After the rowdy heckling of Prime Minister’s Questions-at which Johnson bullishly defended his record in the face of questions about lockdown-breaking parties-the House of Commons fell silent. When Davis repeated these words, it was an extraordinary moment. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. “This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Then he built to a conclusion that quoted Oliver Cromwell, who overthrew and executed King Charles I. “That is, in brief, the story of our initiative over Norway,” Amery said. The Conservative Leo Amery compared Chamberlain’s attitude toward Adolf Hitler to that of a lion hunter caught sleeping by the lion. The quotation comes from a 1940 debate on Britain’s conduct in the dispiriting first months of the Second World War, as Britain failed to defend Norway from a German invasion.
He was comparing him to Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s weak, appeasing predecessor. Davis was not comparing the prime minister to his hero Churchill. When Johnson’s fellow Conservative David Davis stood up in Parliament today and said these words, he must have intended them to be a fatal blow. If you wanted to choose a quotation to wound Boris Johnson-a man who wrote a biography of Winston Churchill as a coded advertisement for his own virtues-then this would be it.
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