At the moment of his political death, Boris Johnson was all but alone. The celebrity who once wowed millions could persuade only a gaggle of Conservative MPs to attend his Downing Street farewell. The manipulator who thought he had ensured the loyalty of his cabinet by stuffing it with unemployable nobodies watched as his hangers-on scuttled off in his moment of danger. Only the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrea Jenkyns and Nadine Dorries remained, the weirdos and the thickos, shuffling in a ramshackle funeral procession for a once mighty prime minister.
Alone, did I say? Not quite. The Tory press was with him to the death. Newspapers that claim to be against permissiveness, crime, corruption and the double standards of an arrogant elite defended a hypocritical, scrounging, sexually incontinent minor criminal, who took money from any willing plutocrat and partied while the public suffered a pandemic and economic crisis. Just as America’s white evangelical churches were willing to betray their religious principles for Donald Trump, so Britain’s Tory press was prepared to abandon its moral code for Johnson.
