Review of Peter Oborne's The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism

 Aside from having no conceptual clue of the reasons behind the current sentient cancerous growth currently inhabiting 10 Downing Street, a pretty good book. 

To start with the positives, it is an unrelenting assault on the scumbag, fraud and liar Boris Johnson. Johnson, a disgusting sack of blubbering meat, who has managed to hide his inner elite sociopath (his constant history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and an almost religious worship of the rich) under a hideous masquerade of bloviating, charming, bumbling affableness, has managed to launch himself into the highest place in the land almost seemingly without effort. Oborne shares my, and I would hope all sane thinking peoples, utter distain and contempt for the unprincipled swinebag that is he. He meticulously picks apart Boris Johnson's endless lies. It must be pathological for the man, someone should study his brain when he dies and check it out, for it clearly is beyond what most humans are capable of. Johnson is a man so dishonest if he said the words "I love you" to whatever comfort woman he is currently playing about with he'd probably do it with two fingers crossed behind his back. Johnson is the objective proof that Britain is not a meritocracy. Born to disgustingly obscene wealth for no reason other than the background of his family, Johnson is an unprincipled, underhanded, lazy, useless, arrogant, lying, dishonest, cretinous, narcissistic, bloated fucking pig. He has a level of corruption that would put the Borgias to shame and a level of shit-peddling public showmanship that would P.T. Barnum wince. Squirming his way from the gilded halls of Eton (and then Oxbridge, where he spent the idle pastimes of his youth trashing restaurants and urinating on homeless people as part of the Bullington Club), he crawled his wretched hide through a long slow march through the institutions of Britain. As Oborne notes, he lied pathologically and constantly as his role in the Times and the Telegraph, the former of which he was sacked from for such liars. But the UK press is a bottomless well where every low-life monstrosity can roam, where no amount of genuine stupidity, personal immortality, journalistic unprincipledness and fawning sycophancy to power (as Oborne notes, the mainstream media, the cancer press in particular, has been uniquely propagandistic for him, regurgitating with all the trained obedience of crufts dogs every lie and smear that comes ejecting out from 10 Downing Street) is barred from getting a job. He then became mayor of London, whose main role there waste to waste money on vanity projects that went nowhere (Boris Bridge etc.) Having gotten way into becoming an MP, he then decided to jump onto the Leave camp, a campaign of dishonesty and lies that would only be surpassed by Johnson's 2019 campaign (the lowest point of British democracy yet). The main contributing role of the Leave campaign was to further isolate Britain's already dimming and increasingly irrelevant role on the world stage, ferment a level of racism and xenophobia in this country not seen since the mid 70s, and primarily becoming a petulant whining vehicle for older white English men in the home counties to account a litany of fabricated crimes (bendy bananas and regulating pillow cases and such) and cosplay the most ludicrous self-victimising narratives that painted the petty grievances of right wing conservatives against a right wing EU as equivalent to the French resistance to the Nazis. Ultimately, it ended in the murder of Jo Cox, a sitting MP. The Leave campaign helped radicalise Thomas Mair into his murder, by the obsessive and fanatical smearing of anyone even mildly disagreeable to the right wing's project as traitors. He won, of course, but it also shows as well as being an opportunistic liar from which principle is irreverent to personal gain, he's also got blood indirectly on his hands (although the grinning charlatan Farage bares most blame for that). 

Now as PM, he has been as bad as anyone could have dreamt. Having insatiably lusted after power for all his life, in his jumped up and power craved little world where he was told from birth that he was destined and born to rule (the British education elite system being a kind of ghastly farm for the breeding of sociopaths to keep the establishment permanently in power), now has jumped his way into power, on the back of an election where he lied so often and so frequently Oborne had to make a website to keep track of them. With a vast pile of donor money to fill the online sphere with a deluge of made-up crap and bullshit, his dream was achieved. He is PM. 

