Two men to lead a reborn UK

David Cameron's failure to get Parliamentary backing for use of force against Syria was a political disaster. As I have remarked before in this space, not in 500 years of British Parliamentary history has a prime minister (or, before that, an English chancellor) called Parliament to approve the use of military force externally and in co-operation with allies, and been refused.

The British have changed war leaders for more purposeful men — Aberdeen for Palmerston, Asquith for Lloyd George, Chamberlain for Churchill. But Parliament has not returned to Westminster on a summons to approve a military intervention and slapped the prime minister in the face and gone back to its holidays — until two weeks ago. Since there is no precedent, it cannot be said that this is a matter of Parliamentary confidence. But, in fact, if a request for the authority to deploy the armed forces and attack a foreign adversary is not a confidence measure, it is difficult to see what is.

Neville Chamberlain easily won a confidence vote in May, 1940. But 41 of his fellow Conservatives voted against him, and 50 abstained; so he did the honourable thing and resigned, allowing King George VI to vest Winston Churchill with practically unlimited power as head of a national unity government in one of the most challenging times in British history. (Chamberlain dutifully continued as Conservative Party leader and a member of the war cabinet, until his health failed. He did not die until November, 1940, and so was able to witness the deliverance of Dunkirk and the victory in the Battle of Britain.)

In the circumstances, David Cameron should resign, and the Conservative caucus, which alone has the power to elevate and eliminate leaders of that party, should replace him with Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, former MP, and former editor of The Spectator (to which post my associate Dan Colson and I appointed him when we were the controlling shareholders of that magazine).

Canadian readers may not be as familiar with some of Boris' witticisms as the British are, though they have been somewhat publicized here. When he first ran for Parliament in 1997, he was asked why by a fellow journalist, and he replied: "They don't put up statues of journalists, do they?" When he was campaigning, fruitlessly, in the great Blairite New labour sweep of that year, he arrived at a doorstep in his constituency canvas, and a lady came to the door and said he need not bother because she was already determined to vote for him. To the delight of onlookers, he replied: "Madame, I'm grateful of course — but why?"

For many years, London had been governed by the semi-Communist Ken Livingstone, until Margaret Thatcher became so exasperated with his antics that she revoked the charter of the London County Council and put one of the world's greatest cities under direct rule from the Home Office (thus sharply improving local government there), and dismissed the occupants of the municipal council building (County Hall, on the South Bank, one of the largest buildings in England), and sold it to Japanese developers to be turned into an aquarium. (Plans subsequently changed.) Eventually, London was re-established as a functioning municipality, and Livingstone was returned as mayor in 2000, and then re-elected in 2004. Prior to the 2008 mayoral election, Livingstone appeared unbeatable because of his apparent hold on inner London unionized and aggregated minority votes. But then Boris entered the fray, referred to his opponent as "Mayor Leaving soon," and ran on his personality and his opponent's record. All the usual efforts to stir up prejudice against him as a toff, the alumnus of a famous school and university, backfired, and Red Ken was reduced to asking for the public's vote because he himself was "not a comedian." Johnson won the election, and has served as Mayor ever since.

Boris proved he was much more than a comedian, presiding over London's 2012 Olympics is successful fashion. Over the years, he has become something of a folk figure. An associate of ours in London is one of many who have a photograph of him on her office wall: He is secular icon, like pictures of Franklin D. Roosevelt in West Virginia or Kemal Ataturk in Istanbul.

Boris always was ready to answer sectarian concerns by referring to one of his grandparents, as one was Protestant, one Roman Catholic, one Jewish, and one Muslim (the last was a Turkish minister of justice who was hanged for resisting the Kemalist revolution). My wife Barbara and I walked with him after Lady Thatcher's funeral from St. Paul's Cathedral to the reception at the Guild Hall, and it was a joy and an eye-opener to see Boris' rapport with police and junior officials, and to hear his badinage with members of the public.

If installed as prime minister, his first order of business will have to be to backtrack on Cameron's misconceived dismissal of Nigel Farage's United Kingdom Independence Party, as, in effect, a bunch of kooks and skinheads. Cameron was deliberately confusing the Eurosceptic UKIP with the British National Party, which truly is a racist organization. The UKIP, which has risen steadily in the polls and in European and local elections, now has about 20% popular support, spread fairly evenly throughout the country, taking huge numbers of votes from the Conservatives.

Cameron has plunged into a cul-de-sac, and his party cannot be re-elected without dismissing the hapless Liberal Democratic shilly-shalliers who are his coalition partners, and replacing them with the UKIP. I commend to interested readers some of the clips of Nigel Farage at the European Parliament, available on YouTube, where he has savaged the pretention and ineptitude of the Euro-federalists for their horrifying fiscal mismanagement and their addiction to regulating everything from the display of bananas on supermarket shelves to the size of condoms.

Nigel Farage is the most impressive of the current British party leaders. He is a veteran of the Royal Air Force, a cancer survivor, a politically incorrect smoker and drinker who has said from the start that Britain should never subscribe to the socialistic over-regulation of Europe and has been proved right at every turn. (Some readers may remember the evening last November in Toronto when Nigel spoke with John Crosbie, Mark Steyn and myself on a panel sponsored by Byron Capital Markets, and explained his sane and somewhat traditionalist British program with great wit and conviction.)

The current British leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, would be as anachronistic and inept as François Hollande in France. With him at the helm, it would be back to Old Labour, with 98% tax rates, currency controls, and rule by corrupt labour unions, who shut down workplaces capriciously when the shop steward had a bad game of darts or an argument with his wife.

The relevance of this to Canada is that if the UK pulls itself together, stabilizes its relations with Europe and dispenses with all this Cameronian rubbish of post-Thatcher modernization, and radically applies common sense to public policy, Britain can flourish again and work with Canada and the new and much-improved government of Australia. And we can all start to rebuild the standing of the English-speaking countries after the Bush-Blair-Brown-Obama-Cameron slide, while waiting prayerfully for better days in Washington.

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