For me, one of the stranger phenomena of 2020 has been watching the principle-free suck-ups of the ‘conservative’ commentariat rushing to heap praise on the Worst Prime Minister in British History because of his allegedly amazing Brexit deal.
I’ll reserve judgement on the Brexit deal until the dust has settled and the “guillotine clauses” have all been found. But it’s not looking good for our fishermen is it? Looks like they were sacrificed as expendable bargaining chips.
To me, though, all this crowing looks like an orchestrated distraction, cynically designed to put a positive gloss on the myriad failures of the bloated, vacillating, devious, mendacious, priapic oaf currently posing as Britain’s Prime Minister — ‘Boris’ Johnson.
I put his first name in inverted commas because it’s not really his first name. His family all call him Al — short for Alexander. Boris is the fake name we’ve all been encouraged to use because it’s part of his brand. It sounds at once exotic and comical; it’s one of those first names sufficiently rare for it to be deployed without a surname in the manner of, say, Kylie or Jordan. Boris is all about the brand and he has been working it for years because basically it’s all he’s got.
But it’s a very powerful and intoxicating brand. It certainly fooled me and having known him since university I’ve had longer than most to see through it. I didn’t though, for the same reason a lot of us didn’t: because Johnson has the sociopath’s gift of dazzling you with his charm while masking his venality.
An early example of this, I remember, were the tape recordings — made a few years after he left Oxford — of a phone conversation in which Johnson gave the impression that he was willing to help a disgraced friend of his, Darius Guppy, get the address of a News of the World reporter so that Darius could have him beaten up.
My response, as someone who had known and liked Johnson at university, was that there must have been some mistake. This was quite unlike the lovable, chaotic but brilliant fellow I knew, I told myself. Lots of people have given Johnson the benefit of the doubt like this over the years. All of them have been wrong.
Not everyone was fooled though. Before Johnson became Prime Minister, his former editor on the Daily Telegraph Max Hastings wrote an excoriating piece about Johnson’s unsuitability for high office.
Sir Max wrote:
I have argued for a decade that, while he is a brilliant entertainer who made a popular maître d’ for London as its mayor, he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.
At the time I put this down to Boris Derangement Syndrome — an affliction I attributed to people not having a sense of humour about a delightful Falstaffian hero who was simply more successful and witty and relaxed than them.
What Boris Derangement Syndrome really is, though, I’ve come to appreciate, is the righteous disgust of people who’ve seen through this capering chancer’s conman act. Once you’ve realised that Johnson is a liar and a cheat and a self-serving rogue, it becomes very hard to watch him pretending to be Mr Amusing Nice Guy without wanting to throw up.
Hastings realised a decade or more ago what most of the rest of us have only properly understood this year: that Johnson’s entire political career has been a bit like the plot of the movie Catch Me If You Can — that of a con-artist waiting to get caught out by events.
If you wanted to be really charitable to Johnson — a charity he totally does not deserve — you could say that Chinese Coronavirus would have been the undoing any Prime Minister, and that this year really wasn’t his fault.
I’d simply reply that even if you take his grotesque mishandling of coronavirus out of the equation, he’d still be the Worst Prime Minister in British History.
It’s the absolute betrayal of all our hopes, that’s what I can’t forgive him for.
Last year, the British people gave his party a huge mandate — an unexpected 80-seat parliamentary majority — to extricate the fractured nation from four years of Brexit deadlock, and to lead the country into a bright, prosperous, independent future outside the constraints of the European Union.
Instead, the United Kingdom is in such a mess we might just have stayed in, nearly.
This is a mess for which Johnson must bear the bulk of the responsibility, for as Prime Minister he sets tone for his administration. And Johnson’s tone, unfortunately, is — for all the cheery bluster — essentially one of vacillation, procrastination, deviousness, mendacity, cowardice, egoism and, always but always, his prioritisation of the needs of his penis above everything else.
In the ‘my penis comes first’ category, we can probably include Johnson’s utterly disastrous 10-point green revolution plan. We know — from Johnson’s earlier incarnation as a newspaper columnist — that in the past he has been sceptical about climate change and about environmentally and economically destructive nonsense like wind turbines. But now, because he happens to be dating a green activist called Carrie Symonds — and because he appears to be mysteriously under the sway of another eco-activist, Carrie’s very close friend Lord [Zac] Goldsmith — he has allowed his libido and his pathetic desire to be liked to rule his political actions.
So it is that the British economy and the British landscape are now to be destroyed by Boris’s Green Hell — even though hardly anyone who voted for him actually wants their hard-earned tax money squandered in this frivolous way.
Then there’s the vanity rail project HS2, which made no sense at the beginning of the year and which makes even less sense now that Covid-19 has rendered office working (and therefore commuting) less of a priority. But Johnson has gone ahead with this white elephant all the same because of his egoism: Johnson likes grands projets, regardless of whether they’re actually necessary.
2020 has, for many of us, been — in geopolitical terms, at any rate — the most dangerous and scary of our lives. We have the Great Reset threatening to steal all our freedoms and render us slaves of a globalist elite. We have an out of control Health Secretary with a Messiah Complex — Matt Hancock — apparently determined to keep us masked and locked down until 2022. We face the growing possibility that we’ll never be able to go anywhere or do anything again unless we submit to a vaccine and carry our papers. We have the prospect ahead of us that in 2021, there may be a full-scale economic collapse, brought about by the series of lockdowns which have destroyed small businesses and killed jobs.
Many of us when we voted for the Conservatives back in 2019 would have imagined, had we gazed into our crystal balls, that good-natured, optimistic, libertarian Boris Johnson would have been just the man to steer us through such rocky waters.
But the Johnson who existed in our imagination bears no resemblance to the burned-out wreck currently at the helm.
I agree with Daniel Miller’s damning article in Conservative Woman that Johnson should never have gone into politics.
At some point, for some reason, perhaps to appear a certain way to someone’s gaze, he bewitched himself into believing he was serious, so now we have the clownish horror of Bertie Wooster playing Churchill.
Yes!
Johnson, a fundamentally irresponsible and dishonest man who has lied and bluffed his way through life, today presides over a government of destruction, which has lied repeatedly to the British people, which has seized powers that no British government in history has taken, which has justified its needless actions on the basis of modelling repeatedly proved false, and which is ruling by decree. After one year of Johnson’s leadership Britain is on the road to a police state, waiting anxiously for the ticking time bomb of economic devastation to explode. Nobody should want to find out what the country could look like after two.
The best thing Johnson could possibly do for his country in 2021 is resign and disappear forever from public life. His replacement, of course, is unlikely to be any better. But at least we’ll no longer have to endure the sight of Fat Blair with his artfully unkempt blonde mop and his terrible suits, making out like running the world’s fifth-largest economy is a wizard wheeze, when it really isn’t — it’s a serious business of which Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is and always was quite utterly, shamingly, incapable.
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