Quote of the day 21st August 2019

"Myself, along with Matthew Parris, Max Hastings and Simon Heffer are proud, stiff-necked characters who would never make concessions to secure consensus and who certainly do not write to be wrong. 

 Yet in recent months, there has been agreement, at least on one crucial point: we have vied with each other to pour boiling oil on Boris. We all insisted that a Johnson administration would quickly disintegrate into risibility and chaos, exposing the country to manifold perils. 

 Well, that has not happened. It may be that we were all wrong. I had assumed that although Boris wanted the self-aggrandisement of power, he would not move beyond ‘to be’, because he would have no idea what to do. 

 That turned out to be nonsense. He had prepared for office. From the first moment, he displayed Montgomery’s favourite attribute: grip."

(Bruce Anderson, from a Spectator article, "Was I wrong about Boris?" Spoiler alerts - he concedes that the answer may well be "Yes.)

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