Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Richard Hakluyt]

The Electoral Commission will investigate Johnson's home furnishings https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56915307

[Sheilbh]

From what I read Johnson looks very rattled at PMQs and is kind of losing his rag. Probably not helped by Ian Blackford of the SNP (who is generally dreadful at this) following up very simply with "are you a liar, Prime Minister?"

Edit: It's still unlikely to cause him to go - though the Tories are unsentimental about this sort of thing - but I'm seeing lots more people discussing the possibility.

Edit: And Starmer got a despatch box denial of the "bodies pile high" comment which I suspect is a mistake given that multiple sources have already corroborated it to Peston and Kuensberg.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I expect Gove to stand firm behind the PM.....knife in hand of course 

I think the longer that Johnson remains the more shit will attach to the Tory party; I just hope that the Labour party can up their game and become worthy of forming the next government.

[Sheilbh]

I expect Gove to stand firm behind the PM.....knife in hand of course 

I see his wife's already run a "helpful" column in the Mail about how we can't expect the PM to live in a skip.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gove was the one - whenever it happens - to knife him. Though at this point I think the likely beneficiary would be Sunak (or possibly Truss or Patel).

Edit: Also I think the Electoral Commission's investigation will give this story a lot of legs - as will the PM's performance today. I'm not convinced that responding to questions about this with increasingly hysterical screams really makes journalists think "nothing to see here"

I think the longer that Johnson remains the more shit will attach to the Tory party; I just hope that the Labour party can up their game and become worthy of forming the next government.

Sadly I think that's wishful thinking on Labour. The feeling I get is that there are still far more on the left who want to see Keir Starmer fail than want to end a Tory government and until that switches (or the left are utterly marginalised), I don't think Labour have a hope.

[Sheilbh]

This whole scandal feels almost lab-designed to excite the British public: class, judging property choices and sleaze.

E.g. Labour party spokesman about Starmer: "unlike the Prime Minister, he doesn't turn his nose up at John Lewis, thinking it's too downmarket."

[Josquius]

Aye labour are in a hard place.
The stain of Corbyn remains for the nationalists and centrists whilst the far left are proving utter idiots who won't accept anything but their favoured shade of red.

Just got my fingers crossed labour are playing the patriotic opposition during the national emergency and supporting the government and as corona fades they'll start digging up the bodies to attack the government with.

[Sheilbh]

I also suspect Johnson might be okay because this won't show up in the local elections. We're politically in a weird time because for the first time in my life I don't think we have a protest party for people who are unhappy with the government, but not keen on the opposition to turn to. That used to be the role of the Lib Dems, then UKIP/Brexit Party. At the minute I don't think there's anyone able to take advantage

[Josquius]

The greens are doing that to an extent. Last general election was their first showing anywhere around here and I think they may have been in every seat.
Which only serves only to knock 5% off the labour vote of course.
In consett it was enough to give the tories the win. I really do suspect there could be some tory support for this kind of useful idiocy if not outright plants

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - but the Greens are more a protest vote for the left. UKIP/Brexit were generally one for the right (plus a decent chunk of Old Labour voters) and the Lib Dems worked for both parties.

If you voted Tory in 2019, you're angry about all this but Labour haven't won you back yet - where can you go?

[garbon]

I feel like all of this is just to then takedown Boris as leader once the coronavirus crisis is over and leadership looks like a shiny bauble again.

[Tamas]

I feel like all of this is just to then takedown Boris as leader once the coronavirus crisis is over and leadership looks like a shiny bauble again.

It would be quite convenient for the party to nip and coronavirus inquires in the bud saying "well yeah Boris F-ed it up, alone"

[Sheilbh]

You may be right - although I wonder who would be behind that?

I think that the Mail is leading the pack as they put it is telling. They don't like Johnson and never really have and they're relatively lockdown sceptical (which is ironic given that Cummings is their source and by all accounts was very hardline/pro-lockdowns). And I think they'd be happier with any of his likely replacements - Sunak, Truss or Patel.

Meanwhile in other leadership trouble 80% of the DUP electoral college have apparently written to the party to express that they have no confidene in Arlene Foster or Nigel Dodds (deputy leader). In part this seems to be because Foster was perceived as soft on the NIP, in part by a DUP rep attending a North-South ministerial council, but the immediate trigger was her abstention on a vote banning gay conversion therapy which pissed off the very strong Christian wing of the DUP. It kind of shows the challenge for the DUP (and unionism more widely) - they're basically caught between losing votes to Traditional Unionist Voice which is very hardline on the NIP and on social issues on one side and, on the other, the Alliance Party who are a non-sectarian centrist party. Optimistically it might lead to a re-alignment in unionism - there are plenty of unionists who are no longer motivated by social issues and are fairly unrepresented, not least because so much of unionist politics traditionally comes from the churches.

But the latest poll has the DUP slumping and the TUV surging, but Sinn Fein as the largest party. They're also leading the polls in the South. And at the minute there's been a controversy over a Sinn Fein TD attending a memorial service and writing an online eulogy about Seamus McElwain noting that he "was assassinated 35 years ago today. He was in his own country; those who killed him were not. Seamus was an IRA Volunteer, he was a participant in conflict." McElwain killed at least 10 people - all Protestants living in border communities, which was part of a campaign that led to Protestants moving away from border communities and into more solidly Protestant areas near the sea. It is also striking because Arlene Foster believes he was responsible for the attempted murder of her father (who was shot in the head on the family farm - they also moved from the border). He is suspected of a number of other attempted murders. He was killed by the SAS in an ambush while planting a huge landmine to target British troops moving in the area. An inquest in the 90s found it was an unlawful killing as he was not offered an opportunity to surrender and because there's evidence that he was killed five minutes after being initially shot (which would have been a murder).

