’m not even convinced there’ll be a leadership contest. I suspect Johnson will return and a few dozen of his MPs will quit the party.
Sunak is the bookies favourite.
That changes by the hour.
Has Toby been on the catnip? Has somebody spiked his tea? There really is no denying the intensity of his man-crush on his dearest “Boris” here is there? I actually cannot believe anyone in their right mind would ever want to see this despicable and inept chump as leader once again. After everything he’s done?? His head should be on a spike! What goldfish-like memories some people have. It does make me wonder about some people…
No he’s merely stating the fact least awful choice, it’s not a recommendation in any way. He’s wef controlled but goes off piste, the other two are thoroughly on script.
Not much of a choice is it?
Johnson is more electable but on balance it’s probably best that the Tory party is destroyed at the next election and leaves room for a party led by actual conservatives – something of a pipe dream but what we’ve had for a long time isn’t working and isn’t worth saving.
In the short term, as RW rightly pointed out, we’re not at all safe from more covid related crap, so whichever candidate is sounder on that would be my preference, so that they hobble on until the next election at which point one would hope re-introducing covid restrictions would be hard even for Labour.
Given that, it’s still something of a toss-up – Johnson was the first rich world country leader to ditch all restrictions, but he caved and brought them back and had to be bullied out of Plan B by a few colleagues and the backbenches – one of those colleagues may well have been Sunak though it’s hard to know for sure.
There are other possible candidates, some of whom may be a tiny bit conservative, but I suppose few if any are plausible.
There really are too many Johnson cock-ups to list. I’d be here all night. He’s caused utter devastation and made an absolute pig’s ear of everything since this plandemic kicked off. And he won’t be held to account for any of it! But I don’t know what the answer is because the choice of candidates is so poor. I’m gutted that there isn’t any decent person in the running, it’s just a case of this shyster or that lying toe rag. It sucks big time.
Time to bring in a foreigner then…
Ron DeSantis would be my recommendation and choice.
Not that Eriksson or Capello, let alone Carney, were a success.
DeSantis has a bigger target in mind though. Perhaps we could offer trump a safe haven. Afterall he can’t make the situation here any worse than it is already 🙂
And the pigeons all cried out “coup coup”, but nobody heard.
A coup, dear reuser of hackneyed American phrases, is when some secretly organized body of people, usually coming from the armed forces, removes a so-far legitimate government with violent action. Hence, the pigeons are as dumb as they always are and no such thing has happened.
BTW, why not a Nazi coup, to indicate that not only is someone governing you really believe shouldn’t govern but additionally, that you really really believe this, no other meaning supposed to be conveyed?
Thank you for sharing your self perceived intellectual superiority you toss pot.
Can we please insist that Daily Sceptics ‘style book’ refers to politicians by their surname? Johnson is no friend of ours. Just because all other options for national leadership are measurably worse does not merit using his first name in a chummy manner.
It’s not even his real first name…
“..as Chancellor he borrowed hundreds of millions of pounds..”
If only it was just millions….
Sorry, Toby, he hasn’t got the balls to do what’s necessary.
He had his chance to stick it to the globalists and the socialists and the alarmists, and he blew it.
They’re all the same. Get used to it.
Moreover, he married one whilst in office!
Boris now has a posh house in a swanky part of London to pay for. Choice between PM salary of £150k per year or jet set round the world receiving £150k per speech as his thanks for implementing the WEF’s policies for 18 months. It’s a no-brainer!
350k$ per speech was his latest gig.
For utter, utter failure.
Think about how much he could charge, if he had been just a little successful.
Fair point, but I suspect that if he had been a bit more successful in the things that really matter, he wouldn’t be able to get US$10 and a book of Green Shield stamps for a speech.
Has Trump been much in demand in the Globalist Billionaire circuits?
Giz a job I could do that, I could destroy a country, kill millions of a population and make speeches of how great I was. Giz a job I could do that.
He’s Sid James and Falstaff and Benny Hill rolled into one.
