A thread mostly for Americans about why Boris Johnson’s emergence as the new prime minister really is the UK’s Trump moment. 
I know what you’re thinking — Brexit was our Trump moment. But in many ways this is worse: instead of acknowledging that Brexit was built on a throne of lies, we’ve decided to promote one of its architects to the highest office in the land.
Four ways in which Trump and Johnson are cut from the same cloth:
1. Their ascent to power was totally undemocratic. If you thought Trump’s Electoral College win was outrageous, you should know that Boris Johnson will become PM on the basis of just 90,000 votes. I don’t mean a 90,000 majority—I mean only 92,153 Britons voted for him.
Thanks to our venerable political system a PM can resign and choose _not_ to call a general election - handing the keys to Number 10 to her successor as party leader. The only people who get to choose that new leader (and new PM) are party members.
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There are 160,000 members of the Conservative party; their average age is 57, 71% are men, and 42% of them support censorship of movies and the press “to uphold moral standards.” These are the people who just elected Boris Johnson to be PM. theguardian.com/politics/2019/…
But in case you think they’re blind partisans, 54% of members would gladly see the Conservative Party destroyed if that was the price of Brexit. 63% would accept Scotland leaving the UK for the same outcome. huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/poll-rev…
For comparison, far fewer people voted for Boris Johnson to be PM than voted last year for John Barrasso to become US Senator from Wyoming — the US’s least populous state. Trump seems almost legitimate by comparison. (Emphasis on 'almost' and 'by comparison'.)
2. A complacent media helped their rise. The image of “Boris” as a colourful iconoclast is mostly the invention of journalists. “Boris” (as the media have always called him) and his many excesses were indulged on the assumption that he sold newspapers and increased ratings.
His record of lying — about the EU, about Westminster politics, and about his private life — was well established long before his infamous endorsement of the ‘Brexit Bus’ and its false claim that leaving the EU would give a £350m windfall to our National Health Service.
This article doesn’t go anywhere near far enough but gives you some idea that, like Trump, Johnson was a godsend to journalists who quietly admired his ‘outspokenness’ or thought his rise was diverting and risk-free. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
(For a sense of who will pay the price for the media's pimping of Johnson, this is much better.) huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-jo…
3. Johnson and Trump are pathological narcissists happy to say or do anything to gain power or adulation. Neither man is devoid of ideology — they’re callous in their social vision and racist in their worldview — but their lack of principle makes them especially dangerous.
Hard to find the best example of this because there are so many across Johnson’s career; but the fact that he drafted newspaper columns supporting Leave and Remain as he agonised over which side to back in 2016 is probably the most notorious. theguardian.com/politics/2016/…
It seems frivolous, but Johnson’s real-time lying about his hobbies during a recent interview was a window on the man: bottomless entitlement, performed bluster, and the privileged assumption that the rest of us will find him charming rather than a compulsive and lazy liar.
4. Johnson and Trump are racists who’ve repeatedly targeted Black people & Muslims. Johnson is a practised dog-whistler but, like Trump, he’s pushed back the boundaries of hate speech towards people of colour in the service of political advantage, a cheap joke or both.
The examples of this are well documented and incredibly depressing. You can literally find dozens of links to articles called “All the racist things Boris Johnson has said.” theguardian.com/politics/boris…
The consistent feature here is that none of these remarks has damaged his career in the slightest; as with Trump, racism has fuelled Johnson’s rise and has become normalised by many in the commentariat. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
Partly this reflects the extent of anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism more generally in the UK, though Johnson’s impunity is stunning and, like Trump, frightening. Here’s the Tory Party response to complaints about Johnson’s "Muslim women look like letterboxes" comment:
The silver lining in all this, if we can find one, is that Johnson may not be able to rely on the same base that Trump has mercilessly milked. His poshness and laziness aren’t really seen as assets beyond the socially regressive precincts of the Tory party membership.
And the basic facts of Brexit haven’t changed: the EU won’t give us a better deal than the one Theresa May negotiated; that deal won’t get a majority in the Commons because ultra-Leavers in the Tory party (and some Northern Irish unionists) can’t tolerate the Irish backstop.
(Since the next three months (or more!) of UK politics will be politicians having exactly the same, perfectly circular Brexit discussions all over again, you might want to refresh your memory about the backstop.)
It’s highly unlikely that Johnson can get the UK out of the EU by October unless he calls a general election; and if he does that, there’s a great chance he’ll lose and become the shortest-serving PM in British history. (George Canning’s 1827 record of 119 days is under threat.)
But I remember the first weeks of 2017 when some of us hoped that Trump wouldn’t beat William Henry Harrison’s 31 days in the White House. Rather than waiting for Johnson to collapse under the weight of his own lies, the work of opposing racism, fascism and inequality is on us./
Racked by insomnia as my brain remembers terrible things Boris Johnson has done which I haven't even mentioned yet. For example....
When foreign secretary he was asked about a British citizen who’d been detained in Iran & said that she’d been trying to “train journalists” - which is precisely what she’d been accused of & had strenuously denied. Two years later she’s still in prison. theguardian.com/politics/2017/…
While mayor of London he cut funding for fire services then told a local official who upbraided him to “get stuffed” — he left office just a year before the London fire service struggled to respond to the horrendous Grenfell fire.
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On a tour of East Asia he crushed a Japanese child while trying to win a game of touch rugby.
