Graun still split over Johnson, if not Brexit (yet)

The Graun staff are still struggling to respond to their utter humiliation;
A Chakrabortty has this:

It’s 2020 – so where’s the paradise politicians promised us? ... Forget the parched wasteland that is Brexit Britain in bleak midwinter [Think instead of the joys that] ...were promised to arrive by this year by the serious, sober all-powerfuls who run the country... [G Brown promised to ]  build an extra 3m homes by 2020.[There was] Tony Blair’s cast-iron guarantee in 1999 that within two decades no child would live in poverty. [And a]..seven-day GP service was dreamed up by David Cameron, who guaranteed it would be UK-wide by this year.

I could carry on in this fashion, a journalist playing skittles with Westminster’s failed resolutions and asking Dude, where’s my utopia?But that ducks the bigger question: what damage have these broken promises done to our politics?  All the pledges were made long before the all-out lie-fest that was the EU referendum of 2016.

You mean -- you now remember that other politicians have made misleading promises?  Chakrabortty has gained some perspective and he rescues the piece with this:

Tying this together is a belief in what the Henley forecasters dubbed “friction-free capitalism”. ...Add to that a belief among Blair and his heirs that they also knew how to win at politics. This school of thought focused on retail and salesmanship – which, as University of East Anglia professor of political theory Alan Finlayson observes, were driven by big “offers” designed to grab headlines rather than worrying too hard about delivery....In that gulf has bred the nihilism that threads through Brexit alongside contempt for politicians, now seen as so untrustworthy that one might as well stick a serial liar in No 10....The difference this time is that when our blonde Nero promises voters a grand target, not even his own side will waste a second believing it.

M Kettle on the other hand might see a chance to reset his own career as a pundit,  and build a few bridges, with this reappraisal of Johnson:

politics may not be keeping up with the way he is evolving as prime minister....Pinning down the real Johnson is trickier than...caricatures suggest....Johnson has behaved with far more political discipline and care ever since he moved into Downing Street than he appeared to do in the past...He is planning to move his party towards the centre, by casting it as the supporter and enabler of middle-Britain voters who want spending on the NHS, social care and the climate emergency.

And real Gruna heresy here:

there is a strong case for wondering how much of Johnson’s past is actually a reliable guide to the present....it might be more useful to dispense with too many prior assumptions and start instead with a blank page.

For 'Johnson' read 'Brexit Britain'?