Well what a week in politics this has been. I would have been glued to the keyboard making comments about it had I not been laid up with a serious bout of food poisoning that has very nearly hospitalised me. This near disaster was very much my own fault for thinking that a pack of frozen minced beef, that was three months past its use by date, would be OK to eat. That was a very bad personal decision that I’m only just recovering from.

In the political field, Boris Johnson’s downfall is to a large extent down to the many personal bad decisions by Boris Johnson. Yes like all politicians he has had enemies, not just in Parliament but also in the media, but he didn’t neutralise or sideline them as he should have done. He could have kept untrustworthy slippery types like Michael Gove well away from any type of power and he could and should as soon as he was able, used the Department of Culture Media and Sport to clamp down on the BBC’s growing left leaning bias. He didn’t do either of these things and Boris Johnson’s opponents were given free reign to undermine him.

However Boris Johnson has also undermined himself. He’s behaved like a wobbly supermarket trolley, as Dominic Cummings has described him and let himself be led rather than be a proper leader.

Shortly after the 2019 General Election, when Covid hit, Johnson allowed those around him to abandon long established pandemic plans that were drafted up precisely for an airborne respiratory virus and institute a lockdown policy that has been incredibly damaging to both the economy and society. He allowed his Chancellor to hose money at all and sundry without proper checks or monitoring with the result that many of the pandemic help schemes that no only failed to protect the incomes of those self employed people who were genuinely struggling but which have been afflicted by massive levels of fraud.

Boris Johnson also allowed his wife and her coterie of elitist, economically and scientifically illiterate greens to call the shots when it came to Britain’s energy security and the result is likely to be yet more avoidable economic and social damage. Boris might have achieved the ability to grandstand at crapfests such as COP26 but it will be ordinary people who in normal times struggle to survive, who will end up paying the price for his grandstanding.

He made no move to tackle the excesses of Labour’s Equalities Act which to a large extent has compelled large public bodies such as the NHS to take money that should be used for core functions to employ worthless and damaging Diversity, Inclusion and Equality officers at massively inflated salaries. The man had an 80 seat majority, it should have been possible to if not repeal and replace the Equalities Act, but to at least reform it. Sadly he did not do so.

His government threw the education sector under the proverbial bus by closing schools during the Pandemic when every effort should have been made to keep schools open. A whole generation of children, including my own, have had their early years education curtailed and damaged by Boris Johnson’ s government’s failure to see schools and children’s education as a vital thing in society.

To be fair there have been some positives. He and his government broke the deadlock over Brexit and Britain’s vaccine rollout was considerably better than that of some other nations or that of the EU. However such successes pale into relative insignificance when compared to the negatives.

I voted for Boris Johnson back in 2019 and I’ve been bitterly disappointed by how his government turned out. Even taking into account the fact that his government was challenged as all governments have been by the Pandemic, there is much failure to talk about. I backed Boris Johnson not only because of Brexit but also because I believed, an impression that Johnson didn’t to much to dispel, that he was in favour of free speech, freedom of expression and a rolling back of the left dominated administrative state. None of that has happened. In fact I’d say that free speech is less healthy now than in December 2019 and the left has continued to advance through the administrative state. Ask yourself this question: Is the batshit craziness of wokery less or more entrenched than it was in 2019. Sadly I believe that you may observe that it is more entrenched.

Maybe Boris Johnson could have survived if he had not, as the blogger Longrider pointed out, not given so much ammunition to his own enemies. He might have done better if, as Longrider’s piece said, Boris Johnson had not had the character flaws that stretch right back to the Darius Guppy episode when as a young man he allegedly got involved in a plot to put the frighteners on a journalist who had crossed him and his friends.

Boris Johnson was the right leader to get us out of the EU and make real the exit from this supranational monstrosity that we voted for. However he was not right for much else, not culture, not the economy and not energy policies.

The hunt is now on for a new Conservative Party leader and although there is the possibility that we might bet someone half decent as PM, there is the equal chance that we could get someone much much worse. I think that we are in for some highly interesting political times.