His first year in office saw him catastrophically mishandle every possible step through the coronavirus crisis, and unparalleled spectacle of incompetence and corruption. He boasted of shaking people's hands, demanded the economy not be sacrificed, allowed Cheltenham festival to go ahead, then locked down too late. His late lockdown last summer killed thousands. He killed thousands in the care home system, by allowing people barely checked to renter the care homes. He then lied about this in Parliament. Then he reopened too early, introducing a test and trace system that was broken almost immediately by failing to have any administrative competence behind it, essentially peddling whatever garbage could be found by his donor mates who got lucrative contracts of destroying our system. It failed utterly, and the crucial gap between the first and second lockdown to stop it spreading was lost (compare this to any country in East Asia, or even Vietnam, with their speedy, efficient and dynamic responses). Having sold our health apparatus to his cronies and in the process ruined it, a second, shorter lockdown was made. He opened up again, promising people a merry old Christmas piss up, and when condemned for this, accused the current Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer (a useless streak of cum possessed with the power of speech and squirted across the front benches) he accused him of wanting to "cancel Christmas". Like an overgrown child, Johnson only exists in a world of buzzwords, slogans, easy-to-disgust whippet shit, happy make believe nonsense, where technical competence and adminstrative management are an irrelevance to whatever media circus he is currently courting. This was disastrous. The virus rate shot up, and having one of the highest death rates in the world at that point, ensured over January an absolute disaster of epic proportions, reaching new heights of abysmal horror this worthless country can sink too by murdering over 150,000, giving nurses PTSD from the sheer relentless horror they had faced, and failed to give people the means to self-isolate. His reward to the nurses was a pathetically insulting 1% pay rise, when it should at least by 12 by any measurement. Having urged us to clap for care workers and nurses, his response was then "fuck you". But such is Jonson's way. It has been said by his former goon Dominic Cummings that he said he would let the "bodies pile high" to keep the economy open. Well, he did. His reign of murder and incompetence, his complete mishandling over everything, his refusal to listen to scientists, his laziness (missing 5 cobra meetings at the beginning of the crisis, following an utterly discredited "herd immunity" strategy) has brought new levels of shame to Britain. Of course, this has not damaged him. Nothing does. He is immune to personal shame or any self-reflection, his narcissism so extreme it borders on a genuine sociopathic condition. But he has also had no scrutiny whatsoever, by our worthless and compliant media, and by the current sack of worthless foetal afterbirth stuffed into a sharp suit that is Keir Starmer (currently reeling from a disastrous local election result having purged the left from his party and offered quite literally nothing). 

All this is well documented by Oborne, and is deserved celebration that there is at least one (and it is almost only one, British journalists have a level of scepticism and mental immunity to lies ranging from somewhere between zombies to animals) journalist willing to embody the principles of his job. As he notes, openly lambasting the media's total absence of critical scrutiny has got him effectively blacklisted from the British journalist class's closed clique of sycophants and flatterers. 

But his analysis for why Johnson is in power is poor. Obore is a Tory, and old fashioned, one nation Tory. And herein lies the problem. Oborne is convinced Johnson and his cronies (like Cummings) are invaders to the Tory party, unprincipled lunatics that have declared war on the traditional conservative values of probity, decent and restraint. But he's wrong, this is a delusional reading. Johnson is as conservative as they come. For sure, more vulgar, more stupid, more diseased, more overtly populist than before. But fundamentally there is nothing he had been doing that has not been set in motion for the past 30 or so years. The complete absence of Thatcher from the book, who he admires, is just bizarre. He condemns Jonson for a cozy relationship with the press. He seems to have forgotten Thatcher's total unwavering support from the right wing press, as well as personally benefiting them (she turned a blind eye to Murdoch's purchasing of the Times in violation of the monopolies act, and the endless stream of gutter smears and deamination that was targeted to the miners is proof of their political use for her). He condemns Johnson and co for treating politics as a battleground from where no ability can be made to come to consensus. That was literally Thatcher's raison d'etre (again, her extermination of the miner's being an open war against the entire working class in Britain). He condemns Johnson for culture war politics, failing to note that Thatcher effectively criminalised homosexuality in Britain for Section 28. He condemns the reliance of spin and media wizardry, seeming ignoring her use of Saachi and Saachi for campaigning. True, the difference was Thatcher was a genuinely committed class warrior, she knew her class (petty bourgeois home owners and international capitalism) and fought for it with a level of brutality and single minded viciousness that we on the left can only dream of matching. Johnson is a showboating, preening, egomaniac whose entire career has been one long vanity project. But all he did was radicalise the tendencies of Thatcherism. In fact, he seems to have no knowledge of the slow, mounting right wing coup that has overtaken this country over the past decade. He is bewildered at the British public's voting of Johnson, yet the ghoulish figure of Farage droves politics rightward for years before that in successive victories.

