Jo, where is your brother Boris?

More than a year ago, I wrote a piece with a self-explanatory title: http://www.alexanderboot.com/the-apparat-is-invincible/.

I wish the intervening 14 months had proved me wrong, but, alas, they haven’t. The apparat has triumphed again, and we must brace ourselves for some 75 per cent of our laws continuing to come from Brussels and the rest from the Corbyn-McDonnell junta.

Parliament is forcing a three-month delay in Brexit, on top of the three years by which it has already been delayed. Out of idle interest, what’s the delay supposed to achieve that the previous three years haven’t managed to?

The only tangible achievement will be a great chaos and a further discrediting of the Tory party, along with the growing contempt of politics in general.

Coming next will be a mournful admission that, much as parliament would love to comply with the British people’s wish to leave the EU, this, alas, is proving impossible.

So good-bye to Brexit – and hello to an evil Marxist gang taking over in a bloodless coup. The apparat will yet again ride roughshod over loyalty to either major party and indeed to Britain, all in the name of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty.

These shibboleths are supposed to make everyone jump up and salute – and certainly not wonder what either democracy or parliamentary sovereignty has to do with this on-going obscenity.

On second thoughts, our MPs perhaps think that, since sovereignty belongs to parliament, it’s free to do with it as it pleases. If you wish to give your book to a friend, you can exercise your property rights and do so, can’t you? Likewise, parliament must feel free to offer its sovereignty as a present to anyone it wishes, including the EU (neither Saudi Arabia nor Putin’s Russia seems a likely receiver of such largesse, yet).

This shameful calamity has been largely made possible by a group of Tory lackeys to the apparat, who, by betraying their leader at a critical moment, proved what hardly needed proving, that they are Tories in name only.

Of that group, Boris’s brother Jo, Minister for Universities, committed an act of multiple betrayal by resigning his post and parliamentary seat. He betrayed not only his party and his people, but also his brother – at a time when Boris was fighting tooth and nail to do what both the people and, subsequently, parliament voted for and what both major parties pledged to do in their elections manifestos.

This sort of thing evokes the memory of Cain and Abel or, to offer a more recent and less dramatic example, Ed and David Miliband. (After all, Ed stabbed his brother in the back only metaphorically.)

A brother’s motivation to betray a brother may vary. It could be simple sibling rivalry for the love of the parents or, in Cain’s case, God. Or it could be boundless careerism, as in the case of Ed Miliband. Or it could be any number of deplorable but humanly understandable reasons. Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry.

But Jo Johnson’s explanation of his betrayal, while definitely deplorable, has an extra quality of being emetically mendacious and sanctimonious. Apparently, he was torn between “family loyalty and national interest”, and national interest won out.

Being in a generous mood, I may accept that Jo actually does think that staying in the EU is in our national interest. The likelihood of this is less than one per cent, but it’s not nonexistent.

But surely, as an experienced political hand, he must realise that choosing the apparat over his party and its leader at this moment raises the possibility of a Corbyn-McDonnell government from likely to almost certain.

Surely he can’t think that would be in the national interest? Well if he does, the other day I outlined the ramifications of such a disaster, so I shan’t repeat myself. In any case, yesterday John McDonnell made my argument for me.

Comrade McDonnell vindicates his Marxist credentials by hating private enterprise in general and the financial industry in particular. Income, to a Marxist, must be earned by labour, ideally physical, not by manipulating money.

That’s why he froths at the mouth when he sees that the City of London delivers at least a quarter of our GDP, and that some of those who work there receive large bonuses.

Well, “change is coming”, he declared. Referring to the City, the Shadow Chancellor said: “If it hasn’t learnt its lesson, we will take action, I’ll give them that warning now. It’s a reflection of the grotesque levels of inequality that people now find so offensive. Action will be taken, full stop.”

Another action to be taken, according to Comrade McDonnell, is a transfer of £300 billion worth of shares to workers, something that has never been done in a Western country before.

What kind of action does McDonnell have in mind? It might have escaped his attention that both British factories and City firms are accountable only to their owners or, if publicly owned, shareholders. Only their boards of directors are thus empowered to decide whom and how much they pay in salaries and bonuses.

To take the kind of action McDonnell is warning of, that power will have to be wrested out of their hands and transferred to, well, McDonnell. This is consistent with Marxism, but not with anything historically acceptable in civilised countries.

What this ghoul, the greasy eminence of the Corbyn junta, is talking about is wholesale nationalisation guaranteed to reduce Britain to the status of the poorer end of the Third World. Maduro’s Venezuela, much beloved of Corbyn and McDonnell, springs to mind.

Is this the kind of national interest Jo Johnson had in mind? What a disgusting man.