Mark Steyn: North Shropshire Conservatives know Boris Johnson's Party isn’t in the least bit Conservative

Let’s get to a brand new feature: This Day in Somewhat Strained Historical Analogy. I see that three hundred years ago – 17th December 1721 - the Earl of Scarborough died. If you have difficulty keeping your earls of Scarborough straight, this would be the first earl, Richard Lumley.

Viscount Lumley, as he then was, is best known for being one of the seven fellows who wrote to William of Orange, urging him to invade England immediately and topple James II.

If you’re a North Shropshire Tory, you may be feeling a little bit like that yourself. But where do you send that letter? Who’s going to play William of Orange in this scenario?

One should never read too much into the citizenry’s rebukes of the governing party in between general elections. For my own part, I’m wary of LibDem by-election victories: that’s just parking your vote with a party that exists for few other purposes.

If you really want to shove it up a useless government, I prefer the Nigel Farage model of 2019: form a new single-issue Brexit Party a couple of weeks before the 2019 European elections and drive the Tories to their worst result since …well, basically since the first Earl of Scarborough was around. Nigel ended Theresa May’s premiership, and delivered the party to Boris Johnson, who appropriated the single issue and ran his campaign on: Get Brexit done.

Because, until we get Brexit done, we can’t do anything else.Three years on, it’s a bit like that with Covid, don’t you find? Get Covid done. Because, until we get Covid done, we can’t do anything else. It is, in fact, done …but for some reason everyone’s pretending it isn’t.

Let’s strain the historical analogy a bit further: Lord Lumley and his pals believed that James II’s son was “supposititious” – that’s to say, a fraudulent heir introduced into the nursery to save the house. I’m not saying Boris Johnson is a supposititious Tory, fraudulently introduced into the Conservative Party… Well, actually, maybe I am.

Last night North Shropshire Conservatives either sat home or voted LibDem – because they noticed that Johnson’s supposititious Conservative ministry isn’t in the least bit Conservative: If you read him in The Spectator and the Telegraph for all those years, you may recall a zillion columns gung-ho for liberty and small government.

He once wrote a piece about the saskatoon berry from the Canadian prairies, which was briefly the subject of some control-freak Blairite UK ban: Quote: “According to some bumf I have from the Canadian High Commission, it is standard practice, at all Canadian state banquets, to sprinkle every course with saskatoons. When one contemplates the volcanic energy of this century's great Canadians, from Mark Steyn to Conrad Black to Margaret Trudeau, one can only ascribe it to the saskatoon-based national diet.”

Funny. Back then, the Johnson column was a must-read not for anything he said, but for the way he said it. Ah, the good old days. Still, one has to admire a chap whose attention to the heavy hand of state regulation extends even to the delightful saskatoon berry.

Not quite so funny when he gets into government and squeezes the populace to a degree no saskatoon berry could begin to imagine. It’s almost as if all those stirring paeans to liberty at the Telegraph Group were the path of least resistance for an Etonian chancer on his way up.

Whereas now, ensconsed at the heart of the bureaucratic state with occasional side-trips to schmooze Joe and Angela at the G7, being hot for wind turbines and Omicron lockdowns is the path of least resistance.

The issues are out there for any politician who wants to take them – stopping the migrants who are uniquely exempt from lockdown is popular with both North Shropshire Tories and Red Wall types. Whereas the Johnson ministry’s Covid record impresses only chumps.

He has presided over one of the highest rates of death per capita in the western world, worse than Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands; worse than Sweden: Sweden’s Covid deaths per million number is 1,498, while the United Kingdom’s is 2,161.

And Sweden never locked down at all, so its pubs and restaurants and theatres and tourism industries have not been wrecked, and it does not have the attendant mental-health crises.

Government Boris, in a way the old columnar Boris would have despised, mortgaged his regime to public health commissars who, when the final tally is known, are likely to have killed far more people through cancer and heart disease and strokes by turning the National Health Service into the National Covid Service and telling everyone else to take a number and we’ll see you in 2023.

Now there are still a lot of Tories who love Boris Johnson and won’t hear a word against him. If so, what does he have to do to make himself the exception to all those tailspin PMs like Blair and Cameron?