This is the Guardian.

My name is William Davis and I'm the author of a Long Read from November 2018 called

Why We Stop Trusting Elite. And the article was written in a context of some political upheaval

and turmoil. It was a time when Theresa May's government was failing to get a Brexit deal

through Parliament and various forces that are often referred to as populism were assembling

against the government, against the elites, against the mainstream media, against various

aspects of the liberal establishment that appeared at the time to be thwarting what many

Brexitiers would have seen as the will of the people to pass a deal to introduce Brexit.

Of course, it was partly that energy that led Boris Johnson to win his majority at the end of

2019. And many of the themes in my article about the various sources of that distrust that as I

argue in it had accumulated over the previous decade became very potent in the way in which Johnson

took the Tory party leadership in the summer of 2019 and then won a convincing majority later

that year. Johnson is now embroiled in a series of scandals surrounding his honesty,

surrounding whether or not he misled Parliament, all arising from the so-called partygate

scandals of the last couple of years. I think the interesting question now is to what extent can

a style of politics and a style of leadership that Johnson has offered over the last couple of

years which was clearly riding a wave of anti-illit populism, was riding a wave of political sentiments

that declared that all politicians are the same, that none of them could be trusted, that people

in Westminster and Whitehall are primarily looking at themselves. What happens when the figurehead

for some of those movements and some of their sentiments himself becomes the target of a lot of

the resentment and animosity that initially brought him to power or offered him the opportunity

to take power. Of course, Covid-19 has changed a great deal of the terms of this type of politics

...