Boris Johnson is planning a mass clearout of No 10 and “a series of populist announcements” to save his tottering premiership, says The Times. “Despite issuing a humiliating apology to MPs over the Downing Street parties on Wednesday, the prime minister is refusing to take responsibility for the crisis and in meetings last week questioned why his team had not protected him”.

The effort to blame his staff has been named Operation Save Big Dog, while his plan to make policy announcements to woo disillusioned MPs and voters is being dubbed Operation Red Meat. Under the proposals Johnson will freeze the BBC licence fee for two years to “help the cost of living”, hand to the military control of the battle to stop illegal immigrants in the Channel, and lift the remaining coronavirus restrictions on January 26.

This only looks like red meat to a strict vegan. The freeze to BBC funding is long overdue but it’s not enough by a long shot. The ailing network hands over millions every year to has-been leftist football pundits and woke commissars. Finding savings without impacting quality should be easy enough. There are plenty of woke non-jobs to be deleted which add no value. Moreover, if a network doesn’t have adverts, the programme is the advert. Nobody wants or needs a network dedicated to climate propaganda.

Nadine Dorries has hinted that she will abolish the telly tax “at the next opportunity” if the Tories are still in power in 2027. Sufficiently in the future for us all to forget. Thus, we can safely assume it won’t happen. The establishment won’t allow it.



As to the military taking over from the border force, it’s difficult to imagine what they might accomplish without causing a diplomatic incident. But then as we know, the Tories never mean what they say when it comes to immigration so we can discount this as a likely outcome. We can expect to see more of the same.

Operation Red Meat has been met with dismay by the chatterati on Twitter, dubbed “populist” by various columnists. They’re outraged at the very idea that that people who voted Tory should get some of the things they voted for. Much histrionics follows. No doubt the lifting of useless and damaging Covid restrictions will see the PM accused of everything up to and including murder. And the left wonders why it keeps losing and why Boris Johnson keeps getting away with so much.

A real “red meat” agenda though, would be the announcement of urgent new gas exploration, the scrapping of Net Zero, and a major new programme of deportations – as a starter for ten. We have heard much mewling about the rule of law, so how about we start enforcing our immigration laws?

That we are to be fobbed off with such a weak shopping list of half baked ideas tells you just how timid the Tories really are. This amounts to very little but it’s as far as they dare go. They care more about what the metropolitan media set thinks of them than the British public. They’re afraid of their own shadows. More importantly, that Twitter lefties really do think these measures are extreme right wing politics, goes to show how much they’ve had everything their way for so very long. They’d have a seizure if Boris Johnson did even half of what Macron does (ie. shuttering extremist mosques and bulldozing illegal immigrant camps).

But then as we know, much of this babyish mewling us purely performative outrage. A technique they've mastered to a fine art – and it works because the Tories are gutless. When it comes down to it, the Tories are squeamish about being conservatives. They have more in common paternalistic Milibandian market socialism than any conservative philosophy. If Tory voters want red meat, they have to come back to UKIP.