Johnson was never a politician to be scrutinised close up. His Falstaffian ‘Boris’ was based on crowds, and distance, on fawning journalists who sensed his shallowness and emptiness but allowed themselves to be amused by it, on Tory MPs who brayed when he tickled their bellies.
He was the amusing chancer, the cheekie chappie, the shambling bear with permanently tousled hair who never took anything too seriously and livened up the tedious political routine with bon mots and classicism and ‘colourful’ phraseology.
Who cared about the racism, the sexism, the reactionary Powellisms, the endless lying, the lack of substance or detail, the disloyalty and betrayals, the ruthless ambition that regarded everyone and everything as dispensable? He was the UK’s feelgood, fun boy bear.
All this was perfect for Brexit. A fantasy politician for a world of fantasy threats and imaginary enemies, of red lines that turned out not to be red lines, of non-existent borders that turned out to be borders after all, of fake promises, bluster, bluff and sunlit uplands.
But now Johnson presides over a world of death, trauma, and loss. History has entrusted him with the management of a pandemic where truth, transparency, and detail are everything, lies and evasions will sooner or later be exposed, and bon mots & pseudo erudition are worthless.
With everyday that passes it’s clear that he is absolutely the worst man to do this, and he has chosen men and women who are cut from the same useless cloth. Close-up and alone on television, he is visibly coming apart like the fluff ball he always was.
Even the eyes suggest that he knows it. Shiftily flitting around in search of the absent crowds, umming and arring around convoluted sentences that suggest he doesn’t understand what is going on, hasn’t read what he should have read, has no real understanding of what’s at stake.
A Prime Minister so diminished and pathetic that he wrecked his government to protect his Poundland Richelieu, and has become - for the first time in British political history - a PM who tells the public he has been ‘forbidden’ to say certain things.
So this is a man unfit for the office he holds even in normal times. That he holds power now is a terrifying calamity. And if this genuine political monstrosity can do one decent and generous thing in his life, it can only be to resign, before he does any more damage.
THE END
THE END
