Imagine if Maggie Thatcher was still the leader of the Conservative party...

She would no doubt have provoked the same kind of polarisation of opinions that Boris does, but she wouldn't be ducking out of media interviews with Andrew Neill or hiding in a fridge to avoid Good Morning Britain.

She wouldn't be reeling out repetitive banal 'lines to take' (not just a Boris problem btw, they all do it these days). She would have done all the interviews and used them to tell the public what her vision of Britain would be, including the bits that would be controversial.

A few months back I stumbled on to an old Thatcher interview with BBC World Service where she did a question and answer with listeners from the Soviet Union. I am by no means a Thatcherite. But I was blown away by the eloquence and sincerity of her answers on all sorts of topics, to listeners from behind the Iron Curtain at a time when the Cold War was still on. There were no 'political lines', just an ideological argument for her belief in free markets, with genuine respect for the questioners. A completely different world from what you get today.

It must be lonely in your world of being correct all the time. I guess the rest of us must just have a life and friends.

Lonely?

He’s got the hatred and his wanksock, what more does he need?

It's a shame she didn't have the same respect for the citizens of her own country, who's lives were devastated by her ideology.

I didn't agree with her politics, which decimated industry in our part of the world.
However, she certainly had more balls and honesty than the Tory's current leader.

As for which one of them will damage the country the most, there might not be too much in it.
There is every chance of the "Union" disintegrating within the next 10 years.

I don't see honesty or balls as virtues in her case - it just meant that she was brazen about her disdain for the working class, and quite prepared to enact policies that were so seismic, we still suffer from their after-effects today.

Whilst I agree about still feeling the effects, "balls" and "honesty" are excellent attributes for any leader, both severely lacking in Johnson, who will be utterly abused when he starts to negotiate our future relationship with both the EU and the US. They will be rubbing their collective hands at the though of stuffing him up for Christmas.
He has offered little in the way of leadership and I would suggest that the majority of the prison population have a far stronger moral compass.
An absolute disgrace of a leader (and he's a Tory).

In or out of No 10 after the election i can't see Boris being the party leader for very long.
He might be a good laugh on a Saturday night booze up but otherwise he comes across as a buffoon.

Boris has a more secure position as party leader because there isn't an obvious leadership challenger in waiting. There are some who covet the job, like Gove, Javid and Hunt, but they don't offer anything new and are seen as part of the same cabal. The next leader will only come when there has been a public shift away from this form of populist politics.

This analysis may become outdated very soon if the election result tomorrow is different to what I expect, but I think Boris will win a majority, on the back of a lot of seats in traditional Labour heartlands of the north and midlands. Whilst this will be hailed as a great success for Boris - 'the first Tory with the ability to connect with people in Labour heartlands', it will contain the seeds of his downfall later.

The difficulties for Boris will be that Brexit will present some challenges that hit those areas more than London and the southern cities and shires. All of the analysis has said that since the referendum. At the moment Boris has a line that resonates in those areas: 'get Brexit done - you voted Leave, other politicians want to dilly and dally, I'm going to do it'. But once it's done that line is gone and he needs something else. If the local economy in those areas goes through hard times then it will be like the 1980s and the Tories becoming unpopular again. Unlike Thatcher, who didn't have a lot of those seats anyway (certainly after 1987), he won't be able to just shrug and say they are Labour areas who cares. A lot of his MPs will be from those places and they might not have huge majorities. If it gets to 2023 and times are hard and they sense the direction of travel is them losing their seats in 2024, they will look for a new direction.

This is what led to Thatcher's demise. I think she could have survived the Poll Tax, as the worst effects of that were in Labour areas anyway. But the high interest rates and downturn that hit her heartlands in 1990 saw her MPs get twitchy, especially when Eastbourne by election went to the Lib Dems and a lot of her MPs looked at that and thought, if that can go, we're all in danger.

Boris isn't a great statesman or leader who will be able to manage the economy through difficult times like Obama did. He's just a blagger and buffoon who only cares about furthering his own interests. So when serious questions of government are asked, and they will be in the aftermath of Brexit for sure, he won't be up to answering them and that will be his downfall.

nothing to with Scargill being a beligerent Unionist, or Kinnock being a general prat then?

Even IF you are right about Scargill and Kinnock, it doesn't change what happened under Thatcher and her quest to destroy the unions, with the decimation of manufacturing in the North of England being "just" collateral damage.
Remember it wasn't just the pit's themselves, as with any substantial industry, the network of companies that serviced this sector disappeared too, along with the local facilities that were situated local to the pits etc.
And we now have something called "the Northern Powerhouse" to try and regenerate the region, which isn't exactly working.
Billions being promised to cut 20 minutes off a journey to London but, it takes an hour longer to make it from east to west (or west to east) than it does to travel to the capital.

Well, if that's your worry let's just pray Labour don't get in. Let's remember, you never see people desperate to flee a capitalist democracy in favour of a socialist (or indeed communist) state.

Vice versa: absolutely. In droves.

Another reason I won't vote Labour. Corbyn & McDonnell have been hard left Marxist Socialists all their lives, flirting with Trotskyism, Stalinism and Communism. Whatever we see from them right now is a watered down version of their ideology, designed to maximise their appeal - hence the constant switching and refocus of policy. Give them a majority and we'll be running at 1000% inflation in a couple of years.