A 58-YEARS-OLD lady in Catterick, West Yorkshire narrowly escaped justice on Tuesday when charges of coercive control were dropped at the last moment before trial. Tiny, 4ft 10 Valerie Sanders was said to have endlessly nagged her husband –a burly, if ageing, a bodybuilder with the appearance of a condom full of pickled walnuts– to clean the patio doors, hoover up the dog hair in the house and to stop buying rubbish in Asda and Lidl.
Mrs Sanders also carped at her husband’s honed physique and steroid-induced failure of libido. Touching his muscle-bound body was “like cuddling an ironing board”. Mr Sanders complained about his treatment to staff at the Jobcentre, who told the rozzers, who came along in two vans to arrest her and locked her up in a cell for 17 hours.
It looks like one law for the rich, another for the poor, as Boris Johnson was this week left wholly unprotected by the criminal justice system when he endured the full rolling-pin-wielding, plate-smashing, screaming-the-house-down treatment from his young partner, Carrie Symonds.
Ms Symonds, according to an ungallant former boyfriend who spilt his heart out to The Daily Mirror, is terrific fun to be around when she’s in a good mood, but a bit of a nightmare when she’s not. He told hacks how Symonds can be intense and passionate, but added: “That passion can work the other way when she is not happy with you.”
Intrusive and salacious stuff, but Boris will have nodded ruefully on reading those lines after the fireworks that went off in Carrie’s Camberwell flat last Thursday night when he tipped a glass of red wine on her sofa. Carrie’s lycanthropic temper was bad enough, but her acute insight into Boris’ personality was worse: “You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything”.
Boris is now making a belated appearance in the leadership contest because the alternative –hanging around the flat and getting under Carrie’s feet– hasn’t worked out at all well. He may have other reasons for the submarine campaign surfacing as late as possible. Ballot papers in the leadership contest are on their way out to members, who will receive them around 6th July. They will probably send back their votes soon after receiving the papers, even though the contest doesn’t end until 22nd July.
This leaves his rival with almost no time to make an impression. Aware he is being outmanoeuvred, Jeremy Hunt has ditched the pathetically unconvincing Trump impression and is desperately trying to ape Rory Stewart’s disruptive campaign, albeit – no doubt because he has so little time in which to get noticed – running rather than walking.
However tumultuous Boris’ personal life has been, he will look back at last Thursday night as a honeymoon idyll compared to the ear-bashing he can expect from the ERG when he becomes PM.
Boris has no Brexit plan that stands up to scrutiny. For now, Tories are comforted that Boris wings nearly everything he does and that as no-deal Brexit is winging it on an international, trillion-Euro scale, Boris should be right in his element. Others might point out that when Boris wings if things don’t always work out well, as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe might tell you if she wasn’t serving an extended sentence in an Iranian jail.
Boris is swearing blind that the UK will leave the EU on 31st October, with or without a deal. It is a ‘do or die’ position.
We’ve heard this before, and from a Prime Minister whose words were –at least for a while– considered trustworthy. Theresa May, mutatis mutandis, gave us similar reassurances on more than a hundred occasions. She couldn’t get her deal through Parliament, Parliament will not permit us to leave without one, and so we haven’t left, despite three miserable years elapsing since the referendum.
Boris is kidding himself if he thinks things will be different for him. He voted for the deal last time it was before the House and tried to bring others with him. The real hard cases didn’t follow him then, and they won’t follow him now. The EU 27 have made it perfectly clear the deal is not for renegotiation. A majority of MPs won’t tolerate no deal, and Boris has said he won’t resort to loopy Raabian extremes like attempting to prorogue Parliament, which wouldn’t work anyway.
This leaves him hardly any more room for manoeuvre than Theresa May had. But nobody really expects Boris to keep his promises, and anyone who puts their trust in him as a leader will only have themselves to blame when he is ultimately compelled to break them.
Perhaps feeling faintly ridiculous at having pursued his complaint all the way to the door of Teesside Crown Court, Valerie Sanders’ husband agreed to drop charges in return for a restraining order to keep the ferocious battleaxe away from him.
The Conservative Party is intense and passionate about Boris but that will work the other way when they cease to be happy with him. When Boris spills Brexit he will need more than one restraining order to deal with his furious, wronged assailants. Hell hath no fury like a party scorned.
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