5 Not-So-Fun Facts About Boris Johnson
Let us set the scene or
Five minutes before appearing on camera, Boris Johnson ruffles his hair and loosens his tie. He has to look disarming not discerning, bumblingly naive not canny and ambitious. After all, a lot of people have invested in his success so he can ensure that the streets of London continue to be paved with gold. But only for the already very rich.
He walks onstage, one hand in his hair. When he gets to the centre of the stage, the presenter has risen from her seat to meet him, and he takes her proffered hand with his. The hair at the back of his head sticks up untidily, endearingly and he squints against the stage lights, looking out in the audience with a bashful smile.
“Thank you,” the woman starts speaking as the applause begins to die down. “Thank you, Boris for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be here. How does it feel to be so close to political victory? In a matter of months, you could be the prime minister of the UK!'“
“Oh, stop it. It’s just mad, isn’t it” Boris turns to look at the laughing crowd. The stage lights have robbed the audience of their features. He has the familiar feeling of performing for a theatre of shadow puppets.
The presenter laughs too. Her smile has creased the foundation around her mouth and Boris notices a fleck of pink paint on her otherwise perfect teeth. “It’s a pretty big achievement that isn’t without controversy. To the public, it’s almost as if it’s come out of nowhere,” she crosses her legs and shifts back in her chair, a hard edge in her eyes.
Not nowhere, no. He thinks, but the words never make it onstage.
He remembers the real catalyst. The tennis match in 2014 . A Tory fundraising event at the Hurlingham Club, where the prize for the highest bid was a match with himself and David Cameron. Lubov Chernukhin had made the winning £160,000 auction bid.
‘You know the party line,’ an amused voice whispers in Boris’ ear. ‘The Conservative Party does not accept foreign donations.’
Boris chuckles. There’s no bewilderment in his mannerisms. “Ms Lubov Chernukhin is a British citizen. It’s her democratic right to donate to any political party she chooses.”
“I’ve said it before,’ the voice moves away. “God bless democracy.”
**
1) He holds questionable views on race and sexuality
Boris Johnson, often found brushing away nostalgic tears for those saffron-stealing bygone days of Empire, once branded black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ and said of gay people, “If gay marriage was OK… I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.” Pretty endearing stuff, right?
And, when referring to Tony Blair’s trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, he said:
“No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh.
“And the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”
That’s before he deemed Muslim face veils as “oppressive” and said it was “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes” as recently as last year.
2) He lies. All the time.
After Boris finished his everyman training at Oxford, he became a trainee journalist at The Times, where he was sacked for making up a quote. His journalistic career cut a course to politics, where he became a Tory MP for Henley. However, he was sacked from this post after lying to the bench about an adulterous affair - one of a string of many - with one of his staff.
When Boris was questioned as to what he wanted for the country at the time of the Brexit referendum, his positions was made clear: ‘I’d vote to stay in the single market,’ he commented in a BBC interview in 2013. ‘I want us to be able to trade freely with our European friends and partners’.
We’re not sure what wizadry befell Boris in the three years since that interview, but at some point he transmogrified into the figurehead of the 2016 Vote Leave campaign, fuelling their lie that the UK sent the EU £350 million. This was a now famously deliberate misrepresentation of the UK Statistic Authority figure of £285 million a week, before factoring EU payments to the UK. He also falsely claimed that Turkey was joining the EU to fuel the anti-immigration rhetoric surrounding the Brexit debate.
It could be said that the only loyalty that Boris displays is to misinformation, to smoke and mirrors. Which leads in to our next point…
3) He’s a self-professed performer
During his time in Eton, he became the star of school plays. The spotlight and his ability to make people laugh proved to be advantageous. But teamed with Boris’ natural competitive spirit, the result was a dynamic combination that helped propel him forwards throughout his career. When asked during a Newsnight interview: ‘Do you think you learnt something in later life from acting in plays at Eton? That you could get more laughs from looking like you don’t know your lines than actually remembering them?’ Boris replies,
‘…as a general tactic in life…it is often useful to give the slight impression that you don’t know what’s going on, because the reality is that you might actually not know what’s going on, but people might not actually be able to tell the difference.’
But, in a recent interview with BBC journalist and political broadcaster Andrew Neill, someone who can definitely tell the difference between wisdom and bluster, Boris’ argument for strong trade deals with the EU following a no-deal Brexit fell apart. Boris relied heavily on Article 24 of The General Election Agreement of Trade and Tarrifs (GATT) during the interview. He stated that, under GATT 2 paragraph 5B, Britain could continue trading as normal, as long as both sides agree to it. ‘And how would you handle paragraph 5C?” Andrew Neil asks Boris. “I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B” Boris says repeatedly. ‘Do you know what’s in 5C?” Neill asks, to which Boris replies, ‘no.’
Paragraph 5C essentially says that you need more than just the EU’s approval, you need to agree with the EU the shape of future of Brexit Britain and a timetable - something that Boris and his predecessors over the last few years have been able to supply. So, will Boris somehow manage to pull this together in less than four months?
4) He has some potentially dubious ties
An Observer investigation into foreign influence in the US election and Brexit (published in The Guardian in 2017) revealed Boris’ position “in a web of relationships between a known Russian spy, Sergey Nalobin, expelled from Britain in 2015, and Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Vote Leave, the official Leave campaign headed by Johnson”.
Tom Watson said: “We’re starting to have a much clearer picture from America of how the Russian state sought to influence the US election and I think there are multiple questions to be asked about how and in what ways the Russian state may have been exerting influence in British politics.”
The miasma of foreign influence has surrounded the Tory party for years. Take the summer fundraiser that took place in 2013. The Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that guests with a total wealth of £11 billion attended, which prompted cries for transparency from Labour asking for discussions between ministers and lobbyists to be revealed.
More recently, Observer released a video showing Stephen Bannon discussing the advice he gave to Boris, despite Boris calling the speculation around his ties to the far-right former Trump adviser a “lefty delusion”. Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs investment banker, relaunched The Movement this year; a Brussels-based organisation established to unite populist right-wing parties across Europe.
5) He’s rubbish with (taxpayer) money
As mayor of London, Boris blew £43 million on a failed plan for a “floating paradise” across the River Thames. He also wasted £322,000 on three second-hand water cannon devices after the 2014 riots. Wasted because his purchase came before they’d been licensed for use in Britain, which never happened. In 2018, they were sold for scrap.
While being shit with public money, he’s been shady with his own. Boris has breached conflict-of-interest rules on more than one occasion. In August 2018, he started a £275,000 newspaper column… three days after leaving his post as Foreign Secretary. He then failed to declare over £50,000 of income and was late in registering his 20% share in his Somerset property.
And, in light of the the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimate, his entitled, feckless attitude looks set to continue. The IFS estimates spends of £15 billion extra a year to Boris, while still keeping the government debt falling at a slow rate. But as the Sunday Express reports,
“Boris Johnson… has racked up spending commitments of about £25 billion — and that is before you take into account Matt Hancock’s suggestion that Mr Johnson would boost public sector pay rises”.
This, in a no-deal Brexit where every penny will count, does not bear thinking about with Boris, in his current state of mind, at the helm. Whether or not he’ll make a good prime minister remains to be seen, but the odds are stacked against him. And it’s only the British public who will pay the price.