One of my fears about the Brexit ref (and I wrote this at the time) was it would remove a layer of accountability from the uk and place it in the hands of the right wing of the Tory party who could then do what they liked. It would make us not more democratic as suggested but would actually work against us in terms of democracy. The whole point was in not defining Brexit, it gave that job to individuals who already had power to make those decisions unilaterally.
I know I posted about this in June 2016.
A lot has happened since then.
The Tory Conference in October 2016 with May's bonkers speech which went far further than it needed to, rather than rolling back to a sensible debate about the single market (which was very much still an option at that point). May could have presided over a more moderate course of events had she done that.
The art 50 farce further did this by removing even more scrutiny. Both were unforced errors of judgement that ultimately tipped us into a chain of increasing chaos.
I do think May eventually realised her mistakes on this but by this point she had become something of the architect of her own misery. She was so determined to prove her commitment to Brexit she listened to the wrong voices at the wrong time (Truss was arguably guilty of the same in even less favorable circumstances). Her deal was the last opportunity to stop far worse and she realised that.
The trouble was that people who should have realised that and could have stopped that also didn't recognise this point and went for broke on Remaining. I think that's a catastrophic error which blame has to go beyond the Tory party and its what gives me cause for concern about British Politics way beyond Johnson and the Tory Party.
Johnson and the current Tory Party could not have got to this point without the entire political climate being the way it was. You can't just blame the right wing media for that. You can blame the smearing of Corbyn. There is something about how the opposition parties also handled the last 6 years (and beyond) that's led to us getting here. It may well play out well for Labour in the long run but probably not the public at large.
May realised that politics needed realignment. Her solution was off though. She did understand the shitty shit of politics better than Truss (and clearly sometimes used dodgy tactics herself).
The one thing that makes her stand apart from her two successors was she clearly had a sense of duty to the public that I've not seen since. She just fucked it.
Where Truss was for the last 6 years to so fundamentally lack the grasp of needing to bring political opponents along with you and understanding how much political capital she had was bonkers. I could understand it if she'd lived under a rock or was a backbencher but not she was front line. She was part of that dreadful front cover about the judges and how it undermined the office of the Lord Chancellor. She's lack judgement on a much bigger scale and much more consistently than May. May at least did eventually get down to details and realised the heart of the problems (bit only after she'd screwed herself first)
Johnson on the other hand has only ever been out to serve himself. Even now standing for election is about his ego rather than stability for the country or even the best interests of his own party!
All bonkers.
I still feel like there's few people who have any grasp of any of it. Chances. The lot of them.