Take too their contempt for the civil service. He seems to have no knowledge of neoliberalism, where all this comes from. In his obsession with painting a fairly ludicrous rosy view of British public life from the war to now (ignoring the Zinoviev letter, the campaign of smears against Benn during the EEC debate etc.), all the tendencies he most despises comes from the new right that colonised the Conservative party in ‘75 through Thatcher and co (along with genuine lunatics like Keith Joseph). He's missed the mark of the "end of conservatism" by about 30 years. He seems to have forgotten James Buchannan’s hatred and loathing for the civil service, for civil society, for anything outside of the market logic. Cummings may dress up his rhetoric in radicalism, but look behind it, but what with his hatred of supposedly recalcitrant civil service bureaucrats and veneration of tech wizards and some pseduo-spontaneous will that unique genius individuals are supposed to have (in a strain of Soreleanism that is there too), he's regurgitating neoliberalism 101, specifically Silicon Valley tech neoliberalism. The hallmark of Thatcherism, as Stuart Hall pointed out, was its "authoritarian populism", the application to traditional tory beliefs (family, church, nationalism etc.) with aggressive populist framing of market choice and personal freedom. The presence of Enoch Powell, about as traditional tory as one can get and the missing link between Heath and Thatcher, and who first pioneered this kind of politics, is nowhere to be found. In fact, as William Davies has pointed out brilliantly, the distain for objective knowledge, expertise and civil society forces was pioneered by Hayek, who fetishized abstract, wild, spontaneous "market forces" with its almost semi-mystic worship of the price form as the source of all knowledge, against what he saw was the attempt by planners to use facts, data and rationality to plan economies  (Thatcher had a copy of his book in her handbag). 

Because he has no understanding of neoliberalism, or more broadly capitalism, he cannot understand the broader dynamics that create Johnson. He berates him for being a project of the rich, of the press barons, but also the finance elites who took over parties' funding and let him in. Who allowed capitalism to reign unstrained in this country? Who allowed the rich to behave like second rate gods and rape all democratic procedures? Thatcher. He venerates a conservatism that is incompatible with the capitalism he values. Truth cannot exist under capitalism, as capitalism only values what is marketable and sellable, not truthful. The "marketplace of ideas" metaphor is so silly for precisely this reason. As the YouTube video essayist Peter Coffin rightly points out "in the marketplace of ideas attention is the currency". Neoliberalism is therefore incapable of valuing truth at all. The destruction of the scientific method, with its strict criteria of truth, comes from neoliberal attempts to create scientific journals outside of academies, subject to market pressure and with a broader range of people accessing it. Capitalism bankrolled climate denialism or decades. If he wanted to destroy the power of the tech monopolies’ capacity to utterly destroy democracy he could support the nationalisation of them, turn them into public services subject to a binding charter of responsibilities, regulations and rights (like the BBC is, supposedly, bound to). But then that would clash to heavily with his own antiquated and deluded one-nationism. The institutions he venerates as pillars of conservatism (the civil service, church, family etc.) are impossible to sustain under the barrage of neoliberalism's relentless project of atomisation. Neoliberalism creates shoppers out of voters and consumers out of citizens. It is a cancer which has destroyed out societies utterly. Until one is opposed to it, all this blather about good old conservatism is sheer nonsense that is deflecting the truth of the situation. 

His analysis of political history, and conservatism in general leaves, also leaves to be desired. He associates conservatism with the tradition of Montinesque, and that of the radical left (or radicalism more generally) with Rousseau, Rousseau embodying a kind of proto-totalitarianism of venerating the "general will" and its willingness for demagogues to impose such will onto society. This is a laughable, fanciable reading of political philosophy. Rousseau's notion of the "general will" is so abstract and flimsy it is debatable it had, or could have meant any genuine substance in his works, and in the Social Contract he is only able to cite the tiny republic of Geneva as a working model (as this was before even America was around as a working republic). Projecting it onto the activities and actions of the French revolutionaries is an after-the fact presumption, as it is barely clear any of the major players in France at that time had read his political work (studies of reading habits at the time suggested his romantic fiction novels were more owned and read that the Social Contract), and although Robespierre may have farted around a lot of Rousseaun rhetoric alot, it is clear the actions from 1793 onwards are a clear response to pragmatic material conditions (the worsening situation on the front, the internal civil war raging in places like the Vendee) than some ideological programme. 

