I detest Boris Johnson. It’s partly because he’s a Tory and I’m not, and partly because he supported Brexit and I think that was a stupid idea, and also partly because he’s a Unionist and I support Scottish Independence. That gives me plenty of reasons to dislike the man, and his performance as Prime Minister gives me even more, but detest seems a bit strong. So why do I have such an abiding and visceral distaste for him?
It’s because he has every negative trait that I recognise in myself but he regards them all as positive.
I’m lazy. I know I’m lazy and I hate it. It’s a constant battle to overcome that part of myself. I fall short of the work ethic that I aspire to and it hurts. You could make excuses for me. You could say that it’s not really laziness because it’s really executive dysfunction caused by my ADHD. But does it really matter what we call it? I’m bad at getting stuff done and that bugs me.
But while I’ve been struggling to resist my laziness my whole life Boris is proud of his. Boris is proud of how clever he was back when he was still a journalist. He’s proud that he programmed macro keys so that with a couple of keystrokes he could instantly add a stock phrase like “You could not make it up” to the badly researched, anti-EU, hit piece that he had, in fact, mostly made up. He got paid actual money to write articles that were barely researched, written to a predefined formula and constructed via stock phrases. He filled newspapers with toxic, cliched articles, full of lies and he’s proud of it.
I can seem pretty bright but I’m aware that my intelligence is broad but very shallow. It’s easy for me to learn the cool surface details of an academic discipline but deeper understanding requires much more focus. It’s fairly easy for me to memorise things but that’s not the same as truly understanding them.
I try to counter this by learning to listen. I’ve come to love listening to people geeking out about the subjects that fascinate them. I follow a few people on twitter who excel at the ‘detailed thread of information about an obscure subject’ form. It’s a great way to learn things if, like me, you have the attention span of a humminbird.
Boris does not care to learn more. He’s proud of that shallow scholarship. He proudly recited lines from Homer in the original ancient Greek. Even though, according to real scholars, his accent sucked, he missed out a chunk of it, and the passage he recited wasn’t relevant to the question he was being asked. The ability to rote-learn ancient poetry is of no practical use. Why is he so proud of it?
And why, in the face of a global pandemic, was he so reluctant to listen to anyone who knew anything? He missed five COBRA meetings. He overruled the government’s own scientific advice group in favour of his mate Dominic. It’s not like his scientific advisers were particularly stellar either. He’s made no effort to seek out the best possible information or the relevant experts to explain it. When other governments took different paths he made no effort to find out what their thinking was and just ploughed on regardless.
I know I’m not always great at prioritising. It’s so tempting to always just deal with whatever is most interesting to me right now. That’s the kind of thinking that leads to spending the whole day on a particularly tricky bit of crochet only to realise that you’ve forgotten to phone the doctor, or sort out the repeat prescription, or pay the vital bill on time, or buy something for super. It’s not good. It requires a real act of will to focus on the urgent stuff.
Boris appears to think that acts of will are for suckers. In the midst of the coronavirus you’d think he’d realise that it’s the number one priority and that everything else has to take a backseat. This week he decided to take some time out of his busy schedule of bullshit and failure to come to Scotland to talk up the Union. This would be bad enough if he was responding to some move by the Scottish National Party but he’s not. The SNP is the party of government in Scotland and they’ve been far too busy dealing with COVID-19 and, the fast approaching threat of Brexit, to do anything to advance the cause of independence. Independence is gaining in popularity here but only because Nichola Sturgeon is doing such a good job by comparison to Boris.
Speaking of Brexit, Boris is still going ahead with that. I don’t know about everyone else but most of my Brexit stockpile was used up getting through the Lockdown. I would guess that a lot of individuals and organisations find themselves in the same boat. Whether it’s savings, medicine or food they’ve had to use it to get through. But Brexit is still coming and the UK doesn’t even have enough pallets set aside.
In his head Boris is the new Winston Churchill. Which would be fair if he meant Winston Churchill the racist and borderline fascist, who was responsible for more than 4 million civilian deaths in the Bengal Famine, and was about as popular in Scotland as dysentery. But he means Winston Churchill the charismatic and decisive war time leader who built a coalition with his former political enemies, Winston Churchill the fearless journalist, and Winston Churchill the writer of one of the most highly regarded history books of the 20th Century.
Boris Johnson is both deeply complacent about, and blind to, his faults because for his whole life he’s never had to face any serious consequences. When he was fired from his job as a journalist (for lying) he just stood for election. When he was fired as a cabinet minister (for lying) he stood for Mayor of London. He has yet to face any consequences for the campaign of lies that led to Brexit. Now he’s Prime Minister and he’s still trying to lie his way out of trouble.
Maybe it’s because I’m working class but I’ve never learned how to lie my way out of trouble. Where I come from a liar is the worst thing you can possibly be. “Are you calling me a liar?” is fighting talk. If someone asks you that and you’re not prepared to back down from your accusation then you’d better be prepared to defend yourself.
Perhaps that’s a weakness in us. We should be more prepared to speak out when our leaders lie to us. We know Boris is lying because he’s always lying. It’s easier to lie than to look things up. We need to approach everything he says with the assumption that it’s bullshit. When he turns out to be right about something it should be front page news. “IN A SHOCKING TURN OF EVENTS A STATEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS HAS BEEN REVEALED TO BE 80% ACCURATE.”
The Stick of Doom speaks 