Boris, Boris, Boris

Like the vast majority of the politically-minded British electorate I have been following the movements of Boris Johnson for years.

He first leapt to the fore of my conscience – and on to the pages of this blog – in early 2008, when he penned a scathing attack on Sudan for the Telegraph, without once making an effort to understand the situation on the ground. His gripe was over the apparently shoddy treatment of Gillian Gibbons (the British teacher that was accused of blasphemy because she named a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’ in her lesson) and lamenting that we could no longer muster enough testosterone to pull together an armada of ships to go rescue the poor lady (just as a belated aside, Mr J.: even in the hey-day of the British Empire, we never actually did that. Just look at what happened to that poor Charles Gordon chap. We dillied and we dallied, and then they cut his head off. And he was supposed to be one of our most beloved heroes).

Incidentally the story of Gillian Gibbons was completely different to the one that Boris Johnson told within the pages of The Telegraph – and indeed which many uninformed journalists repeated ad nauseum. Her arrest and subsequent detention was actually to do with a co-worker who didn’t like her, and happened to be related to the Minister for Justice. The Sudanese government was thoroughly embarrassed by the whole incident. But just you try running that story in our xenophobic press. You simply can’t.

But I digress.

The point I was trying to make at the time – and is now clearly borne out by recent events – is that Boris has built his entire career on fabrications and half-truths, and has only been able to get away with this for so long because he is quite simply a brilliant wordsmith.

Such literally brilliance combined with such a cavalier disregard for the truth is a highly dangerous concoction. It was why I didn’t – at least at first – support his candidacy for Mayor of London.

But then, four years later, after witnessing the energy and enthusiasm of the man, I changed my tune. I was happy that Boris was elected Mayor, but in no way thought that he should ever lead the country. It is one thing to promote cycling or introduce bendy buses in our capital city. It is quite another to shake hands with Olaf Scholz and tell her we are committed to our European partners without reaching for the punchline.

So, no, Boris Johnson should never have been prime minister – and I think that the events that have transpired over the past six months or so rather support this position. His leadership style made a mockery of British politics. It was at once incompetent, irreverent, divisive, arrogant and poisonous.

Boris Johnson, as he has done for most of his life, used his wit and charm to conceal the reality of what was going on behind the closed doors of Westminster – and indeed to conceal the fact that he really wasn’t suited to the job at all.

Very much like the article he wrote 15 years ago about Gillian Gibbons, of which he knew almost nothing.