Hiding his light in a fridge?
Planning his escape?
Busy making up his next cover story?
Pretending he is a decisive man of action?
None of the above?
August 2019
When I watch the pre-election antics of Johnson and his Jackass crew, I am reminded of a recidivist old lag talking to another “crim” coming up for his first parole hearing.
“Tell them you met a man who changed your world – who made you see the error of your ways. Tell them that you have started to dedicate the rest of your life to the public good. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the more outrageous it sounds the more the daft sods are likely to believe it.”
“Tell them that you have spoken to the lords of wealth and riches and that they have given you special rights to their magic money tree. No, don’t worry, no one will ever make you account for it. The guardians of the tree will make sure that the interests of the tree are well looked after. These arrangements are only a temporary setback after all.”
“Tell them that you accept that you were duped into going along with some things that weren’t exactly straight and honest, but that others were really to blame. That you didn’t really mean to lie, cheat, or waste public money on garden bridges, fanciful airports, stairways to the stars, and American bimbos; or to change your mind every time the wind of expediency shifts a little. They are dim enough to swallow that as long as you adopt that winsome “little boy lost” look of yours.”
Yep, I wrote this in August 2019 just after the Tory Party Leadership contest but prior to Johnson’s victory in the UK December general election of that year but couldn’t bring myself to follow through on it. It has been sitting in my Drafts folder ever since. I guess inertia kicked-in, or despair — probably both. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now, but it is interesting to look back at how things have developed since and to wonder if Johnson’s people – because he, wisely, largely hid from view – dared to imagine that they really could crash and crush our nation so comprehensively in such a short period of time and get away with it. They say, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” and every time a crisis has given him the opportunity, our petty pound shop Churchill has spectacularly failed to rise to meet it. Of course, the pandemic has helped by providing such fertile ground that would have been harder to till, had we only been dealing with Brexit, but clearly, his finest hour was getting elected and his continuing hope is that nobody ever got the sack for not making decisions, especially if they could come up with a good warlike metaphor to fire-up the people.
Our Lacklustre, Lackaday hero
For me, even his tarnished reputation has a lacklustre air.
He really has lived-up to my expectations – or should that be lived-down to them?
I don’t think he has uttered much in the way of substantiated truth since he came to office. He has reneged on so many pledges and promises that he personifies my choice of motto for him and his ilk. Unlike Thatcher, this PM is ONLY made for turning, or at least for blurring the truth so that we have no idea what he actually means when he says something. Mind, you, I suspect he shares that position with the rest of us.
He reminds me of the Magic Robot Quiz Game of my childhood but with the magnets misaligned. In the game, the robot was placed in a circle and pointed at a question to align its magnets. It was then moved to another area which held the answers and mysteriously pointed to the correct one. Magic!
In Johnson’s case something has clearly gone wrong with the polarity as it seems to come up with plausible but totally untruthful answers. Just watch him at one of his Press Conferences – seeing is believing.
He is about as dystopian a figure as you could imagine and yet he has a huge majority.
Our freshly disunited Kingdom could reasonably be characterized as dehumanised, run by corrupt corporations and a dysfunctional government, facing environmental disaster, and experiencing a cataclysmic decline in society. When taken alongside abysmal public levels of trust in economists, ethical and religious leaders, politicians, artists, intellectuals, scientists and technologists, we clearly have the mechanisms in place to facilitate a totalitarian state and may be approaching the end game: a society rapidly speeding towards a state of moral, financial and human collapse.
Well Done Boris! It will be just as many of your backers hoped and expected. I am talking here of the short sellers, the disaster capitalists, the exploiters, those who make no contribution to the public good but simply seek to make profit from it.
Those who thrive on disaster and economic collapse. Tory party donors, many of them.
So Mr Johnson, you have enriched the already rich, impoverished the already poor, confused the easily confused, uneducated the poorly educated, tilted the playing field still further, deepened the social divide (and yet still not died in its enticingly promising ditch, nor drowned under the border in the Irish Sea), sold The North an HS2 pup, cowardly caved-in whenever the might of the right reared its ugly head, tipped the nation into a new age of austerity, created and nurtured a new dawn of corporate corruption, and will probably break-up the United Kingdom.
If any of your colleagues clearly deserves their marching orders, they can rely on you to defend them to the hilt, as long as they seem at least as incompetent as you so as not to invite invidious comparisons
Not bad for a single year’s work, eh?
But be sure of one thing, those of us who manage to survive the scourge of your ineptitude and mismanagement will not forget or forgive. You may think that Thatcher has had a bad press over the years but believe me, Boris old son, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Mickey take and more 