British Standards

Of course Boris Johnson was going to beat Jeremy Hunt and no matter how the media tried to spin the fact that Hunt was making ground in the last two weeks of the contest, once it was whittled down to those tow they may as well have just have had the vote and be done with it. But at least it gave the whiny brigade the opportunity to have a run-up to their garment-rending, self-harming tantrum and prepare themselves for an but highly public irrational meltdown.

Irrational? Of course; Boris being Prime Minister is hardly surprising, given all the assistance afforded by the Remain campaign. Not recognising that their brand ethos of lecturing, hectoring, browbeating and generally abusing the general public for their ignorance, xenophobia, causal racism, Little Englander mentality and all the rest is largely what lays behind the Brexit vote in the first place. The British – the true British – are phlegmatic. We are not quick to hot temper; rather we quietly absorb the insults, then defy you.

So, by so emphatically screeching from the rooftops how Boris must never become Prime Minister you were, effectively, endorsing his candidacy in the eyes of those you hold so low. And now, by yelling your impotent howls of pain into the void, all you are doing is feeding our sense that we were right all along. Mediocre comedian-muso Mitch Benn is a near-perfect exemplar of the genre, with his small-minded, hastily composed anti-Brexit, anti-British ditties and his insistence that those who would swear the UK’s fealty to foreign powers are the true patriots. An idiot doesn’t know that he is an idiot.

An idiot used to be something you tried not to be, but nowadays it seems that in the bizarro-world of leftist equalitarian nightmares, idiocy is the moral equivalent of intellect; one man’s inadequacy is the equal of another’s excellence. And now that the idiots are in positions of power the acceleration towards the age of idiocracy is almost palpable. They are everywhere; in the classroom, the courtroom, the boardrooms and woven through the very fabric of our national administration.

Our armed forces rightly bemoan the loss of competence; if we no longer have experience in all theatres of warfare, how can we adequately train future soldiers to fight for our freedoms? If we scale back on rigour in education, is it any wonder that the school- leavers of today are less well-equipped for the world of work? And if our public discourse is so poorly degraded that any idiot with a grievance believes their poorly framed and intellectually bereft grudges are as equally valid as honouring a national democratic referendum.

The rage has barely subsided; if anything, it has intensified since 2016. These people are not only not going away, they are growing in self belief and self-righteousness even as their argument becomes weaker and their former supporters desert them. They are not even embarrassed now by their, frankly, embarrassing tweets, pronouncements, press briefings and articles. Boris has begun to lance the boil and he hasn’t even lifted a finger yet.

Time to be the bulldog

He has a small window of opportunity to stop the rot, drain the swamp and show up the flimsy ambitions of Parliament. They wish to remain under the thumb of a supranational junta; have our standards set by others; subjugate ourselves to a project which does not have our interests front and foremost. He has to start hard, maintain the pressure and insist that the only standards to which we should all be held are those our predecessors spent blood and treasure establishing. Is it too soon to hope that the Battle for Britain has begun?