More like Richard II or Henry VI. Simply not up to meeting the events which buffet him from corner to corner, and leave him always at the behest of others.
Whenever in office, he will always be the pawn of others
Exactly. He’s better employed as a salesman for proper Tory ideas. As a leader he’s merely a crowd pleaser and that’s fatal because to achieve anything meaningful making enemies is par for the course – something which Boris can’t do. He has to be everyone’s friend. That’s absolutely not what anyone needs right now.
I can’t think of any MP up to the task. They’re all spineless career politicians. All of them.
Very disappointed that JRM hasn’t had courage to lead.
he plays safe, far too much.
I think Mark Steyn put it well when he said last night that the one thing they can do to save themselves now is to stop the invasion on the south coast. They need a leader who’s willing to do that. And if there isn’t one among them who will do it, then – as Peter Hitchens has been pleading for years – let them die, so we can have a real small ‘c’ conservative party.
Since 2015 – that’s seven years ago – there have been three general elections, four Tory leadership contests (including the upcoming one) and five different prime ministers (also including the upcoming one). What the Tories ought to do is to halt this apparently neverending carousel of elections, elections and then some elections and actually start governing the country if they can do it. Someone who tries to solve any problem by going back to square one and do everything right from the start this time never gets anywhere. To use one of my all-time favorite quotes:
It’s so easy
To do nothing
When you’re busy night and day
Take a step in one direction
Take a step the other way
[Steppenwolf]
The new guy blew it again this time. The next new guy will blow it again next time.
You criticise me for recycling a Bill Hicks routine and then start quoting Steppenwolf to shore up your corner!
“But my gut says that Rishi would be worse.”
Well yes. Rishi Sunak is a WEF young global leader but Boris, according to you, has been blackmailed by the Globalists all along. So pick your poison.
I honestly don’t know what’s going on anymore. I feel like a student again at that party where someone offered me what looked like the corner of a Frosties packet and turned out to be some really malevolent acid.
I had a similar experience. Looked like a lovely chocolate cake. She did seem to be smiling rather too much as I accepted the slice she offered, but eat it I did. The rest was a blur.
My chocolate cake was fine, but she said she was bi, which I thought meant bisexual, but it meant bipolar. The rest was years of borderline blur.
We are in an interesting position…
69?
We are in the middle of the Chinese proverb “May you live in interesting times”
More curse than proverb I believe?
Johnson is the person who presided over the massive decline of the last few years, it would seem reasonable that he takes responsibility for sorting it out. Oh, I forgot, he does not have a good track record for taking responsibility.
How many does he have again? Ah, yes, I can see that £150k wouldn’t be enough to parent that lot. He needs the after dinner speech route.
I keep hearing that Boris won the large majority in the last election. I suspect that UKIP backing out of nearly 300 seats had a bigger impact.
Sorry Toby , we chime on many points here but a return of the Fat Pig Dictator ..no f,,,,king way.He is WEF , useless and married to nut nut.
A bit left field but how about Hague or even Howard as a safe pair of hands short term then hope that Nigel can cobble together some sort of Right of centre alliance for the next election .
We do not want the Starmer lot is at any cost…
AND RELAX !!!!
Angry beyond belief as I am at Johnson, they might as well put him back as anyone. I’ve washed my hands of the Tories and that fat f***er is a slightly more amusing clown to represent the clown administration that – put bluntly – has ruined my life and destroyed the remaining few years of my Dad’s life, than any of the alternatives.
I hope the Tory Party puts Johnson back and is split asunder. I want a genuinely conservative party, a genuinely libertarian party, a genuinely liberal party out there and I want people to understand the difference between the three.
The UK has spent too long under the jackboot of social democrats and technocrats desecrating the corpses of both of our two main political parties.
