Prime Minister Boris Johnson has an embarrassing problem. Her name is Rachel Johnson and she is his sister.
Here is Rachel cheerfully knifing her brother on Sky News:
“My brother is using words like ‘surrender’, ‘capitulation’, as if the people who are staying in the way of the blessed will of the people, of the 17.4 million who voted to leave in 2016, should be hung, drawn, quartered, tarred and feathered. And I think that is highly reprehensible language to use.”
Here she is, doing him over on the BBC’s World At One. (From around 17m 50s in)
“I love my brother but he is a very different person in the Commons. If you put a man in front of the dispatch box he becomes a completely different person. It becomes a sort of bully pulpit.”
She goes on to accuse him of “strong man rhetoric”, raising the tempo in order to “whip up the base”, and of using “extremely aggressive” tactics in order to secure his position as “tribune of the people”.
Nor do Rachel’s indiscretions end there. Listen to the full recordings — if you can bear: keep a sick bag handy — and you will hear Rachel joining the Labour Opposition benches in playing the Jo Cox card and airing loony conspiracy theories about Boris only doing what he does in order to help his billionaire backers short sterling.
Naturally, Remainer Britain has been having a field day with Rachel’s sub-Momentum witterings.
But what’s so wrong with Rachel Johnson offering her click-bait personal insights into her illustrious brother?
Well, one of them is that she is essentially trading on a false prospectus.
The way she is selling herself — and being sold by the dishonest mainstream media — as the honest, loyal, caring sister delivering a few home truths about where her brother is going wrong.
But what she also is, of course, is an ardent and very outspoken Remain activist who — like the rest of that dwindling hardcore of doctrinaire, fight to the very last, Masada-style Remoaners — seems genuinely to believe that Brexit is the very worst thing to have happened to Britain in her lifetime and that it must be sabotaged at all costs. Even if that means the collateral damage includes the Prime Ministerial career of her beloved brother.
Obviously, I’m not suggesting that Rachel makes any secret of her Remoaner affiliations.
What I am very much saying that it’s as Boris sweet, caring, gossipy, blonde, quite fit sister she is being presented as in these interviews; definitely not as the mad cat woman Remoaner loon that she actually is also.
As with so many issues to do with Brexit in these troubled times, no one on the Remainer side of the argument is going to look at these media forays by la Rachel and think anything other than: “You go, girl!”
Equally, no one on the Brexit side of the argument is going to be remotely persuaded that Rachel’s commentary is in anything other than the worst of faith.
And those Brexiteers would be damn right, too.
Consider the grotesque hypocrisy of Rachel’s performance in that Sky News interview. Having pretended to be appalled by her brother’s use of some very mild metaphors — “surrender”, “capitulation” — she then suddenly ups the ante by using some far more dramatic, visceral, and — if you believe in that sort of nonsense — offensive phrases of her own.
To whit, how is it over the top of Boris Johnson to use the words “surrender” and “capitulation” but not over the top for Rachel Johnson to use the phrase “hung, drawn, quartered, tarred and feathered”?
After all, one might note, no one gets hurt in a surrender or a capitulation.
But you definitely get hurt when you are hanged till you are semi-conscious, have your entrails pulled out, are cut into four pieces and then — to continue with Rachel’s metaphor — covered in boiling pitch and feathers.
I’ve known Rachel since Oxford. I find her entertaining, delightful, gossipy company. But I think it’s worth noting that when she’s in the spotlight — which, she craves — she does exactly what she accuses her brother of doing, her monstrous Johnsonian appetite for attention overriding any sense of propriety or proportion.
Boris was dead right to call “humbug” on the outrageous attempts by Labour to exploit the death of the late Jo Cox in the most cynical way imaginable.
The same can certainly be said of his naughty sister’s look-at-me drivel. Humbug. Humbug. Humbug.
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London