He seems to also have no knowledge of Hayek and Friedman's love of Pinochet (blaming the left for a vision of politics where people can be brutalised into a utopian goal, something which, as David Graber pointed out, is the quintessence of neoliberalism, as seen in Chile). The UK benefits reforms conducted by the disabled killer in chief Irritable Duncan Syndrome (IDS) is the definition of such a belief system, forcing people into impossible goals and then when they inevitably fail punishing them for such failure, in a truly nightmarish Kafkaesque dystopian bureaucracy putting eastern bloc regimes to shame. Or we can look at the ultra-lunatic fanatic Von Mises support for Pinochet (a man so right wing he stormed out of the Mont Pelion society meetings proclaiming the people there (including Hayek and Freidman) as a bunch of communists. Or the fanatical anticommunism of most right wingers throughout the 20th century, reaching its pitch in McCarthyism in America but continuing on as a sustain, hysterical, fascist attack on any and all leftists everywhere regardless of how moderate they were. The war against soviet tyranny he credits to Reagan and Thatcher was actually a war to exterminate the last vestiges of a social democracy in Europe (Thatcher after all, in private to Gorbachev, was opposed to the Eastern bloc collapsing). War against totalitarianism for the right meant support for totalitarianism when it benefited capitalism and the forces of reaction, as seen by the absolute legions of blood-stained dungeons created across South America with help of the USA. In this ludicrous 1st year A-Level understanding of politics, conservatism (which he associates with a "realist" recognition of the limits of human nature, the importance of stability, the need for truthfulness and so on), and the kind of arson-like radicalness of Johnson and Cummings, with their disdain for mechanisms of state rule, ruthlessly instrumentalist approach to truth, vicious political weaponising of everything and a populist showmanship towards the masses, as against it. Yet in his bizarre world, Johnson and Cummings, products of the rich, supported by the rich (or at least a small conclave of the mot politically conscious sections of capital, Brexit after all was hated by most of capitalism), openly praising of the rich (Johnson once said the Times 100 rich list should all get OBEs just for being rich, Cumming's endless veneration of tech entrepreneurs for some supposed energy and dynamism lacking in politicians and bureaucrats) becomes a problem of the masses harming an genteel elite led conservatism. The sources of private money supporting them (as he points out) now become a problem of the excess of democracy. No notion seems to be acknowledged that it is entirely possible for the project of lunatic populism to in fact be one sustained by the rich elites (after all, Bolsonaro and Modhi, two of the greatest mass killers of the modern age what with their handling of COVID, where salivated over by the global rich class and the magazines of the global wealthy for their overtly neoliberal regimes). In his binary world, conservatism = stable rule by sensible elites, while Johnsonian radicalism = a kind of pseudo-communist attempt to bring the politics of hyper-politicised lying, demagoguery, political manipulation and weaponisation into the state, failing to realise that for most of the latter half of the 20th century they were more of less the same project. As Corey Robin has shown, the presumption of a benign Conservatism one-nationsism as the bed rock of conservatism since at least 1975 is a laughable fantasy created by conservatives, which ignores the strain of right wing radicalism that has always existed in conservatism, especially in America, where the deranged strain of libertarianism nearly always went hand in hand with the stringent defence of property rights (this was usually nearly always racialized, and was openly supportive of terroristic, insane white supremacism, as any peep into the writings of Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul's newsletters would testify too).

His view of British public life as being one of total probity, clarity and robust independence is also pretty ludicrous. Conservatism, (as he actually acknowledges, quite refreshingly) was set up to deter the working classes from voting. Conservatism is the belief system for the defence of property, and its founding myth that leads all of its hysteria from then onwards is its opposition to the radical, egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution, and it's supposed "excesses". The French Revolution is the founding cradle for all of modern politics, and conservatism is founded on its absolute hatred of the masses. William Pitt the Younger effectively ran a dictatorship in Britain at the time, persecuting and banning any reform societies set up to allow the shocking idea of allowing working people the vote. Conservatism's hatred of the supposed "totalitarian" excesses of radical projects for human emancipation like the French Revolution was always an excuse to justify terrorism and subjugation elsewhere. Counter-revolutionaries may like to wail about the Terror as proof against revolutionary movements, but are also just as likely to say the same about the Haitian Revolution, a slave uprising specifically influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution. They bewail the "realist" nature of human beings and the impossibility of any real change, something they have had at every period of change, from male suffrage, to abolishing slavery, to women's suffrage and decolonisation. Founding their political philosophy on hated of the Enlightenment and of the radicalism the French Revolution supposedly embodied within it, it has set itself on a course for the fanatical and extreme destruction of any democracy and freedom at all, running right from the Peterloo Massacre all the way to the brutal crackdowns and attempted slaughters of the rights and liberties of ordinary people (from the Paris Commune to the Amritsar Massacre). It eventually led to the wholesale and triumphant support for fascism and the Nazis, as the ultimate bulwark against Bolshevism in Europe, and a reaffirmation of the belief in naturalised hierarchies of race and gender against the egalitarianism and belief in universal human nature, birthed from France (Dominic Losoduro's work on this is vital in this regard). Conservatives were on the wrong side of every historic struggle, from fascism, to decolonisation, to Northern Ireland, to Vietnam, to Aparteid, to Gay rights, while the left were on the right on each of those. The fact that it should end in Trump and Johnson is, in some ways, no surprise.

