The Blond Bombsite

Not only has Boris Johnson expressed the universal recognition that the Conservatives are going to be looking for a new Leader after having lost next year's General Election, but he has also demonstrated that the position of Mayor of London is a non-job, theoretically capable of being done for a year by the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

Why, then, is attention lavished on him, as it also was on his predecessor, while most MPs, and everyone with real political responsibilities in local government, are ignored completely? What on earth makes him think that he is qualified to lead the Conservative Party? Or, indeed, that he might be allowed to do so?

By the time of the next General Election, Johnson will have been out of Parliament for as long as he was ever in. After that Election, more or less any seat still held by the Conservative Party will by definition be a safe seat, often occupied by an MP of very long standing. (It is telling in the extreme that, for all his loudly alleged popularity, there is no suggestion of Johnson's contesting anything other than a safe Conservative seat.)

Will MPs who had toiled for decades, in good times and in bad, be supposed to waft into the Leadership a man who had only just re-entered Parliament, and that on the specific understanding in his own mind that he would instantly be made Leader?

Johnson, like Michael Gove, is given no scrutiny whatever, in both cases because they are the media's own. But Gove is a spectacularly unsuccessful politician, while Johnson is not really a politician at all.

In 2010, Labour decided that it, and not the media, was going to chose its Leader. That party has been ahead in the polls for almost the entire period since, and it remains so. 2015 might very well be the year when the Conservatives come to the same decision.

In any case, Boris Johnson is unfit for public office. He has admitted that he always knew the case for the Iraq War was a load of rubbish, but that he voted for it anyway.

No doubt this admission is true of many then-MPs, some of whom are still there. They, too, were and are unfit for office.

The Conservative rebellion was proportionately as well as absolutely far smaller than the Labour one. But the Conservative Party were the Official Opposition, making its failure to oppose an even greater dereliction of duty. The same is true of the Labour Party, as such, over Libya.

Has this country ever gone to war without the support of the Official Opposition? I cannot think of a case. The Conservatives could have kept us out of Iraq, as Labour could have kept us out of Libya.

That said, Labour MPs, as individuals, who voted for war while knowing that it was all lies, as most of the general public had no difficulty in recognising, were and are no better than any other MPs who did so.

It is one thing to have been hoodwinked, although MPs ought not to be. But this was, and is, something else.