Are the Tories afflicted with foot and mouth disease?

Stanley Johnson -'Bumbling, Blue-Blooded, Buffoon'

Two days ago in an article in the Guardian newspaper, the journalist Arwa Mahdawi, referred to a BBC interview with Stanley Johnson where he was told by the interviewer Joanna Gosling that a viewer had called his son Boris, "Pinocchio."  This was obviously meant to allude to the prime ministers reputation for mendacity and dissembling. Johnson le père, suddenly quipped: "Pinocchio? That requires a degree of literacy which I think the Great British public doesn't necessarily have... They couldn't spell Pinocchio if they tried."

In her article, Mahdawi says: "Johnson stated explicitly what has always been obvious: the Tory party thinks the British public are bunch of idiots." She said that she was amazed at how little anger there has been from the British public towards the comments of this "bumbling, blue-blooded, buffoon," and suggested that Americans would never have been so blasé about this if he had called the U.S. electorate illiterate. Mahdawi wrote:

"We still show ridiculous reverence towards the monarchy and embarrassing deference to aristocrats and old Etonians who rule us."

Mahdawi said that Stanley Johnson had made a serious error with his comments in that he strayed from the populist playbook, which says that you must always pretend it is the 'liberal elite' who always look down on ordinary people and adds: "You should try to conceal your disgust of the great unwashed if you want to get their vote."

It is notable how often the Tories have let the mask slip in showing their disdain and disgust for the great British public. A former Bullingdon Club member, Boris Johnson, often used the term 'oiks' when referring to the working-class and mocked the 16% "of our species" with an IQ below 85? Jacob Reese-Mogg mocked the Grenfell Tower victims, who he said, lacked common sense. Michael Gove, stated that people were driven to food-banks because they couldn't manage their finances. Similarly, the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Hasting and Rye, Sally-Ann Hart, recently told voters that disabled people should be paid less because "they don't understand money.

Both Boris Johnson and his father Stanley, are remarkably gaffe prone, and that is why the prime minister is reluctant to give television interviews and to subject himself to scrutiny by formidable interviewers such as Andrew Neil. Both father and son have a tendency to put their foot in their mouth and are rather too loose with the lip. Yet, I suspect that most British politicians, have a rather low opinion of the intellectual abilities and political judgement of the British public and perhaps see their job, as "curbing the instincts of the mob."

In an unpublished memoir that he wrote in the late 1990s, Sir Gordon Reece, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, explained how in 1975 he approached the task of persuading more people to vote Conservative. Reece seemed to think that only dullard's voted Tory. He confessed that he'd told Margaret Thatcher that the type of people who were likely to vote for her, were not to be found among the readers of broadsheet newspapers and the watchers of serious political programmes and the longer, night-time news bulletins, nor were they much interested in politics. He told her:

"The people we had to reach would read the Mirror, increasingly the Sun, the Express, the Mail, the People, the News of the World. They would watch Coronation Street, Jimmy Savile, Top of the Pops and listened to Jimmy Young on the wireless. And any aspiring prime minister had better go to them, and not expect them to come to her." (Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher - The Authorized Biography, Volume 1).

I think that one of the things that has become apparent since the referendum in June 2016, on whether Britain left or remained in the E.U., is that the issue of social class, is no longer a reliable indicator of voter intention when choosing which party a person might vote for. Some argue that age, education, and region, are now the main dividing lines in British politics. For example, it is known that some 70% of voters whose educational attainment is only GCSE or lower, voted to leave the E.U. while 68% of voters with a degree, voted to remain in the E.U. The over- 65s were more than twice as likely as under-25s, to have voted to leave the European Union and every region of the country except Scotland, Northern Ireland and London, voted to leave.