The Big Calls

 Here's a list of most, but not all of Boris Johnson's Big Calls, all of which he got phenomenally wrong.

• Leaving Matt Hancock in post. 
• Defending Barnard Castle.
•  Appointing Dominic Cummings in the first place. 
• "Let the bodies pile high," comment. 
• Trumpian /QAnon 'Deep State' comment in PMQs. 
• Overall calibre of Cabinet. 
• 40 new hospitals lie. 
• Peter Crudas peerage, against advice. 
• Cull of all dissenters (and hence talent) from Parliamentary Party. 
• Stepping back from condemning conversion therapy. 
• Wallpapergate. 
• £37bn Test & Trace fiasco, although not all the £37bn was spent (only £29.5bn, according to the NAO).
• The unusable PPE scandal. 
• General calibre of people put into the HoL - Hannan, Moylan, Goldsmith, Lord Siberia. 
• Care home Covid scandal. 
• Skipping 5 COBRA meetings.
• Even the vaccine roll-out was squandered to the extent we ended up lagging the rest of Europe. 
• Allegations of investigations into historic child sex abuse as spaffing money against the wall.
• Initial refusal to feed the hungriest children in the country during lockdown school holidays.
• Appointment of David Frost as chief negotiator on Brexit and the allegedly 'oven ready deal'.
• Pledge to be prepared to break international law. 
• Evacuating animals from Afghanistan in preference to humans. 
• The promise of no border in the Irish Sea. 
• Misleading the Queen. 
• The unlawful prorogueing of Parliament. 
• The parties happening during the funeral of Prince Philip. 
• The attempt to save Owen Patterson after he was found to have breached parliamentary standards. 
• Attending, while Foreign Secretary, a party at the palazzo of a man currently sanctioned in Canada for being one of Putin's inner circle. 
• Promulgation of the lie, in the House, that Starmer was responsible for not prosecuting Jimmy Savile, resulting in death threats against Starmer. 
• Tearing up the report that found Priti Patel guilty of bullying, promoting the independent advisor on ethics to resign. 
• Boasting about shaking hands with Covid patients at a time when his only job was to convince the public to stay safe. 
• Talk of handing out peerages in the resignation honours list on the basis of signed contracts to vote with the government. 
• Rwanda policy. 
• Closing down legal asylum routes to the UK from abroad. 
• The utter disaster of Brexit. 
• Raw sewage pouring into rivers and on to beaches. 
• Nadine Zaghari Ratcliffe - although that was before he became PM. 
• That NHS bus slogan. 
• Justice system collapsing. 
• NHS collapsing. 
• Social care system collapsing.

Good riddance to the worst PM of my lifetime.

As a follow-on, and in light of the news we'll all be waiting for today in respect of Truss, it's worth noting that no party leader elected against the wishes of its MPs has ever gone on to win a General Election; Tory MPs wanted Sunak. Yes, that could merely be a statistical coincidence, but a stark one and there are some valid reasons why.