Thread by @garius

You can trace all of this back to his refusal to do the Andrew Neil interview in December 2019.

That was the moment he definitively knew he could get away with not conforming to the norms of politics.

And that not only would supporters not object, but they would cheer him on.

https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1410196340353683457

Plenty of seeds before that of course. Most critically the absolute destruction of parliamentary norms in August 2019, which I wrote about at the time with reference to A Man For All Seasons.

But December was the point he realised his voters didn't care.

garius.medium.com/and-the-devil-…

This is, ultimately, the problem with electing a sociopath.

They only follow norms when norms demonstrably matter.

And right now, for a WHOLE bunch of political and societal reasons in this country, they don't.

We'll pay for that in future, much more than it's costing us now.

I don't just blame Johnson for this, of course. I blame the broken mess that is the current Conservative Party.

There are plenty of Conservatives (big and little c) current and historical who I disagree with politically, but can see they were trying to make the country better.

This is NOT true of the bulk of the Tory Party now.

It's performative, self-serving Conservatism at its worst.

And they'll sit there and bray for the populist, without any respect for the party (and politics) they are meant to represent, let alone the country.