Could ‘Boris Bonds’ be the answer to Britain’s coronavirus recession?

Do Alan Clark’s diaries have a lesson for us about Boris Johnson’s ability to continually defy the odds? In his entry of 7 April, 1982, Clark wrote about the whiff of mutiny in the air among Tory grandees towards Margaret Thatcher at the time of the Falklands War: ‘It is monstrous that senior Tories should be behaving in this way. It is only on occasions such as this that the implacable hatred in which certain established figures hold the Prime Minister can be detected…If by some miracle the expedition succeeds they know, and dread, that she will be established for ever as a national hero…The greater the humiliation…the greater the likelihood of a lash-up coalition, without a general election, to fudge things’.

It could have been a description of the travails of Boris Johnson last autumn as he tried to deliver EU withdrawal while leading figures from the Tory establishment did all they could to hamper him, humiliate him, block an election and promote instead the idea of a cross-party ‘Government of National Unity’ to fudge things.