I WATCHED Downing Street’s wine-and-cheese “press conference” then switched to C5’s brilliant film about the sinking of Europe’s biggest cruise liner, the Costa Concordia.
It was hard to tell where one ocean-going catastrophe ended and the other began.
Boris Johnson’s ramshackle government has been holed beneath the water line, run aground by a skipper who seems absent from the wheel.
He may now be “sickened and furious” about staffers giggling about a lockdown-breaking wine and cheese party, but he is a week too late in saying so.
Once again he has veered from stubborn denial to grovelling apology.
BoJo has graduated from “wobbly shopping trolley” to “crashing the car into the ditch” to driving his administration on to the rocks.
It began as a drip-drip of unforced errors, “Boris being Boris”.
Early Covid blunders gathered pace with Dominic Cummings’ “eye test” trip to Barnard Castle.
Now, after Matt Hancock’s snogging video and the Owen Paterson “sleaze” fiasco, fed-up Tory MPs are baying for blood — a more lethal threat than anything Labour’s Keir Starmer can muster.
All this amid evidence of staggering incompetence in Afghanistan, with mangy cats and dogs airlifted to safety while terrified families were left behind.
Did Carrie Johnson really persuade Boris to approve this inappropriate evacuation?
The Afghan crisis was a real-time test for ministers and civil servants.
Yet, then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was away.
So was top mandarin Sir Philip Barton, who refused to interrupt his three-week holiday.
A junior staffer had to man the fort while Foreign Office staff effectively worked to rule.
The word “omnishambles” barely covers it.
This is an issue of leadership. It is about management. It is impossible to imagine this on Margaret Thatcher’s watch — or Theresa May’s.
This Prime Minister needs to get a grip — before it is too late.
