Thoughts on Boris gone wrong

The 2019 election victory for Boris Johnson writes Harry Mottram should have seen him in office for years – but he was undone by his own lies

It has always surprised me that friends and acquaintances thought Boris Johnson was a great bloke and ‘the person we need to lead this country.’ They don’t anymore. Just like the very few who admit to having voted for Margaret Thatcher new her legacy of declining public services and the era of rip-off-Britain has sunk in. And it has become increasingly harder to find those who voted for Johnson’s Brexit – now it’s been proven to be a disaster.
The reasons they would give for voting for Boris were his sense of humour – I would tick that one – and his ability to quote from classical Greece and Rome – I’m happy with that one as well – but the idea he had a Churchillian vision for Britain – do me a favour. The only policy Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had was to become World King as he said as a child – or Prime Minister later on – or as he put it when Parliament beckoned ‘nobody puts up statues to journalists’. And journalism was his first occupation after Eton and Oxford – a writer of sparkling prose but like many a feature writer (and I’m one) liable to invent the occasional fact – and was famously fired at The Times for making up a quote.

Telling the truth and competency were two of his faults – almost all commentators agree on those – along with inconsistencies in his views and an ingrained bigotry embellished with snobbery – which one might expect from a public-school boy. But as he once alluded to, having a sense of humour helps in getting the message across and giving the impression that you appear at times to not know what you are doing – endeared him to a wider non-Tory public. Essentially his USP was he was a human being with all the faults that go with being normal. So much in contrast to his fellow politicians.
And it was that mixture that convinced so many of my friends, relatives and colleagues that allowed him a free pass – and for my Boomer Baby generation – a pride in being British complete with overtones of Empire. Unfortunately, it was those very human failings – you know the ones – dishonesty, pomposity, dilutions of grandeur, cowardice, laziness and incompetence that saw him fall from grace. Not by the electorate or by the opposition parties, but by his own cabinet colleagues who put the knife in after Partygate. As his friend Sir Nicholas Soames said to him when he ascended to Number Ten as he raised a toast – here’s to not buggering it up. And bugger it up he most certainly did.
And it wasn’t just Brexit which has left us with a legacy of economic decline and long queues at customs posts on the continent but a series of Conservative leaders that have seen the party almost collapse with Nigel Farage somehow assuming the mantel of Britain’s political right wing.
How things will pan out it is hard to predict but since Johnson was an unlikely recruit to the Brexit campaign it was that pivotal moment when he wrote two editorials – one in favour and one against – that decided on Britain’s destiny for the next ten years or more.
My theory is he only joined the Leave campaign as he expected it to lose and he could then mount a challenge in the future to topple David Cameron and succeed him as PM. Instead the rest is history and now Boris Johnson is a rather irrelevant figure writing angry articles for the Daily Mail condemning the Labour Government and making ever more outlandish claims about Britain and where it is heading.

Rapscallion magazine

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