SOME POLITICAL INSIGHTS FROM GREAT BRITAIN
Fully Asked me for my Take on the Bojo 180 and his prospects going forward.
Part of the explanation of BJ’s U-turn is in my last post: The public no longer accept the covid narrative because the government broke their own rules and people can also see the evidence for mandates and lockdowns has crumbled. Anger and activism is growing and private govt polling has confirmed this.
However there may be another story and one which I have wrestled with since this nightmare began.
Boris has long been seen as a ‘classical liberal’ type of ‘right-wing’ Conservative. As a politician, writer and media figure he expressed this broad view for his entire career.
In my brief private conversations with him over the years this was confirmed repeatedly. Many of his staff and advisors were similar. Some expressed their private views to me in the strongest possible way. They hated the left and political correctness. They knew how it had taken over our institutions, trashed our country, its history and how the left hated the British people. Most of his team had always been Brexit and some had been campaigning to leave the EU for 30 years.
They seemed passionate about freedom of speech, choice, free enterprise, law and order and all the pillars of conservatism. They were socially liberal to some degree, as am I. But no more than is reasonable and right in this day and age.
The same was true of Michael Gove and his staff. And perhaps this is the best way to try and explain the confusion that follows: Look what happened to Gove. He went from being pro BJ leadership in 2016 to stabbing him in the back. He went form being staunch Brexit to being a Brexit sell-out for Theresa May. He went form being a fanatical Tory liberal to being a lockdown fanatic. Even 3 weeks ago he was still pushing for more lockdowns!
The point is this: Increasingly, the personality profile of politicians is as follows: Highly emotional, Sociomorphic, Narcissist, Sociopath, low-self esteem etc…you get the picture.
Critically, many of them are social-media addicted. This erodes the function of the pre-frontal cortex and places them in an even more emotional and dopamine deficient state. This means they are unable to make long term decisions, control their impulses or defer gratification. They also suffer from the perceptual blindness, amnesia and so on. This means they can easily be herded into conformity and group-think through fear.
Many MPs staff are often in their early 20s drawn from Oxford/Cambridge and wealthy back grounds, with no life experience and even more personally flawed. Their counterparts in the media are similar. So their is no anchor or counter balance within the establishment.
The only real stabilising force is the ballot box and perhaps opinion polling. That kicked in with the Shropshire by-election.
What this means is that members of parliament, including the PM can change their views drastically and irrationally. As we have seen. In fact the PM more than most. BJs grasp of detail and memory recall are poor. His ability to make a clear decision and stick to it is low. I remember in 2019 it was amusing how the entire media blocked any possibility of a debate between Farage and BJ. We wanted it because BJ could never have competed with Farage. BJs advisors knew it and kept him a million miles from Farage at all times. BJ is lucky in that many of his advisors are older and experienced, some are over 50.
So to understand how Boris has, seemingly, returned to sanity we must examine the forces playing on him.
I am no longer sure about the power structures in Downing Street in 2022. What I do know is that there are many figures advising BJ who you do not hear about much in the papers. People like Ed Lister, Dougie Smith, Danny Kruger, Munira Mirza and others. I always knew these people to be sensible and proper conservatives. So I have spent the last year wondering what has happened to them.
The resignation of Lord Frost (who I never knew or met but who seemed to be a proper conservative and very sensible) may have been a warning shot to BJ to pay more attention to these people, as these were the people who helped BJ win the election and understand how to keep him in office, (notwithstanding Lynton Crosby’s understudy coming back for the next election).
Maybe the dominance of SAGE sidelined the sensible group. Maybe new advisors entered the fray of which I am unaware. Maybe the influence of Davos and Bill Gates had its effect. I think Carrie Symonds is also a big influence. I met her when she worked for David Cameron and she was actually very pleasant. However I sense she was a lot more liberal in the modern sense of the word, a Remain voter, and an internationalist in the Cameron mould.
I think Cumins departure was net neutral. I never met him either but he seems to have been a total fraud. He wasn’t really opposed to authoritarianism or technocracy at all. Brexit seems to have just been a chance for him to impose his form of technocracy and authoritarianism and Covid was the catalyst.
But either way we now know the fear of those early months in 2020 when Covid could have been a planet killer was a huge disruptor. None of us know what it’s like to be in office when you could be responsible for the deaths of millions. So maybe the most sensible people I knew in Downing Street were understandably swept away by the fear and resulting psychosis.
So maybe its just that now – they and BJ , in sufficient numbers, are emerging from the mass psychosis that may well have been spread by the China/Davos/Big tech Axis.
You must realise that almost all these people believe in what they do – even if they change their minds a few hours later, they are just blown around by the forces that play on them, and only self preservation brings them to their senses.
In our case part of that ‘coming to their senses process’ means that BJ and a few around them have been shaken by the threat of losing power and have resorted back to their Classical liberal/proper conservative settings to some small degree. That is what may be happening now. I suspect that they are also seeing some terrifying stats on vaccine damage and I wonder if some may even see the calls for Nuremberg 2 as just maybe not being so crazy.
In France, germany etc..the leaders have no such setting. Or cultural or historical pull in that direction. Nor do they have the fluid interaction with the voting public through a tried and tested political system where the local party officers in the small towns will feed back public opinion though many layers to the higher levels.
To be brutal, in Europe we know that many countries have a history of happily killing their own people (which is partly why the USA is there I guess!). Take France. Look at the periods of self-inflicted slaughter: 1794, 1848, 1871 and Vichy. So a few hundred thousand vaccine deaths in the coming years are easy to ignore. Macron has no self righting mechanism to bring him back to his senses. What France does is build up such anger and pressure that an explosion occurs. I pray we see an electoral explosion in the coming election in April/May.
(as a side note I am reading an excellent book: Guy Sajer: The Forgotten Soldier. Its about a Frenchman who joins a crack German Division in WW2. I am shocked how the German military police persecuted their soldiers at all times. Tens of thousands of German Soldiers – even from crack units – were killed by their own military police for no real reason – just to set a supposed example to others. To me this is just another small historical cue that shows how brutal Europe can be .)
We have no cultural parallel to any of this in the UK. So really, BJ is reflecting that subtle character difference here that makes us just that bit more resilient and able to right ourselves from self-destructive episodes. As you know its the same in parts of the USA.
My worry is that this Bj (unknowingly) is disrupting the global order. I am as yet unsure whether the attempt to get rid of BJ is coordinated from above or just chaos theory and politics as usual. Some things just have no real explanation.
But perhaps its best to just enjoy the weather while the sun is shining.
Wow AGB
You are a scholar and a gentleman
This is heavy and fascinating stuff.
I understand you are speculating here but it is coming from a passionate and tuned in perspective that
we do not otherwise have access to
Thanks so much for taking the time for this detailed post
Keep in touch if you see anything more .
regards
Fully
This is phenomenal.
Sending far and wide, including to some relatives on the Dutch side of pond.
I think he is worried for his pension and would like to stay longer. Perhaps he will try to unify the people with the cry of ‘Russians are coming’ and the sheep will kiss his oxfords.
Much appreciated insight!
Very insightful post. The big question in now where do go from here, and what are the external forces that will be influencing our rootless politicos. Will the internal decency and fairness of most of the British people prevail or will the jackboot come down hard an England, the international outlier as Sturgeon called us?