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Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?
From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.
Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)
The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure
Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...
A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration
Liz Truss becomes PM
Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?
Liz Truss resigns as PM
Maybe Boris is coming back?
It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?
What's really happening, there. Help me out.
Boris is not intelligent, particularly, as far as I can tell. Nor is he particularly conservative, so some of the party will always have wanted his head. What everyone I know suspects is that his run-in with the coof scared him, and he let his hysterical new wife have too much sway over him -- turning him from Brexit man into running a government based almost solely on what his wife thinks and how policies polled. His coof episode made him give into safetyism. As this is no way to run a corner shop, let alone a government, he was eventually ousted. Truss is just the prize moron slash Lib Dem sleeper agent who picked up the fallen banner.
Boris is intelligent. Unfortunately many British politicians studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, which is notoriously an easy subject. (Why doesn't a PPEist get up in the morning? Becuase then they wouldn't have anything to do in the afternoon) Boris studied Greats, which is basically a broad-based course in Ancient Roman and Greek society based on reading the primary sources in the original languages. It is traditionally seen as the hardest course Oxford has to offer, although the mathematicians and physicists naturally disagree. His tutors said he could have got a First if he applied himself.
Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.
Well, I said as far as I can tell, because he's never demonstrated his intelligence that I've seen.
If a genius only orates in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, why should anyone believe he's a genius?
The dude can apparently recite a significant chunk of the Odyssey (or was it the Iliad? I can't remember) in the original ancient Greek, which was impressive to me. Maybe I'm an easy mark. He also debated Mary Beard for IQ2 on "Greece v. Rome," taking the side of the Greeks. I don't know...which American national politician could do that, even at the level he's doing? He may not be great shakes by academic standards, but measured against the bog-standard politician he sure seems smart to me.
Maybe. Are you American?
I realise that question comes across as the peak of European snobbery, but ancient languages are still taught in (posh, high-tracked) schools here. The upper echelons of power are lined with men who went to such schools, and the classics lose a bit of their mystique because of it. I don't regret having been taught three years of Greek and six of Latin one bit, I genuinely appreciate what I learned there, but epic poetry was designed to be easily recited and after high school + Oxfordian education on the matter, Johnson had damn well better be able to recite what he's learned from memory. That's how it's supposed to be.
Guilty as charged. I've always been jealous that in my dad's day High Schools offered greek and latin, but now...well....gestures helplessly at the universe.
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