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So Gota — as everybody now seems to call him so perhaps I should too — must really go home. That is what the GotaGoGama inhabitants said almost from the inception.

But they made one mistake which they never corrected. No wonder Gota never went home. They did not tell him which home he should retire to. They lapsed there. So Gota remains, perhaps struck by Hamletian doubts or perhaps unwilling to surrender power as demanded by what his supporters condescendingly call a nondescript hoi polloi that deserves tear gas and water cannon treatment.

The British Conservative Party did not make that error. Its supporters were clear in what they wanted. More than 40 percent of Tory MPs wanted their leader to get the hell out of the prime ministerial seat and out of 10 Downing Street and go hold the drinks parties elsewhere.

That substantial number of elected MPs — thankfully the British do not have a national list system — had lost confidence in the man who led them to victory in the 2019 parliamentary election, just one month after some 6.9 million Sri Lankans voted an untested and politically inept Gota into power.

But almost three years have passed since those political victories. Gota won a massive vote and Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to a victory that the party had not enjoyed for 40 years, garnering 43.6 percent of the vote.

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher won the election with a 44-seat majority ousting the incumbent Labour government and continued in power for 18 years.

Centuries earlier the famous Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero lamented in words that still resonate each time countries are plunged into economic and political chaos by sheer ineptitude, dubious policies and widespread corruption.

Like a disgusted Cicero they say “O tempora, O mores.” Classicist Boris Johnson knows what that means. Gota perhaps not. He might have read of Field Mashal Montgomery but hardly, one thinks, of Cicero.

Times have changed and so have society’s ‘customs’. What prevails today is not what it was yesterday. However much once-victorious politicians who ended up as rulers, and their obsequious cohorts might claim that huge majorities swept them into power and so they are here to stay, is bad logic and worse politics.

Such majorities are not permanent verities. Such victories are not carved in stone and remain valid from here to eternity. They are the last propaganda prop of failed or failing politicians, not that they do not know it.

Two days after Boris Johnson survived the recent “no confidence” vote he told parliament “Absolutely nothing and no one” can stop him from continuing in office. Such arrogance is typical of Johnson who some in the EU bureaucracy in Brussels seem to see him as a “showman buffoon”. Whether his bluster will remain intact or more Conservative MPs will be preparing for a night of the long knives we will know when the results of the two by-elections later this month are known, is worth watching.

The current saga of Gota’s political fall and more generally what has befallen the once powerful Rajapaksa family and the British prime minister’s fast declining fortunes and his struggle to cling to power, is emblematic of the sudden changes in public perceptions.

Politics is a fickle thing and politicians even more fickle. While Sri Lanka’s president has been hanging perilously to power shuffling one set of incompetents for another and hoping that time will soften public anger and heal the wounds that he caused from the very start of his presidency, Boris Johnson has just been holed below the waterline.

He might present a more ebullient and confident face at prime minister’s question time as he did last Wednesday and look more cheerful than Gotabaya Rajapaksa, but he is a wounded leader though not yet like Julius Caesar, metaphorically speaking, amidst the blood-letting senators on the Ides of March.

Gotabaya and Boris both tried the age-old political gimmick of shuffling cabinet packs thinking their policy indiscretions can be hidden behind new faces or, sometimes, old faces with masks on to hide their failures. Not even four such changes over the last 2 ½ years could hide the mess in policy and governance.

Gotabaya’s immediate tax cuts and failure to stop leaking foreign reserves and his unbelievably short-sighted overnight ban on chemical fertiliser and Johnson’s shortcomings on Covid policy, the economy and now on Brexit and intended changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol which some consider a breach of international law is sufficient cause for public protests.

As Sri Lanka’s economy kept heading for the cliff edge, Gotabaya kept denying that he was responsible for the resultant mess. But as public criticism of his policy-making and over dependence on jackboots in the civil administration kept mounting he did plead mea culpa admitting some of the policies — no doubt promoted by over-rated advisers and self- inflated Viyath-mugs — he adopted were wrong.

The problem with Boris Johnson is that he is the kind of arrogant Oxbridge ‘toff’ who believes that the maxim “king/queen can do no wrong” applies equally to him as to the ruling monarch.

Though Johnson might deny his government has made a mess of the economy, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned the other day that while the UK’s growth this year will be 3.6%, in 2023 it will be 0% and will be the worst among the G20 group of developed countries barring Russia.

In an interview with Bloomberg recently the embattled Sri Lanka President made remarks that some might well find strange. Though the protesters have been calling for Gotabaya’s head, so to say, he says he is going nowhere sounding very much like a Johnsonian echo chamber.

But the reasons why both intend on staying on differ. Johnson because he thinks nothing nor anyone could uproot him from Downing Street. Gotabaya does not want to leave his post because he does not want to quit as a “failed president.”

At least he is now honest enough to admit that he is a failed president. An extension of that argument does raise what some might well consider disturbing thoughts. If the President intends to continue until he is transmogrified from a failed president to a successful one, it might well ask what if he doesn’t? What if he doesn’t attain that political nibbana?

And if he thinks that this day will come, how long does he think it will take? Will it be like waiting for Godot? Will an already angered and suffering pubic be ready to wait until then?

President Gotabaya says he will not contest a second time. That is a comforting thought. But that is another 2 ½ years from now. What, however, if he does not come out with a clean record by them? Will he still be around to remind Sri Lankans?

It is time to give it a thought, don’t you think? 

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London)