Brexiteers love to invoke fish. It reminds people that we are an island. Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
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Boris Johnson was at the ExCeL in Docklands this week for the final hustings of the Tory leadership contest with Jeremy Hunt. I knew I was going the right way when I saw a man dressed in sand-coloured linen at Greenwich North station, and a woman with a silken head scarf knotted under her chin: a refugee from a Jilly Cooper novel adrift in Docklands. The surroundings were unfortunate, but Boris is a writer. He can conjure a dream. He conjured himself.
Johnson was introduced by Liz Truss in blood red, as hard as he is soft, promising enforcement of the dream. Then he wove narratives in the air. His narratives, which I think he cannot help, are shameful and multiple. Sometimes they are not even ambitious.
“The fantastic ExCeL building!” he shouted, waving at the interior of this massive shed, as if it were the Royal Albert Hall at the Last Night of the Proms. He can gild ExCel, is his message. He can gild anything, even darkness: it is always darkest, he reminded us, before the dawn. He meant: Brexit is the dawn.
He looked clean this time at least, and unfrightened. He used to look quite frightened when power approached – and he has the tidiest hair of his life. Boris’s hair is his spirit animal; it tells you the state of his mind. Iain Dale, the grumpy MC, who moaned at the stewards struggling to get microphones to Tory members’ mouths, asked him if he dyes his hair. That is all the lobby is talking about, Dale said, which gives you an idea of the state of the lobby, who are required, these days, to analyse the subconscious yearnings of voters; to rationalise what is insane. Boris refused to answer. For him, personal questions are a short road to hell.
He waved a kipper around instead and said that the EU demanded it be posted to customers with an expensive “plastic ice pillow” which will harm British profits. Brexiteers love to invoke fish. It reminds people that we are an island. The next day the EU said this was not their regulation; they have nothing to say on smoked fish, only fresh fish. But that is Boris’s way: build straw men, and then dismantle them, or not.
He talked about the non-existent threat to Mars Bars – Remainers say there will be no Mars Bars, or water, after Brexit. Then he asked: do you think this great country is incapable of making Christmas dinner? It is not really a joke, even if people laughed. It is an insinuation: does it follow that Jeremy Hunt thinks this great country is not capable of making Christmas dinner, and is therefore not a great country at all?
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