Bloody Hell

Blimey. Did I miss much?

The biggest reason that I stopped posting after the 2017 election was that I had simply stopped understanding politics. Nothing seemed to make any sense anymore, and I couldn't see why people were doing what they were doing, or what they expected to be the result.

As such, I didn't have much of an incentive to write anything down. Oh, and Twitter has killed blogging anyway.

But Boris. Boris I understand. I have done ever since I recommended him as the London mayoral candidate back in July 2007 (Christ I'm old). It's why I would have voted for him as leader back in 2016, and why I did vote for him as leader in 2019. Boris may look chaotic and unplanned, but the unplanned chaos is itself a plan. And as soon as he became leader, I knew what he was trying to achieve.

This is all old hat now, and after-the-event-wisdom at that so I won't linger on it, but the Tories' only chance of survival at the end of last Summer was if they could, in short order, unify the party, neutralise the Brexit Party and bring Brexit to a head so that an election could be called in circumstances that could be sold as Brexit vs. No Brexit. In the event, he was able to get a Deal, which made the election campaign much much easier (and entirely shafted the Lib Dems into the bargain).

But everything he did on becoming leader (turfing out the 21 rebels, appointing a wildly pro-Brexit cabinet, proroguing Parliament and making his "die in a ditch" pledge on leaving the EU on 31 October) was predicated on uniting the rest of the Party and killing off Farage. It wasn't all successful, it certainly wasn't guaranteed success, but at least it was coherent, and I could understand what he was doing and why.

So, now politics has returned to comprehensibility I might even start posting stuff here again!