Who is popular today?

My former Conservative colleagues: ask yourselves what Boris Johnson has achieved, and heed the damning answer
Dominic Grieve was Conservative MP for Beaconsfield from 1997 to 2019 and attorney general, 2010 to 2014
As they exit No 10 Dominic Cummings and his associates will leave behind a seemingly contradictory legacy. On the one hand, their unscrupulous campaigning skills helped deliver the outcome of the 2016 referendum on the EU and the scale of Boris Johnson’s victory in the general election in 2019. On the other, their astonishing capacity to generate destructive mayhem left much debris at the heart of government.
The two, of course, went together, as could be seen during the political crisis over prorogation last year. The No 10 press operation was turned into a lie factory spewing out factual untruths about the government’s intentions and smears against anyone trying to stand in its way. It then sold the new “withdrawal deal” as not involving the risk of a hard border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, only for it now to be the government’s position that this deal risks exactly that outcome. Continue reading...