Troubled Tory MPs fretting he’s Superflop, not Superman, would concern a Prime Minister less arrogant than Boris Johnson.
Increasing murmurings on Westminster’s Tory benches about drift and lack of direction betray a creeping nervousness in party ranks – only a month after winning a thumping Parliamentary majority.
Friday’s orchestrated celebrations of a Brexit not yet done and Britain remaining in the Single Market and Customs Union during 2020’s dangerous £600billion trade talks will distract momentarily from the growing unease but prove no permanent diversion.
Wiser Tory heads worry that Johnson thinks Downing Street is a grander version of London’s City Hall, where as Mayor he spent his time posing for photographs and squandering public money on vanity buses and an unbuilt garden bridge, stealing other people’s credit for the London 2012 Olympics.
Older Tory heads compare – unfavourably – Johnson’s early weeks, including a fortnight’s holiday in Mustique, to the Labour bundle of energy that was Tony Blair here, there and everywhere on his 1997 debut.
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Early impressions count.
HS2, Huawei, climate emergencies and Whitehall upheaval are splitting a party incapable of remaining united outside election time.
Include a slouching economy, an ailing NHS given a plaster instead of the required transfusion and another round of school cuts… and the bleak picture that emerges is nothing like the pretty fiction Johnson painted in December.
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Add a dash of resentment over posh weirdo misfit adviser Dominic Cummings’ Mafioso act and the mix is political Kryptonite.
This Clark Kent with thinning hair isn’t the character he sold to the electorate.
Folk in seats such as Sedgefield, Stoke, Redcar, Grimsby and West Brom are entitled to feel short-changed.
They’ll be taking back their loaned votes when they discover that Johnson is robbing their councils to bung to the diehard Tory gin-and-Jag Surrey set.
Slouched on his No10 sofa, Johnson’s boyhood yearning to be Prime Minister is finally realised.
But the cynical liar is happier playing at being a pampered Prime Minister than he is doing any hard political graft.
Superflop’s idle arrogance will transform him into a supervillain.
