"Boris Johnson is one of the least admirable - and most successful - PMs we've ever had"

Professor Tim Bale, of Queen Mary University of London, says Boris Johnson was always prone to collapse as he neither had the talent nor interest in governance

Boris Johnson didn't have the talent to govern, says Tim Bale

Boris Johnson was sooner or later to collapse and burn.

He was the salesman suddenly promoted to CEO by a company desperate to avoid losing market share to a disruptive rival - in the case of the Tories, Nigel Farage's Brexit Party, which finished so far ahead them in the 2019 European elections that they literally feared for their survival.

In the short term, it seemed like a smart move.

Johnson won the general election that followed on the promise (false, it turned out) that he had concocted a 'cookie-cutter' deal that would 'do Brexit' so he could 'improve' the country and repair the damage done to our public services by a decade of Conservative austerity.

But it soon became apparent that he had no talent for (nor, indeed, much interest in) governing rather than campaigning.

As a result, Covid hit the country much, much harder than it needed to.

Boris Johnson's Brexit promises turned out to be false (

Picture:

POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Indeed, no Johnsonian boast about Britain's successful vaccination program should be allowed to mask its manifest failure to prevent so many from losing their lives or their long-term well-being.

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Meanwhile, instead of establishing a genuinely cooperative trading relationship with Europe, Johnson simply could not let go of the Brussels bashing that had become his trademark - with the result that the British economy is developing more slowly than almost all of its major competitors while politics in Northern Ireland remains in lockdown.

The only bright spot was our support for Ukraine. But does anyone seriously believe that another prime minister behaved differently in this regard? I don't think so.

So…add his breaking the law, his lies and his sheer disregard for the norms and conventions that underpin our parliamentary democracy, and you have, in Boris Johnson, one of the least admirable prime ministers and less successful in this country. never seen.

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