BORIS JOHNSON - PORTRAIT OF A CHARLATAN

The following is a pseudonymous contribution by Malleus Maleficus.  If you wish to report libel or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com  To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk 

The first thing you noticed at diplomatic conventions was bull-headed Boris – “Herr Brickendrop!” - knocking chunks out of ambassadorial subtlety. Reconstructing the psychology of a cartoon character is guesswork at best, but there are distinct flaws in Boris Johnson’s psychological make-up. Revelling in his status as a Churchillian statesman, Boris has always possessed a fatal attraction for the elements of farce –“mutton-headed mugwumps,” “flag-waving piccaninnies,” “boss-eyed, foam-flecked euro hysterics”. Much like Joachim von Ribbentrop (whom he deftly emulated in all but sartorial elegance), Boris was  a liability. What  seasoned politicians have contrived to assemble  in years of patient planning, a duplicitous Boris undid through treachery by a single stab in the back. From Remainer to Brexiteer in a blink.  On June 23^rd 2016 the situation changed decisively.  If the intention was to create an irreversible position, the message was one of personal opportunity rather than political expediency. Armed with his picturesque idea of this “incredibly exciting landscape ahead,” Boris’ global-free-trade Brexit is a regurgitated fossil of the early imperial common

wealth, a throwback to a bygone era at a time when the geography of commercial conquest was sweeping the world. Which is historical nostalgia and central to the global "fantasy of a golden age."  For the rather more newsworthy question is this: how did the United Kingdom –– as the domain of confidence tricksters and charlatans -  come to be captured by these world-loathing Little Englanders? And a disgraceful thing indeed, for Boris to seek license for his narcissism at the expense of the disadvantaged communities who voted to leave. To add insult to injury,  Johnson then announced that he was pursuing the case for a “liberal Brexit” because “the advantages of leaving have not been properly outlined for the public.” I am not a spiteful person, but for some reason that made me laugh. Or as the

judge said to the accused: "Admitting guilt has the advantage of protecting you from the rope!" The Rich and the Poor, may be a political cliché, but unlike Disraeli’s Two Nations, Boris never suggested that they should  be united. He operates as a personality cult, and class is the clincher. The poor and the disadvantaged are to Boris what a suckling pig's snout was to David Cameron. Nor do I wish to exaggerate, but I couldn't possibly have thought  of a more humiliating or embarrassing choice for discharging the powers and duties of Her Britannic Majesty's Foreign Secretary.  He was both, awkward and out of his depth, stumbling through diplomatic niceties like a sleepwalker in soiled underwear.

 And yet, plotting in the shadows, he remains the madcap instigator of a national suicide act that defies every reasonable expectation. An ambition that diverts him from the somatic and psychological discomforts of his own professional inadequacy. 

And so I put it to him that his views on the ‘incredibly exciting landscape ahead’ led me to believe that the natural solution to the problem of ‘our glorious future’ would be to think long and hard about placing wishful commercial theory before plain economic evidence, and that like many other political delusions Brexit  primarily reflects the profound hold exercised over the people’s imagination by their own inherent prejudices. Whether or not you agree is neither here nor there, but it is your call as to whether the “EU is an attempt to do by different methods, what Napoleon, Hitler, and various people tried out” or the mutually beneficial economic and military commonwealth that would maximise Britain’s clout? (For the nation's only aircraft-carrier has no planes and a leak!) And that’s before we get to the technicalities of how what neither Philip II, Napoleon nor Hitler achieved,  Brexit will accomplish: From an unrepentant Great Britain on the eve of disintegration to the break-up of the UK.  From the “increasing possibility of a Marxist in No 10” to the last days of the United Kingdom. Which, as things stand, is an issue only history will clarify. For the long walk home still lies ahead… 

...hanged in 1945 !