My friend Mark Elliott is a very busy man, and these days he only occasionally posts on his site ‘Public Law for Everyone’. This is a pity, because it’s always worth reading, even if you might not naturally assume that thoughtful articles by a Law professor are the natural choice to accompany your cornflakes.
From his latest post:
Johnson himself said that he was ‘being forced out of Parliament by a tiny handful of people, with no evidence to back up their assertions, and without the approval even of Conservative party members, let alone the wider electorate’. He went on to contend that ‘a dangerous and unsettling precedent is being set’, describing the Committee as a ‘kangaroo court’ and the process adopted by it as part of a ‘witch hunt’…
Was he right? Read on…
RSS feed
It was very much in Johnson’s interests to go like this, though, wasn’t it? Looking like the victim of the establishment was much better than just losing the inevitable by-election. Trump seems to be using the same strategy, with some success, and Johnson probably noticed. Johnson also got a few days of everyone talking about him, and it’s probably half the battle just having people remember you.
I doubt Johnson would have wanted things to go like this, but he’s a clever and tricky campaigner. The telling thing for me is the Vote Leave bus, with the £350M per week figure. I think everyone who looked into it (Leavers as well as Remainers) recognises that the figure was misleading, but it ended up with everyone talking about how we sent lots of money to the EU. The Remain campaign were completely outsmarted, and spent ages banging on about this £350M figure, which was exactly what Vote Leave wanted them to do.