The old Tories, the ones who were around when the UK had a functional government, are starting to pull no punches in regards to Brexit and Boris Johnson:

William Keegan (not a Tory, old or otherwise) writes:

Brexit was becoming a farce. Now it is turning into a coup

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There is no getting away from it: this is a rightwing coup. I agree with Ferdinand Mount, once head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit at Downing Street in what now look like less disturbing times. Writing in the current London Review of Books, Mount sees echoes of Mussolini’s rise to power, in that “yes, [Johnson] has come to power by strictly constitutional means”; it is what happens after that matters, and the do-or-die approach of Johnson and his warlord Dominic Cummings is truly disturbing.

As my former Observer colleague Neal Ascherson says in the same vintage issue of the LRB: “We have leading Tories - not only Johnson - apparently prepared to suspend a sovereign parliament in order to force through a Brexit meant to restore the sovereignty of parliament.”

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Here’s what Ferdinand Mount wrote:

How bad can it get?

Yes, this is a right-wing coup. It is duplicitous or self-deceiving to pretend that British politics is still proceeding more or less as normal. We are told that it is ‘hysterical’ to argue that Boris Johnson’s regime is in any way comparable to the nationalist dictatorships of yesterday or today. If this is a temptation, I shall happily succumb to it as a patriotic duty. By every standard of measurement, the Conservative Party has been transformed into Britain’s own BJP. ‘Optimism with a hint of menace’ was how the Sunday Times approvingly described Johnson’s first days in power - pretty much the way you might describe the first hundred days of Narendra Modi, or Donald Trump, or Benito Mussolini. Yes, he has come to power by strictly constitutional means. So did they all. It is how they govern when they get there that counts.

First, there was the brutality of the cabinet cull. Macmillan’s Night of the Long Knives pales by comparison, […]

We are already beginning to take for granted Johnson’s abusive tone towards international institutions and foreign leaders, except those like Donald Trump who talk the same mixture of bluster and treacle. At home, we are promised more mega-bridges and bonanza buses, the sorts of project with which dictators always like to dazzle the plebs. Here, the author of Boris Island Airport and the garden bridge is at least staying true to form.

What still puzzles some people is that so many old-fashioned Tories should have fallen for such a seedy, treacherous chancer. In fact, I think Johnson has succeeded because of his amorality, not despite it. The transgressive sayer of the unsayable breaks through the carapace of conventional politics with a mixture of humour and vituperation, slang and high-flown rhodomontade. Clowning is part of the act for the leader who wants to reach beyond good and evil in the fashion Nietzsche recommended. A cartoon Superman? Yes, but they all are. See Charlie Chaplin, passim.

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