ANDREW Marr has launched a blistering attack on Boris Johnson for “hosting parties” as the veteran broadcaster buried his father – and said that the Prime Minister has been left in a difficult position in dealings over indyref2.
Marr described the Prime Minister as as “a formidable, alpha-male albino gorilla who will fight, fight and fight again” to save his position.
He said Johnson would “use every tactic, clean and dirty, to cling on” and warned that if Tory MPs did not move against him they were sure to find more scandals and trouble ahead.
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“There are plenty of decent Conservatives out there who know this,” Marr said. “If they don’t get together and move, then they will sully their party for a long time to come.”
Marr made his comments in a New Statesman article on why he thought Johnson was beyond saving.
He wrote: “As the Prime Minister was hosting parties, I was burying my father. How can a premier who inspires such contempt continue to lead?”
Marr described how he attended the funeral of trade unionist and frontbench MP Jack Dromey on January 31, at St Margaret’s Church near the Commons, which he described as “a profoundly moving occasion”.
However, on a day of bright winter sunlight, there was an “unavoidable shadow” close by – Johnson’s “I get it and I will fix it” response to Sue Gray’s report on the Downing Street parties.
Marr wrote: “Fixing it, however, so far seems likely to mean sacking little-known civil servants and giving himself more power through a fresh prime minister’s office. [Sir Keir] Starmer, in his best parliamentary performance I have seen so far, accused the Prime Minister of taking the public for fools and tore into his dishonesty.
“I have found Johnson personally charming and amusing many times in the past. But at almost exactly the same time as he was hosting his parties in Downing Street, having a high old time lecturing the rest of us, I was burying my father.
“We did a good job for him – poems, a piper.
“But it was just a very few of us, standing outside in a churchyard in the wind: we were unable to hold our own service inside the church where he had been an elder for more than 50 years and he never had the proper send-off he richly deserved.”
READ MORE: Stephen Paton: EHRC is starting to look like a front for Tories
Marr said a Tory leadership contest was coming, but there were “more twisting, choked, switchback roads to come before we get there”.
He glossed over those seen as the main contenders, and focussed on someone who is not currently in the Cabinet – Jeremy Hunt – who he said was the Tory politician Labour MPs would fear most.
The former health secretary, foreign secretary and leadership challenger had already accumulated some impressive supporters, he said.
“He has been discreet. He hasn’t been out attacking the besieged Johnson, but, since you ask – yes, I think he would stand.”
Marr said that “Westminster opinion about the Prime Minister’s future is as consistent as an overweight drunk on a skateboard trying to negotiate the pyramid of Giza”. However, he added that whoever else may be in the frame for his job, would encounter further problems beyond the hefty rise in National Insurance payments.
He explained: “In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has promised to reveal in the ‘coming weeks’ her plans for a new independence referendum before the end of next year. How does a Johnson administration, with almost every Scottish Conservative parliamentarian having declared against him, deal with that?”
He said a growing range of other policies was stuck in parliament for want of a reliable majority, and added: “Johnson has lost the support of so many backbenchers that his freedom to introduce any fresh radical measure is now cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in. In the end, it’s all about authority. Belief. Credibility.
“A prime minister must be able to look his colleagues in the eye, order action, and watch change ripple out.
“If he can’t do that, what’s the point?”
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