A comment by Ralph T. Niemeyer
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is not the man who would resign but as he used today the analogy of a herd starting to move, he was only avoiding to be trampled down. British politics never shows any gratitude to any of their leaders and that may be because of the very Britishness of the Brits who over the centuries of Imperialism developed understatement as a tool to level out their arrogancy by wit which many non-Brits mistake as “English sense of Humour”.
In the past one hundred years after the “British Empire” ceased to exist, which again only the upper-class Brits failed to take note of, there had been many Prime Ministers but only a few set a tone and a standard by all means, foremost Winston Churchill who managed to unite the country for the fight against NAZISm and for a brief moment put the UK again onto the world stage by sitting as a winner of WWII between Stalin and Roosevelt in Potsdam.
And, there was Margarete Thatcher who sacrificed the UK’s sovereignty by joining the European Community while at the same time yelling “I want my money back” which she eventually got by having the Germans and French each pay a third of the British contributions to the EC, thus laying the morass for the growing anti-European sentiment that half a century later led to BREXIT.
Also unforgotten will always be Anthony Blair who as founder of “New Labour” not only went with a chainsaw in his hands through the social net by committing his party to outright neo-liberalism that even Lady Thatcher had not dared to execute while he led Great-Britain under false pretext into unwinnable and illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, thus slaughtering all holy cows “Old” Labour once had fed.
“Tony” Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown even planned to join the European Monetary Union (EMU) and for this purpose transferred two thirds of the gold reserves from the Bank of England to Frankfurt just to have a foot in the door whenever the Germans would allow the EURO become the EU’s single currency.
And, Mr. Blair converted to Catholicism in order to increase his chances to become the EU’s president if the EU constitution would be drawn up and create the “United States of Europe”, by this laying the groundwork for BREXIT since the majority of British citizens were increasingly asking themselves whether they had won WWII only to surrender to Frankfurt some 60 years later.
It had been clear from that point of time that the UK would leave sooner or later the “non-imperialistic Empire” as at that time EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso called it, and kiss the “Holy German Empire of European Nations” good-bye in the most abrupt way, which only a brutal and crazy appearing person would be able to do in a credible way: Boris.
On a personal note I may add that I enjoyed conversations with Boris Johnson when we were both correspondents to the European Community in Brussels long time before it became the super-state called “EU”. The midday press briefings were legendary in those days thirty years ago when he put the EC president virtually under fire from the right side and I from the left side. Sometimes we went for a pint of Guinness after those press conferences in the “Old Hack” pub downhill from the Berlaymont where the EC hq was. After the third pint he always called for a right-wing revolution and me for a left-wing uprising, and then we sat down and had a drink. Over our last dinner we had together he confessed to me that he was fascinated by Winston Churchill and that he would want to do such great things for his country as well. Then, he fell asleep right at the table before we had desert.
Now, he had his revolution, and as all revolutions do it, they eat their children, and come with sacrifices. He was certainly the only one who could get Brexit done, because it required someone who was brutal enough to ignore the downside of it, and the trap that the German-dominated Brussels bureaucracy has provided for in the Northern Ireland protocol: the loss of territory which put him between a rock and a hard stool as either the border will be in the Irish Sea psychologically making it more probable that “Emerald island” once will be reunited or a new armed conflict would arise in Belfast once again. And, the Brexit fall-out will also lead to the next referendum in Scotland.
Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson both set their mark on British history, the first for re-inventing Great Britain, the latter for it becoming Little Britain.
