From fuel panic to M25 protests there’s a sense of utter shambles across govt

IS anyone actually in charge in Downing Street?

Is there a proper strategy for quelling the petrol panic? For ending the insane queues, the forecourt fist-fights, the siphoning of fuel from parked cars? For getting stranded key workers to their hospitals, care homes or schools?

There isn’t one. Merely a hope that it will all just go away in the end.

The Government may issue more visas for EU truckers — but will they come unless the pay is so high as to be unrefusable? There’s little evidence they will. They seem defiantly uninterested.

Some 150 Army drivers will be trained to handle fuel. But they won’t be ready for several days at best.

Meanwhile, how about the M25 being blocked yet again by a cult of thick eco warriors, and our elected Government apparently powerless to prevent it?

We were told a court injunction would sort it. The rabble scoffed at that and shut the motorway anyway. And last night they were reportedly freed yet again to continue their infantile protest.

Jail? Genuinely punitive fines? They will take weeks, if they happen at all.

And yet, as these serial offenders openly mock them and the law, the Tories continue to talk tough on crime.

It’s the same story with illegal migrants. Each day hundreds more land on our beaches. Every proposed solution — more co-operation from France, more deportations, processing them abroad and so on — comes to nothing.

There is a sense of utter shambles across Boris Johnson’s Government.

Get a grip on it, PM. Public patience is close to breaking point.

Party poopers

IF only there was a coherent opposition to hold the Tories to account. Labour are nowhere near it.

2

Keir Starmer and his allies are delighted by obscure changes they’ve made to Labour’s rule book, which they say remove the threat of the party again falling into the grip of a hard-left fanatic like Jeremy Corbyn — and stop his Momentum followers getting moderate MPs deselected. 

If it means Labour now spends less time fixating over its internal politics, and starts engaging with issues which actually matter to voters, then fine.

But all the public is seeing and hearing this week is a party bickering obsessively over transgender rights and Angela Rayner’s obnoxious slurs about Tories. Now a shadow minister has publicly resigned and he and fellow Corbynites are openly denouncing their leader.

Amid this anarchy even one of Labour’s saner figures, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, produced a list of spending pledges vastly exceeding anything she would recoup from the few savings she is prepared to support.

And still they trail the Tories in the polls. Though not by much.

Voters are having to choose between mayhem and pandemonium.