If it ever did exist, it only applied to the non-colonised. Indeed, Oborne seems to have no knowledge of the fact that the entire system of rigorous public administration set up by the Victorians was precisely not only to crush all tendencies towards further democratisation, but the enormous need to expand and clarify the public civil service after all was needed due to the constrains and needs of Britain to manage its massive empire, a vast chain of torture, murder and oppression. The British establishment system from the mid Victorian period was, if anything, dedicated to the protection, promotion and securing of that system, which they did with remarkable efficiency. British private educated civil servants were the ones preceding over mass slaughters and famines in Africa and India (the insane hysteria surrounding the Indian Mutiny of the time should put to bed any notion that frenzies of racialized madness are a new phenomenon), meaning such any such system of sensible, stable governance was if, if anything, only for the domestic audience (and then often not). Abroad it was one of unbridled savagery. Even in the 20th century, Tony Benn's account of the extremely passive aggressive undermining of him during the 70s should show the notion of them being politically independent is a stretch, at best. Plus, the entire apparatus of the British state, from the deranged MI5 (who have spent their entire time in existence pretty much built and dedicated to infiltrating, bugging and destroying the left in the UK), and the Police (ditto), means the presumption of a politically neutral state passively arbitrating the norms and rules of Britain in a totally impartial and objective manner is abject nonsense. The British state has always been a politicised state, a left hating state, a worker crushing state, and imperialist, racist state, if not one that managed at times to accommodate or even allow in people from such marginalised groups to change the direction, if not the structures of such policies. Britain has an unusually wretched and backwards political culture, the country most effected by liberalism economically and the one least affected by it politically. The country which always defended property before people but allowed a solid layer of pre-capitalist aristocracy, monarchy and inherited privilege to sit alongside cosily in it, in a mutual class compromise between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie for the mutual success of them both. That's why, even now, most of Britain's land is owned by aristocrats, why we still have an unelected head of state, why there is no formal codified constitution, unelected peers in the House of Lords able to vote on British laws, and an informal culture of patronage and old boys network. Oborne specifically cites the latter as reasons why the British state worked, the presumption of a shared playing field (to use a wretched British cliché which makes me want to be sick) where well-meaning chaps coming from the same class background can sensibly agree on things without the need for all that palaver about amendments and articles of rights and so forth. Unfortunately, it is precisely this tendency, a slap on the back don’t-worry-old-chum everything will be sorted out elite decadence which has been the main source of Johnson’s rise and power. The entire litany of corruption scandals (and I use that term cautiously, lest it fall into the usual fascist moralism that accompanies cries of corruption) that have been wrought upon Johnson, through the lobbying scandal of David Cameron and Greensill, from his relationship to millionaires that gave him money to own a flat, from the absolute obscene network of chums and pals that run the entirety of his media operation (Allegra Stratton, who worked for the BBC, wife to James Forsyth, head of the Spectator, is now his media spokesperson, and now Robbie Gibb, that was once his media spinner, has gone back to the BBC), is precisely because of Britain's total absence of any functioning democracy or civil society. As Britain has slowly rotted away over the decades, the country that implemented the harshest form of neoliberalism anywhere in Europe and the country least capable of doing even the minimum to change it, it has become more like some run-me-down village than a functioning country. Civil society lies dead, community lies dead, parties are dead, politics is evacuated of any debate (dictated entirely as it is by the right wing media, which has a vice like grip on all political discussion and harshly punishes any trespassers into their pre-ordained field of discussion, see the entire behaviour towards Corbyn for evidence, treating him with a level of vilification and