‘Go now’: Boris, like Bibi, doesn’t care for the greater good, only his own

COLIN SHINDLER: Johnson, Netanyahu and Trump share an addiction to power marked by a reluctance to step down from public office, and using ambiguity to delay the day of reckoning

“YOU HAVE SAT there too long for all the good you have done. In the name of God, go.” So spoke Leo Amery MP to Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons in the wake of British military failures before the Nazi advance in 1940.

These words, originally attributed to Oliver Cromwell during the English Republic, symbolised the beliefs of British Jews that the policy of appeasement should finally be buried in the graveyard of good intentions and that a new leadership was called for.

Was this a Jewish issue? In a national sense, of course there was a Jewish imperative to fight the Nazis. In a wider sense, the universalism within Jewish teachings cried out that it was a necessity to prevent the enslavement of millions by Hitler's war machine.

Was it merely coincidental that Amery was of Jewish origin while Chamberlain was known to have very negative views about Jews?

Last week, Amery's famous epithet was hurled at Boris Johnson in the House of Commons during a debate on “partygate” by a committed ally and stalwart of the Conservative party, David Davis. Johnson, the author of a book on Churchill, professed not to recognise these famous words of Leo Amery.

Davis later told the British press that his unexpected intervention was the outcome of a lack of integrity by Johnson. “It is not what I expect from a leader.”

This was followed by a daily series of new scandals, ranging from Islamophobia in the Conservative party to bovver-boy skulduggery from parliamentary whips to prime ministerial birthday parties. Boris Johnson sank deeper and deeper into the protozoic slime.