History is littered with numerous unsolved mysteries. Jack The Ripper, The Bermuda Triangle, The Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot are just a few that have perplexed and baffled many generations.
I’d venture to add another more contemporary but no less brain-bending a conundrum to that list : just how is Boris Johnson still in his job as Foreign Secretary?
His original appointment was equally as inexplicable to most people, but it’s generally assumed that, as the most likely contender for the top job before Theresa May lucked into the position, she was playing the old ‘keep you enemies close’ game. To put it in the more vernacular idiom she’d rather he was inside the tent pissing out.
But I’m not sure if even she would have expected him to be quite so incontinent. Indeed hardly a day goes by without him dropping his pants and pointing Percy at a passing issue, turning it into a steaming pile of foul smelling sogginess.
This might have been acceptable when he was caught short with his boozy, inbred, hormone-addled chums in the Bullingdon Club, but in public office it’s customary to cross one’s legs, or at least ask for directions to the nearest urinal.
Caroline Lucas
There are very few things that he hasn’t pissed on or people he hasn’t pissed off and Caroline Lucas from The Green Party took to the airwaves today to give a fairly comprehensive list.
This included referring to Barack Obama as part Kenyan with an ancestral dislike of the UK, describing people from the Congo as having “watermelon smiles”, referring to Commonwealth citizens as “flag waving piccaninnies”, suggesting Papuan people are cannibals, running a magazine that accused Liverpudlians of “wallowing” in “victim status” after the Hillsborough disaster, and joking about clearing away dead bodies in Libya to make it a better holiday destination.
Things she missed out were his quoting of Kipling’s poem Mandalay in a Myanmar temple, comparing Brussels bureaucrats to Nazis, and writing a column entitled ‘Bravo for Assad’.
His latest bit of free micturition landed on the head of hapless British subject Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe languishing in an Iranian jail on trumped up charges, who now faces a potential addition to her sentence or perhaps worse all because Boris couldn’t keep his mouth or his flies zipped. This is someone who should be able to rely on the good auspices of the Foreign Office to help her rather than becoming the victim of a throwaway remark from the boorish buffoon paid to protect her.
As London Mayor he could get away with this rubbish. The clumsy faux pas, the childish ramblings beneath a mop of untidy hair. Most of his charm in those days was that he stood out amongst a sea of nonentity politicians all seemingly saying the same thing. He was forgiven on most occasions after offering a characteristically bumbling, mumbling explanation, usually littered with clichés, non-sequiturs, non-words, chunks of Latin and seemingly adroit quotations from the classics that were often anything but. On the whole most people didn’t care as the amount of damage he could do was limited, he was just Boris, in the words of Douglas Adams – Mostly harmless.
Darkly Daft
But let loose on the world stage as essentially our chief diplomat he’s not only an embarrassment to the country, he’s a positive danger. Apart from his inability to engage his brain before running his mouth, he has what appears to be a very slim grasp on the principals of international relations. This is something of a surprise given his own multi-national heritage and his previous experience as both a journalist and a politician.
It’s like he’s been able to hide a darkly daft and inconsiderate side to his personality which has now been given free rein by his ministerial role. Either that or he has an undiagnosed condition akin to a form of political Tourette’s. A pathological inability to think about the consequences of what he says before he says it.
None of these traits are qualities that lend themselves to the plum role he’s been handed by Theresa May and seems to be immovable from. But then, it’s apparent that May has remained stunned and unable to act decisively since she was caught in the headlights of her own folly in destroying the Tories majority earlier this year.
The fact that she’s still in power is perhaps testament to the culture within our government now. Not so much an administration of the great and good as one of compliance and enfeeblement limping from one self inflicted crisis to another. May is now virtually catatonic as a leader, unable to deal with any of the inadequates she’s let loose on us as a nation.
She’s become a single issue PM so focussed on the sh*tstorm of Brexit and her own slim grip on power that she daren’t rock the Westminster boat. Even the two most recent ministerial disasters have not been resolved by any decisive action from her. Both Fallon and Patel have been allowed to resign and slink off to the back benches to fight another day.
In the case of Priti Patel the rumours won’t go away that the government was actually complicit in her actions in Israel and were probably rooted in May’s dislike of dealing with Johnson and the Foreign Office directly. Even decisions about her replacement were driven by outside forces such as Nigel Farage demanding that the Brexit balance be maintained in the cabinet.
Zombie PM
This coming on the heels of the virtual self appointment of Gavin Williamson as Defence Minister shows just how little control Robo-May has of her own cabinet. She’s a virtual Stepford-PM who does what she’s told, when she’s told or she’ll be shown the door of Number 10. That’s something she’s quite clearly terrified to contemplate, leaving her as little more than a zombie Prime Minister, in love with the role she plays, regardless of her complete irrelevance in it.
But then that pretty much sums up the majority of the Tory administration now. A tired and tawdry bunch of incompetents, unable to deliver effective government but desperate to keep their Westminster parking places and government credentials at any cost.
In that context it’s simple to understand why Bojo the clown is still being allowed into the global arena to stumble around making us look bad with even more recent antics such as lavishing praise on a US President almost universally regarded as being as incompetent as he is.
It seems that Boris knows where the bodies are buried and is untouchable in the glazed and fixed stare of our rabbit-headed PM, so in honour of him I’ll end by misquoting Oscar Wilde – To lose one minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness; to lose Boris would probably mean the end of May. For that reason above all others, he’ll no doubt continue to whip his Johnson out at every conceivable opportunity and piss on all our shoes whilst eloquently assuring us that it’s merely an unseasonably warm winter downpour.
I've just been on @BBCNews with @BBCSimonMcCoy explaining, point by point, why @BorisJohnson must resign.
Please do share. pic.twitter.com/hmJum8jt2M
— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) November 7, 2017
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