demonization that would make authoritarian countries wince), the economy increasingly exploitative and unfair, the housing situation increasingly broken, the police increasingly brutal, spaces of civil society to thrive utterly choked to death (the universities are coming in for particular assault) the entire political situation skewered towards the boomer property owners denying any young people a voice at all, it has had to rely on a solid line of smoozy, smaltzy crap to lace over the vicious, bleeding, naked class and regional divides. It laces it political backwardness with an endless stream of nauseating, tawdry war-time nostalgia (Keep Calm and Carry On mugs, constant evocations of a war time spirit to mask the crippling obliteration of public services and the total incompetence of the government (especially during COVID), endless hagiographies of the patron saint of England Churchill (who may as well be deified like Kim Il Sung at this rate), a pathetic addiction to wrapping the English flag around you at every moment like a comfort blanket, ludicrous posturing over military affairs, a jumped up sense of self-importance, twee, unbearable Oxbridge humour, and a culture of historical denialism over empire and slavery that makes Stalinist revisionism look nuanced by comparison. This garbage cesspool of unbridled capitalist exploitation and cultural reactionaryness is the swamp from which Johnson wallows in. He is popular precisely because he, like a sounding board for the most infantile tendencies in British public life, hones in on what British people like to imagine a Brit is. They like poshos and elites (as Britain's introverted sense of class deference rears its ugly head), a sense he's smarter than them and therefore desiring of a curtsy and a flat cap tilt. A sense that he brings with him establishment stability and trustworthiness, a sense that he's, at his heart, a good chap with a well-meaning spirit, someone who can man the helm of the state with his good education. But the British public don't like elites per say, they don't just want him to be a posh autocrat with no sense of humour. On the contrary, what they want is a trustworthy establishment figure that is also, at heart, a bit of a buffoon. Who they want for leader is Captain Mainwaring, an authority figure who is also a fool, a Basil Fawlty, an authoritarian who is at heart a moron, a Wooster, an upper class fad who fucks up endlessly but gets away with it because, at heart, he's an affable fop of no harm to anyone, who can be dusted up by Jeeves and sent on again. Johnson knows that with every fibre of his being, has cultivated it meticulously, schemed for decades honing it with well placed cultural appearances like on the shit and worthless Have I Got News For You, and he tickles the bellies of the British public to their joy every time he ruffles his hair and mumbles and makes a "gaffe" or says an improper remark. He's a cynical, mendacious scumbag with every iota of his fabric, one of the most grotesque and monstrous examples of diseased and warped product of Britain’s mediaeval class system, but he has covered it masterfully with a glorious tinsel wrapping of good humoured British tomfoolery. Britain is a country that turned the mild mannered, honest, principled, decent and moderate Social Democrat of Corbyn into Stalin Incarnate and turned the serial lying, racist, sex pest and sleazy incompetent Johnson into a national folk hero. It says volumes about Britain's putrid, decaying soul, a country where migrant drownings are as common and as celebrated as National Trust properties. So the problem for Oborne is precisely the conservatism he values is precisely the Conservatism Johnson had played into, benefited from, and been empowered from. The only reason he can shred constitutional rights so easily is because we do not have anything approaching a constitution in the American sense, where he can be bound. The only reason he can so flagrantly violate every last principle of Parliament is because the executive in Britain is granted huge powers, far beyond what any European leader would have. He is able to lie without question because Britain's garbage press does it continually itself and is endlessly rewarded for it (how many journalists where discredited forever over there Iraq War lies? None). Johnson is not the abdication of conservative principles he's it's foaming embodiment. He's not against the grain of Britain he's it's logical conclusion. Britain is turning into most villages around the country, increasingly deprived of any genuine community or society and increasingly filled in-between the empty shop fronts with corporate mega chain branches and war time nostalgia masquerades. 