As I say this is going to be a challenge for any move to a united Ireland - especially if Sinn Fein ever take office - of how you construct an identity out of those two views (and there are equivalents on the loyalist side to add a further complication).

Edit: And Arlene Foster has resigned.

[Sheilbh]

It would be quite convenient for the party to nip and coronavirus inquires in the bud saying "well yeah Boris F-ed it up, alone"

What in the last 5 years makes you think the Tory party is anywhere near coordinated and competent enough to pull off this type of political management?

I think more important is that Johnson has never been popular among Tory MPs (and, interestingly was seen in the tea rooms after PMQs talking to backbenchers which is never a good sign for a PM) or certain sections of the Tory press. In general Tories have no loyalty to leaders and will dump them if they become a liability, but there's always been a sense with Johnson that they'll support/tolerate him for as long as he's winning but that's it.

[garbon]

Yeah I'm not saying it is coordinated so much as it is just one of pieces we all know is necessary before the inevitable tory backstab.

[Sheilbh]

I think this is very good and right on why this scandal is hitting home - I'd also add I think John Lewis probably has one of the best brand reputations/images in the UK:

The 'John Lewis nightmare' shows just how out of touch Boris Johnson is
Zoe Williams
To the majority of voters, snobbery is the headline offence of the prime minister's flat refurbishment
Wed 28 Apr 2021 15.15 BST

Some stories touch the nation at a level above politics, somewhere nearer the self; Boris Johnson's renovations to his Downing Street flat is one. Had it just been a pile of numbers, it's possible that even his most ardent opponents would have lost interest. Yes, a £30,000 annual allowance for refurbishments sounds like more than any normal person could dream of spending. Sure, there's £58,000 he spent on top of that to account for – donated by Lord Brownlow, but after what shenanigans, and what was all that about a blind trust?

Yet in the jumble of missing puzzle pieces, boring parliamentary rules over declarations, and the odd commentator dragging up tax and interest – words designed to stifle curiosity – this could have died down. Electoral commission investigation notwithstanding, consider the context: a prime minister who nobody expected to tell the truth or manage his personal affairs with probity in the first place.

If only the quotes hadn't been so magnetic; as the Daily Mail has reported, the prime minister bemoaned to aides that Carrie Symonds's gold wallpaper was "costing tens and tens of thousands ... I cannot afford it". Reading this in a script, a diligent editor would say, "Why is he having that conversation with an aide? Why can't he talk directly to his girlfriend about whether they have tens of thousands in their bank account?" Their relationship suddenly looks somewhat darker and much less relatable.

Even though Samantha Cameron had only just installed a new kitchen – sure, it's a long time ago in politics, but it's not a very long time in the life cycle of a lacquered unit – Carrie couldn't live with it, according to a "friend", because it was "greige" (this has particular connotations in the world of interiors, I understand – a kind of dated-hotel-chic). The killer, of course, was one visitor recalling Symonds's desperation to see the back of Theresa May's "John Lewis nightmare".

The headline offence is snobbery: to the vast majority of Conservative voters, possibly just about all of them, John Lewis furniture represents something of a pinnacle. To homeowners, John Lewis is the idealised court portrait of the Ikea flat pack they actually bought; to renters, it is a world away from landlord-assembled tat. It makes Johnson and Symonds seem scornful, remote and painfully clueless about the lives of their compatriots.

This is particularly problematic in the light of the still-denied "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" remark. It's all clicking together like Lego, another horribly common yet universally coveted thing Carrie probably can't abide. A man who didn't care whether people lived or died probably would end up with a woman who thought John Lewis – John Lewis! – was for little people. Furthermore, Johnson's best counterattack strategy to all the recent sleaze allegations has been a version of "people don't care about silly stories, they care about the vaccine rollout". After this saga, it's fair to say that he doesn't have a clue what any of us care about.

Some of the shock at this snobbery is confected: many were probably already aware that Posh is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. They don't even have department stores. Alan Clark's famous (though contested) slur on Michael Heseltine's breeding – "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy his own furniture" – is the touchstone of the aristocratic interiors-worldview. Their furniture is all 300 years old, and it emphatically does not blend into their wallpaper. They never have any draught exclusion and their plumbing doesn't work.

Alan Clark, faced with an interior by Symonds's favoured designer, Lulu Lytle, might have found it gaudy and crass, but also unspeakably arriviste, as he would any sofa whose springs weren't digging into his butt. Even though we've yet to see pictures of the inside of Downing Street (give the Mail a break, it is trying to bring down a prime minister here), we can probably guess from Lytle's look book that what we'd see is not timeless English class, but a billionaire oligarch's idea of what an aristocratic English interior should look like. Johnson and Symonds are not seeking to visually represent their own class. They're flogging a theme park version of it – two parts Raj, one part boho, two parts anteroom from the set of The Crown – to the world of the High Net Worth, a world to which the views of Alan Clark, John Lewis, all its partners, and the assorted citizenry of this sceptred isle could not be less relevant. The flat, and how it was paid for, is actually not a bad metaphor for Johnson's politics.

    Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

I also really want Theresa May to do an interview that is only covering her decor decisions in that "John Lewis nightmare"