Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. As it’s almost Christmas, I wanna tell you a story.
Come with me now, boys and girls, on a journey to a Land of Make Believe, a Britain that might have been.
Five years ago, to the day, the Conservatives were basking in the warm glow of a thumping General Election victory.
Boris Johnson had led them to an 80-seat majority, with the biggest share of the vote since Maggie Thatcher in 1979.
Sick and tired of the constant arguing, dishonesty, and efforts to change the outcome of the EU referendum, voters overwhelmingly supported Boris Johnson to finally complete the Brexit process.
Prime Minister Johnson promised various initiatives, such as increasing the number of police officers and nurses, keeping taxes and VAT steady, and implementing a points-based immigration system.
Traditional Labour seats in the Red Wall had tumbled to the Tories on a promise of ‘levelling-up’ forgotten communities in the North and Midlands.
Boris aimed to unleash the full potential of Britain by leveraging the opportunities presented by Brexit, with the goal of boosting the economy and investing in better public services.
Five years ago, to the day, the Conservatives were basking in the warm glow of a thumping General Election victory. Boris is pictured with Carrie on the steps of No10
It all started so well. Brexit was done a month later, albeit imperfectly but enough to have justified Nigel Farage’s generous decision to stand down his candidates in Conservative seats.
And then it all went pear-shaped, when the Covid bogeyman stomped into town bringing death and destruction. Boris himself was among the early victims of the Wuhan flu and arguably never fully recovered.
With the Prime Minister battered by ill-health and betrayed by his own party, including some in his inner circle, things started to unravel.
Rookie Chancellor Rishi Sunak decided to throw money at the problem with one of the world’s most generous furlough schemes and his misguided Money For Nothing And Your Chips For Free initiative.
The eerily deserted streets during lockdown resembled a post-apocalyptic scene from a science fiction movie, as millions embraced the cult of Working From Home and getting paid for sitting about doing nothing except watching daytime TV and eating Hobnobs.
The economy tanked as ‘the science’, the Labour Party and Left-wing broadcasters in the Remainstream media daily demanded even tougher restrictions on freedom of movement and commercial activity.
With the country in crisis, opponents within and without the Conservative Party who had never forgiven Boris for taking Britain out of the EU, seized at every straw which might give them an excuse to bring him down.
Then along came their golden opportunity – so-called Partygate, when staff at No 10 were discovered to have been breaking lockdown rules imposed on everyone else.
Voters gave Boris an overwhelming mandate to finally Get Brexit Done
The public, who were being put under house arrest, fined for drinking tea in the park while being surveilled by police drones, forced to wear masks and watch loved ones through nursing home windows, etc, were understandably furious.
Support for Boris collapsed when he was caught on camera phone in the office with a piece of cake, which he didn’t eat, and a glass of something he didn’t drink.
The Conservative Party, and half the country, had a collective nervous breakdown. Even Red Wall MPs who owed their seats to Boris rebelled and demanded his resignation.
In July 2022, they got their way. As I wrote at the time: Whoever said that in Parliament, your opponents are across the aisle, your real enemies are behind you, was bang on the money, as never before.
The regicidal antics of Boris’s so-called Tory colleagues, from certain duplicitous Cabinet members to wet-behind-the-ears backbenchers were despicable.
I still think that when the history books are written, future generations will be amazed to learn a PM with an 80-seat majority could be deposed because of fluff and nonsense over wallpaper and prosecco.
I predicted that Tory MPs acted in haste – fuelled by personal ambition and petty resentments – and would repent at their leisure. And how. Half of them are now gone, swept away in the summer. Good riddance to the lot of them.
They’ll get no sympathy from this quarter, only anger that they’ve lumbered us with five years of an incompetent, Left-wing Labour Government which is already doing untold damage in less than six months.
For the record, I’m not writing this because these days Boris and I share the Daily Mail duvet. I said so at the time, along with harsh criticisms of my own.
Let’s agree Boris got some big calls right, from Getting Brexit Done (almost) to the spectacularly successful vaccine rollout. But that aside, his time in No 10 was a disappointment.
But after his brush with death during Covid, he seemed to forget that he once posed as a tax-cutting, libertarian, small state Conservative.
His passionate embrace of the economically suicidal Net Zero madness, his drunken-sailor spending sprees, his failure to take back control of immigration or confront the divisive woke BLM and trans agendas were an affront to the big-C and small-c conservatives who voted him into office.
Elected as an anti-Establishment crusader, he caved in at just about every juncture to the vested interests in Whitehall and quangoland. In his farewell speech, he even thanked the civil service for their support and hard work. Why?
The massed ranks of fanatically pro-EU Sir Humphreys treated him with undisguised contempt, openly resisting everything from Brexit to the Rwanda migrant policy. The civil service unions stubbornly defied all instructions to their members to abandon WFH and return to their desks. And still do.
Yet I thought then, as I still think now, that he could have survived and could have gone on to beat the dismal Keir Starmer convincingly.
And here’s where we get into my little Land of Make Believe story. Just imagine that the Tories had got behind Boris instead of stabbing him in the back.
Provided he had stuck to his original Conservative principles and the policies which delivered him a landslide in 2019, we could now be in full recovery mode from Covid and heading for the sunlit uplands.
Instead of crawling back into the EU in all but name under Starmer, we could be on the verge of signing a massive trade deal with the incoming US President Donald Trump. We could have dozens of the money-spinning freeports we were promised.
Rather than slinking off to Cop 94 and boasting about ‘leading the world’ by bankrupting ourselves over Net Zero, scrapping North Sea oil and gas licences and carpeting our green and pleasant with wind farms and solar panels, we could be fracking like mad and exploiting our plentiful supplies of shale gas.
Not paying the highest electricity prices in the world and facing blackouts. Nor would National Insurance be rocketing.
The strike-happy unions who, like Oliver Twist, will just keep coming back for more would be curtailed by law. Civil servants might even be back at their desks.
And flights would be taking off to Rwanda every day, deterring the small boats.
We certainly wouldn’t be stuck in Starmer’s socialist hell-hole with Rachel From Complaints trying to ruin everyone from family farmers to small business and Ed Miliband and Ginge Rayner destroying what’s left of the countryside.
But to be honest, I can’t see the Tories getting back up from this existential crisis they have brought upon themselves – and the rest of us. Nor do they deserve to. Why should anyone trust them ever again? And, to be honest, there’s no guarantee, on past form, they’d have done any of the above even if they had won another 80-seat landslide in June.
So Nigel, it’s over to you.
I do hope you enjoyed my little Land of Make Believe story about what Britain might have been. But, sadly, that’s all it is . . . make believe.
Merry Christmas!
