Boris is dragging the Tories down with him

Tories occasionally like to pretend that they are not wasting their talents and lives defending a bottom-feeding demagogue. They lecture critics who damn Boris Johnson as a British Trump and tell us we have him all wrong. Fraser Nelson, my own editor here, once argued that, far from being a sponger and fraud, the Prime Minister was a liberal conservative, a centrist, indeed, who had absorbed and defeated populism. 

I wonder what Fraser thinks now. I wonder whether Conservative MPs and Conservative voters realise what Johnson is doing to them. All power corrupts, but Johnson’s power corrupts all who defend him. To maintain it, Johnson is screaming desperate lies at those who hold him to account. Like Trump’s Republicans, Conservatives are now going along with the lies because — well, perhaps one day they will explain themselves. My guess is the answer lies in a mixture of cowardice, stupidity, habit, tribalism, fear of giving an inch of ground to Labour, a secret contempt for the fickle-minded public they believe will move on to the next distraction, and an absence of political vision that means they can see no alternative to sinking deeper into the mire.