It almost [almost] pains me to say it but Conservative MP Jesse Norman's letter to the Prime Minister early on Monday morning was so right and so succinct; so brutal, too, in a way - even if Norman himself had supported Johnson for 15 years and it seems as though he’d only just noticed these things about the Prime Minister when it turned out that Johnson may adversely affect his own career.
Among other things, Norman denounced the Prime Minister’s claim that he was "vindicated" by Sue Gray as "grotesque"; the Rwanda deportation plan is "ugly", that Johnson lacks a long term plan, "a sense of integrity" and respect for rule of law.
He was right.
Norman was presumably one of the 148 Conservative MPs that sought to depose Boris Johnson on Monday evening that didn’t fall for the pork-barrelling that appeared to be taking place as whips operated “like gangsters” in assuring tentative votes from an unsettled subset of wavering MPs.
One of the broader points that was being missed by the media with regards to the confidence vote - at least on Monday - was that even if Boris Johnson ‘technically’ won, he’d have still ostensibly lost depending on how high the number was of those who voted against him.
Think of the context:
Everything that his supporters had been saying across social media - from Elizabeth Truss, to Rishi Sunak, Dominic Raab, even Nadine Dorries and the usual sycophants - was the glass half-full approach that sought to remind people of the ‘positive’ things Boris Johnson has apparently delivered during his occupancy of Downing St.
Yet regardless of these seemingly ‘positive’ aspects - some of which in the case of Nadine Dorries are highly dubious, suspect and questionable [as we will get to later in this article] - there should not be a logical or rational explanation to explain how we have arrived at the destination we are at now in spite of these ‘things’.
We should not be here calling votes of ‘no confidence’ in the Prime Minister. The Conservatives and Boris Johnson should not be here, either.
This, until around October last year, was Boris ‘eyes another decade in power’ Johnson after all.
But we are here. And there’s a reason for that.