And if Johnson brings back that c*** Matt Hancock, there’ll be a civil war.
i liked boris so much when he first said the u k would go for herd immunity.so he would be my choice as long as he woudln’t give in the next time
i thought hooray for the british going for herd immunity ! that was so long ago now
If only Tory MP’s had paid attention to the party membership at the last leadership contest instead of thinking they knew best. I seem to remember that Kemi Badenoch led the polling of party members before being rejected by MP’s, maybe it’s time to give her a chance. Alternatively someone like Steve Baker would have the advantage of not having been in the cabinet and could be seen as a completely new start.
I can see where people are coming from when they say that the Conservative party need to suffer election defeat and rebuild themselves as truly conservative, but the last time that happened after Major we were stuck with a Labour government for 13 years. I don’t think the country, and especially the Union and Brexit could survive a repeat.
Toby, I dearly thank you for all the hard work, sacrifices and diligence you’ve put into fighting this absolute f*cking madness of the past two+ years. I’ve donated regularly and you have my unwavering support for this site and its credo.
But Bring Back Johnson? Jesus! Sorry dood, You are grasping at the Last Straw Saloon – it’s over for the Conservatives, for Johnson, and your admirable, unconditional support is only hot air; like most of Johnson’s post 2020 reign of chaos.
In fairness, I don’t have an answer to the most obvious question: who next? I only know the answer to “who’s not next”, and his name rhymes with Schmonson.
It astounds me how many people are still gullible enough to fall for Johnson’s grift after all that’s gone on.
Sorry, but the fortunes of the conservative party are not important. Hobbling along til the next election just to prevent the other half the British uniparty from taking power is not the issue for most people. We need politicians who are opposed to the globalist agenda, who accept the responsibilty of representing the best interests of the country, who show some inregrity, who can demonstrate consistency and common sense, and who are not merely obsessed with their own political survival. Such politicians really would be worth voting for.
Searching for rocking horse pooh then?
The advantage of hobbling along for another couple of years is to completely bury covid nonsense so it’s much harder for Labour to bring back. Other than that, I agree.
Is it absolutely impossible that a dark horse candidate could yet show up?
I’ve tried Boris and he turned out to be all mouth and trousers. He had tidy hair when young so now I know he’s just putting on an act.
Add to that he lies to you, fully aware that you know he’s lying but he doesn’t respect you enough to be honest.
He appears to have taken pains to prevent peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia; what kind of person does that?
He scarpers when in hot water and did a bait-and-switch with his manifesto and did nothing but bang on about Net Zero when he wasn’t dealing with COVID.
Yes, he had his uses for a while but I can’t go through all that again; he and his entire cabinet (with the exception of Braverman and Badenoch) can go hang – I want a change. I even dithered about joining Reform earlier today.
I don’t know much about Reform though Richard Tice I think has been a consistent voice against covid nonsense. I think Heritage (David Kurten was also a consistent voice against lockdowns), Reclaim (Laurence Fox’s party) and Freedom Alliance all seem reasonably sound on the issues I am most bothered about. I will be voting for one of them if I can or spoiling my ballot paper otherwise.
Me too – for sure. If they would join forces they could be a serious threat; if only they wouldn’t split into factions nine months in….
I think they would only be a serious threat if they had a big head start of a significant number of sitting MPs joining them. Otherwise I think it’s almost impossible.
Oh FFS.
Rishi, like Obama, will check the ethnic boxes and so will win on that basis.
If the net effect is that there is a Labour Gov with a large majority, there will be plenty of work for you to do! No shortage of scepticism then. After all, during lockdowns, Starmer sounded worse than the other side, and Labour was even less attractive than the Gov.
There were a few speculative items on GBN yesterday about the potential split of the Tory party, and it kind of reminded me of what happened when the SDP was formed, and look what happened to that. Our electoral system is a big fence for any new party to climb over. It is just possible that there could be one dominant party for a while, with a range of smaller “opposition” ones that don’t work.
Had positive vibes about Tobes joining team James earlier in the week, this article seems to suggest he’s still firmly of the believe this is all still cock up!!!