MICHAEL WALSH: Good-Bye to All That.

The principal architect of the Tories’ demolition is [Boris] Johnson. Born in New York City with some notable Turkish ancestry, BoJo is the very model of a modern Briton: witty, quippy, raffish, well-read, part-foreign, and an absolute toff who panicked at the arrival of Covid and abandoned all pretenses of governing as a conservative from that moment on. He flouted his own Covid strictures and threw himself headlong into the economic stupidity of “climate change,” from which Britain has yet to emerge and certainly will not under Starmer. Johnson could debate, but he couldn’t lead. Just as the two Bushes squandered the post-Cold War legacy of Ronald Reagan, so did Johnson and the Tory ragamuffins who flanked him put paid to the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher.

As Harold Wilson, another Labour prime minister, once said, a week is a long time in politics, but so also can just a few years vanish in the blink of an eye: just ask Boris Johnson. With his victory in World War II, Churchill was shown the door by an unsentimental electorate. Now, 80 years later, his entire party may be about to get the boot, and it only need look in the mirror to understand why.

Exit quote: “Despite the Tories’ promise to address the issue of economic migration, the situation has only gotten worse in the decade since that article in The Guardian was published, and their repeated failure (despite the Brexit victory) to do so has left them on the edge of political purdah.”