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What if this government is neither irrational nor incompetent, but simply pursuing the interests that it serves rather than any others, while possessing a very clear sense of exactly what its own electoral base will tolerate and what it won’t?
Johnson doesn’t need a single person on Left Twitter, a single Guardian reader, or a single teacher in Britain to think he’s doing a good job. He also cannot undertake a full-scale national plan without going against the most fundamental ideological tenets of his own party.
That means that repeatedly pushing things as close as possible to the point where the public loses patience, without them ever quite doing so, while also never ever admitting how bad things actually are, or taking action that explicitly signals that fact, is completely logical.
This also means that the opposition can either do competence, by proposing a genuine national plan, or it can do triangulation, trying to peel off a few tens of thousands of soft Tory voters, but it can’t do both.
