Article in Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail”
We begin this editorial with an apology to you, our faithful readers. In March, we described the Brexit situation, then careening through its third year and nowhere close to resolution, as an “omnishambles.”
An omnishambles is a state of utter chaos, total disorder and perfect mismanagement – which brings us to our apology. If you’ve been paying any attention to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, you know that, in declaring United Kingdom politics to have reached peak shambolic six months ago, we spoke too soon. Oh, did we ever.
Because if the Conservative government was making an omnishambles of Brexit back in the spring – a happy era now remembered as a halcyon age of a merely half-hearted appetite for national self-destruction – then what words can adequately describe the scale of Mr. Johnson’s achievements?
Megashambles? Summa cum laude shambles? Tyrannosaurus shambles? The-Chernobyl-reactor-just-exploded-and-the-dosimeter-reads-15,000-roentgen shambles?
Mr. Johnson is the author of 11 books, some admittedly banged out in the careless haste that is his style. But this week, without breaking a sweat, the PM penned the Odyssey and the Iliad of shambles. He faced his first votes in Parliament and lost them; lost his minority government’s governing majority; sacked 21 of his own MPs, including his party’s longest-serving member and Winston Churchill’s grandson; provoked his own brother into resigning from cabinet, citing a conflict between “family loyalty and the national interest"; and lost control of the House of Commons while remaining so offside the chamber’s confidence that it will not yet allow him to resolve the matter by calling an election.
Mr. Johnson did all that, and more, in the space of two days. What will tomorrow bring?
British politics today is what results from the collision of an unstoppable force, an immovable object and a clown car.
The unstoppable force is the dominant faction of Britain’s Conservative Party, which insists on not just an exit from the European Union, but the most catastrophic exit possible. It’s a plan for national self-defenestration. The immovable object is reality – the reality that a no-deal Brexit will play havoc with the economy and hurt real people; the reality that a majority of Parliament and the people will not back it; the reality that the Brexit-at-any-cost crowd can’t press the detonator without majority approval.
And the clown car is Mr. Johnson.
The Tories have transformed themselves into a protest party, even while continuing to govern a Group of Seven nation with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. They’ve become increasingly monomaniacal in their Brexit obsession, and increasingly childlike. It’s an evolution that has reached its nadir in the premiership of Mr. Johnson.
