It was always obvious to anyone with a grain of sense and half a brain cell that Boris Johnson was shockingly unfit to serve as Prime Minister (especially after his shambolic stint as Foreign Secretary). His appearance at the Covid Inquiry this week has done nothing to dispel that view and has merely underlined his unfitness once again. As satisfying as it was to see him grilled over his half-arsed and incompetent handling of the pandemic, it was still profoundly frustrating for several reasons. Not least of which is the suspicion that this inquiry will, instead of holding politicians to account for woeful decision making, turn out to be yet another example of establishment immunity.
Despite the Tory care home scandal, the billions of pounds lost in corrupt "VIP lane" covid contracts for Tory cronies, Rishi Sunak's insane "Eat Out To Help Out" scheme, and billions more squandered on covid support loans to fake companies and fraudsters, a light grilling by their establishment peers is as bad as it's ever going to get for the likes of Johnson and Hancock.
You'd have to ignore so much in the past to believe that this time it will be any different. That this time, their feet will be held to the fire. That this time, the precedents will be proven wrong. Here are some examples of what I have in mind
Tony Blair's actions lead to countless thousands being killed in Iraq and created the world's largest terrorism breeding ground, and the worst he faced was the Chilcot Inquiry exposing his lies. And then what?
Cameron and Osborne caused the premature deaths of innumerous people via their austerity agenda, and they haven't even been told off. They've got off scot-free because the establishment elitists are still as addicted to economically illiterate austerity ruination as they ever were.
Theresa May completely got away with introducing the unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" which destroyed the lives of countless Commonwealth Brits and their families, to the extent of deporting British citizens who actually died in exile overseas.
It's sickening that the worst Johnson and his ilk are going to face is a bit of a telling off, rather than the jail time they deserve, but that's just how the British establishment order operates.
Another profoundly frustrating aspect is the faux shock and outrage from Labour politicians and their liberal-capitalist media outriders. They knew exactly how bad Johnson was all along, but that didn't stop them sabotaging the Labour Party from within. These people worked tirelessly to hand power to Johnson and his Tory rabble, because they saw it as a price worth paying to achieve their primary objective of taking control of the party for themselves.
Their outrage is doubly fake because they don't want to set the precedent of jailing political leaders for crimes of governance (why isn't there a crime of 'Government Manslaughter?) and corruption, because they want to retain the same establishment immunity for themselves when they get into power.
Without serious consequences for the profoundly corrupt architects of bad governance, the Covid Inquiry is destined to be just an empty performance. And we all deserve better than that. Or am I jumping to a premature conclusion?
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