He fumbled and stumbled into premiership- but now he's going to be capable of "some careful political manoeuvering". The man who made his career as a journalist by badmouthing the EU? I find this very unlikely.
He took a razor-thin majority and turned it into a huge one. He’s PM because he ruthlessly executed a plan to become it. He won almost every brinkmanship point with the EU that he took on over the last year.
He’s not who I want as PM, and I think his record is dismal, but if you think he “fumbled and stumbled” his way in then you’ve fallen for his con: he’s bright and ruthless.
*Edit: That said, speaking as a staunch remainer, as much as we need to accept that we can't have our cake and eat it, the EU must recognise the same. It's their own fault that they're in this position.
All of which was also present in 2017 when May squeaked to victory
> Campaigning solely on the notion of “Getting Brexit Done”
which ... was effective and led to the largest landslide in 40 years.
I think he’s been a crap PM but the idea that he’s not a sharp political mind with a keen sense of the political mood is insane.
> ...he’s not a sharp political mind with a keen sense of the political mood is insane.
He's a chancer. As an example, he refused to go on the Marr Show, relenting to only to capitalise on a national tragedy so that he could wave his populist flag. You could call that 'sharp', I'd call it cowardly. His saving grace was Cummings, and with him mercifully out of the picture, we'll see the real Boris.
They were extremely popular with a small vocal minority but when you’ve got Dianne Abbott having say she no longer believes that “every defeat of the British state is a victory for us all” why would anyone vote for them to be in charge of the British state?
So instead we’ve got the Tories and ministers like Nadhim Zahawi, who changed his family office rental company into “Warren Medical Limited“ ...right around the time he was put in charge of vaccine contracts.
It was a choice between the openly corrupt right and anti-British, student politics of the hard-left.
I don't disagree on this, but Corbyn predated the Brexit referendum, and BoJo made his series of choices that left him in power knowing full well what the opposition looked like. He certainly had a fair share of luck, but the idea of him bumbling accidentally into No 10 is both naive and playing exactly into his hands.
You only have to look at the way he tried to manipulate the search results on the whole bus thing by later claiming he liked to paint buses on broken packing crates.
Or the speeches he made in favour of the EU but later reversed when he saw he could turn Brexit to his favour.
I think he’s a very calculating and manipulative man, and not to be trusted or underestimated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iznogoud
Or, most of the time, gets exactly what he bargains for. In the case of Johnson, that's being Prime Minister in the middle of Brexit and just before an unforeseen pandemic that kills dozens of thousands of his citizens.
He must be thaking god very hard for AstraZeneca right now.
But none of this happened thanks to his careful planning. Johnson was lucky to be associated with the Euroskeptic Tory right as an attack journalist writing defamatory pieces for EU institutions, before he joined the party. Then he struck gold when David Cameron put his head in the mouth of the wolf with the 2016 referendum.
He's an opportunist who got lucky.
He'll do what he thinks is best for his vote share, and my, admittedly amateur, reading of this situation is that he might well make a trade off in that direction. Although the latest news from Northern Ireland might be rocking the boat a bit too much. We'll just have to see I guess - but these days I'll expect anything.