However, I feel it would be remiss to dismiss him entirely. He is surely right to point out that Tories of old were, in fact, decent. I have tremendous respect for Harold Macmillan, whose administration actually built more houses than the previous Labour administration (his condemnation of Thatcher's "selling the family silver" being a case in point, and I have huge respect for Ted Heath, who was an old school believer in social stability and reform, unwilling to crush the labour movement out of memories of the effects of mass unemployment in the 30s (he ended up spending on state industries later on in his life, and the more one looks into it, there was honestly no real difference between him and Wilson policy wise, both committed to a kind of technocratic state managed capitalism with the more radical aspects of labour movement alienated), was sincere in his speaking and beliefs and utterly contemptuous of spin and bullshit, disdainful towards the American alliance favoured by everyone today, and genuinely quite committed to social democracy (it is the perverse irony of history that it was Callaghan, not Heath, that truly brought in neoliberalism in Britain, as did Carter in America). They are now long gone, and hearing their sincerity and genuine commitment to civil life (Heath, lest we forget, dumped Powell is seconds for his racism, concerned by his effect of society) is almost tragic to see in retrospect when looking at the current creatures paraded to lie on TV. 

He is, after all, right to denounce Johnson on the things he does and says. No one can take qualms with the raw analysis of the book. He is right to upheld the principles of the civil service and of a commitment to truth telling. As much as I hate and loathe the British state, and think its history is appalling, what Johnson is doing is clearly far, far worse. He's running a government in full Berlusconi mode, which, as David Broder has pointed out, reveals general trends towards the death of genuine democracy and civil society. Media run and utterly empty, at least even Thatcher stood for something, at she had a class politics. With Johnson essentially turning the country into a one-party state ran by his cronies and apparatchiks, with the media increasingly and ever more so hysterically propagandistic in their functions, with the constant drum beat of manufactured culture war drivel, the authoritarianism of his government's approach to protests and demonstrations, the rigging of the electoral war, and the lacing all of this with the popular, personality cult of Boris, the modern tory party is a formidable force that shows no ability to be defeated. Having increased their share of the vote in every election since 2015 and finding new sources of votes in the former "Red Wall" areas (the Hartlepool defeat being yet another calamitous sign of the political hegemony he is building) Britain's looks set to be doomed for decades of Johnson's tory party. At it is his Tory party. Make no mistake, the cleansing of any anti-Brexiters in 2019 was essentially a coup by his brand of right-wingerism, utterly destroying even the last vestiges of old school Toryism. The values Oborne values may be deluded and mythologised, but they are values at least. We look set for brutal years of Torysim, without even the threadbare level of genuinely sincere liberalism to hold onto, which, at least in days past, did provide some means of access for forces of civil society to fight back. As with the global rise of right wing neo-fascist populism the left must find itself in the unenviable place of actually having to defend the basic principles of liberalism against right wing populism, for if the COVID crisis has shown us nothing is that right wing populism will send us all to utter hell. Neoliberal technocracy is terrible. Neo-fascist populism is unliveable. "The destruction of the administrative state", the stated goal of Bannon, the obliteration of any trust in politics, the peddling of conspiracy theories instead of policies, the crude demonization and moralistic insistence for authenticity and purity in politicians, the hatred of process and formal democratic change and the subsequent elevation of cultures of personality by strong man demagogues, all the hallmarks of populism, bode ill for the left, which is, at the least, dependent on most if not all of this for its future success. One cannot advocate for a Green New Deal is "experts", of which the GND will be very reliant on, are treated with contempt. One cannot have Marxist analysis if the boundaries of discourse are governed by QANON lunacies about paedophile satanic conspiracies, where every attack on the "globalists" (read, Jews) is seen only as some kind of generalised evil. One cannot form complex class coalitions, in democratic but disciplined labour parties, capable of forming mass majorities to achieve working class goals, when politics has been reduced totally to spectacle, where organised, disciplined "workers" has been replaced by incoherent, formless "mobs", where parties have been replaced by mere vehicles for individual charismatic leaders that cannot and will not create the kind of bottom up movements needed to sustain any socialist government into power (and as the old communist parties, like the Italian CBI, did extraordinarily well), where any act of leadership and hierarchy is seen as the inevitable proof of "elitism", where binary, arbitrary, Schmidttian "for" and "against" politics replaces the compressive and nuanced analysis of class society, especially problematic for the left when our opponents are so broad and complex in makeup (domestic as well as foreign capitalists, neoliberals, liberals, fascists, old school pre-capitalist feudalism) and the people we need to support so diverse in nature (young, multiracial urban-centred students and precarious workers as well as older, white former industrial workers). (see also, again, William Davies on precisely this point, the use of crude arbitrary boundaries imported straight from Schmidt as a means to limit people’s political choices). The politics of Johnsoniasm are a barrier to all of this, and it's continued success renders our goals ever the more harder. In that sense, Oborne should be cheered for at least, however naively, in trying to return this country to some sense of sanity.