Class clown (Photo by Paul Grover - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
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I’ve been transfixed, these last twelve months, by the zest with which Boris Johnson bangs elbows with startled strangers wherever the photo opportunity takes him — to vaccination hubs in Bristol, to helicopter command stations in Northern Ireland, to bagel bakeries in North London. Is it fanciful of me to suppose that, when the long day’s task is done, he retires to the rear of Downing Street, has someone pour him a gin and tonic, and bangs elbows with his wife and baby?
Many of the world’s leaders employ this greeting but along the same plane as a handshake; Boris Johnson offers his elbow with a sudden and even feral twist of his torso, as though it’s the first step in an elaborate South Sea courtship ritual he has still to learn the rest of. Above his mask, his eyes are smiling like those of a child who knows he has been bad but hopes he will be loved for it.
I recall seeing him do this on television — perhaps for the first time — just before the national lockdown in March 2020. He was about to shake hands with someone — something tells me it was Matt Hancock — then remembered that shaking hands wasn’t allowed, swivelled, stuck out a hip, and did his elbow jive. From the expression on Matt Hancock’s face you’d guess he thought he was being given the elbow in the being-dumped-by-a-lover sense. A look of impending catastrophe he’s carried ever since.
Most of us had been elbowing one another for weeks by the time Boris Johnson got going, and had progressed to more sedate, and safer, forms of salutation. My preferred method was to maintain a distance of three elephants with extended trunks and throw my arms wide in cosmological bafflement, much as Moses must have done when he came down from meeting God on the mountain and found the Israelities dancing round a cow. Otherwise it seemed both prudent and befitting the solemnity of events simply to wave or incline one’s head. There is a limit — is all I’m saying — to how long you can go on finding bumping elbows entertaining.
But not for Boris Johnson. Thirteen months down the line he is as delighted by it as ever, his capacity to be amused by himself inexhaustible. One has to be churlish indeed not to find this beguiling. The boy in the man will always charm and the boy in the holder of a serious office of state will charm still more. I speak for many who were never little boys even when they were little boys when I say I marvel at the resilience. How, when all around is stress and sorrow, is it possible to find so much fun in so little?
There is, I accept, no point longing for the days when Prime Ministers and Emperors were philosophers and men of letters. They seem like relics of another humanity — Benjamin Disraeli who wrote more than a dozen novels before he became Prime Minister; Vaclac Havel who wrote plays and essays prior to assuming the Presidency of the Czech Republic; the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius who said “Pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.” Voters today would rather elect a clown than a serious writer or a thinker. As witness the clowns and comedians who have taken to the political stage in Ukraine, Guatemala, Slovenia, Italy, America — if you allow that a clown can still be a clown even if he isn’t funny — and now here.
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SubscribeHey Howard, if you think Boris is bad, you should try living in the the socialist paradise that is Canada under Justin Trudeau. I’d take Boris’s buffoonery any day, hands down, over Justin’s fluffery.
As soon as any author repeatedly uses the word “clown’ in pieces about Johnson – without acknowledging his very significant educational attainments – you know the rest is likely to be a Guardian-esque yawn.
The last paragraph sums up the authors obvious dislike (possible jealousy) of Johnson’s interpersonal skills.
The “if further proof were needed …” sentence almost demands that we don’t take any of the piece seriously.
The fact that Boris has lots of bits of paper does not guarantee that he, or indeed anyone, is a serous person or a credible or competent leader. Boris IS a clown – except he isn’t funny. But he plays the fool and is either too lazy, too insecure or too incompetent to provide the leadership we so desperately need. And he appoints cronies who are equally incompetent because they are no threat to him. God help us.
I don’t think someone that consistently lies can be described as having interpersonal skills. (I am assuming that in his days as a serial adulterer he lied to thos he claimed to love.)
If it were possible, Id suggest you get out more. We all lie, politicians lie all the time. Its called politics. ‘Serial adulterer he lied to those he claimed to love…..’ really fits better in Mills and Boon than in the hard yards involved in getting the job done.
If only he were ONLY a clown.
But he elevates relatives and cronies to a House of Lords already massively overstuffed with political and bureaucratic hacks. He champions obviously insane options – HS2, a bridge to N. Ireland; insane in their expense, their cost-benefit stupidity.
And he does these loony things because (a) he adores the idea of leaving monuments to himself around the landscape – one of the worst and most destructive characteristics of bad politicians; and (b) he is in cahoots with big business, effectually owned by it.
He continues to allow mass immigration, not least by illegal ‘asylum’ seekers who ought never to have got so far as British shores.
He continues to tolerate an out-of-control quangocracy (of which the Tories promised to make a bonfire 11 years ago) and appoint hopeless failures to leadership positions in it. Kate Bingham, the vaccination czar, has been splendid but is the unique exception proving the general rule.
He does not discipline the also out-of-control BBC, nor reform the NHS.
He has not learned anything from 5 years of populist protest – in the UK, the USA, across Europe – against the awful Ruling Caste in the western world, the ‘elite’ ‘meritocrats’ who are incompetent and lack merit.
If it be argued that he has had no opportunity to do these things owing to the onset of Chinese WuFlu, I should like to be able to agree. Yet there was no sign of his interest in doing them – entirely the reverse – during the 3 months after his big election victory December of 2019 and before both the Covid Pandemic took hold and with that the lockdown crisis.
We need a new generation of politicians who think drastically differently from the 4th-rate types currently in the House of Commons.
Boris is no game-changer. And a game-changing politics has been long overdue.
Spot on
Give him time. I look forward to seeing Boris in post-Covid mode, where the BBC will finally get its comeuppance, and he has all the usual things that a PM worries about. I look forward to him taking revenge on all those whingers who haven’t actually had to sit down and take literal life-or-death decisions. I look forward to Priti and Rishi finally establishing the truth about how minorities are performing in Britannia. And, as for those 4th rate politicians, we all voted for them.
Is there ever going to be a “post-Covid mode”? I wonder.
Boris post covid is a broken man who needs to re-build the Nation he destroyed. Sure, I can see him taking care of that.
You must be a very patient man then because I can’t see any of these things happening. He was good as mayor as he’s entertaining,good at PR, a good figurehead for the city-but totally out of his depth as PM
“He continues to… appoint hopeless failures to leadership positions…”
Indeed, just look at the splendid Baroness “Dido” Harding of Winscombe for the perfect example; she’s been failing upward for years and years!
Or, perhaps, Kate Bingham?
“play the hooligan and capsize the ship of state as Trump did,” Trump was MAGAing, but the ‘Wreck America’ worms managed to use mail in ballots and 101 poling place chicanery to just barely defeat him. Biden is every bit as incompetent as Boris, but also is out to wreck the Country. The Ship of State was sailing proudly till the Ship Worm Democrats holed it.
Yawn….Please do try and say something original. Trump lost, as every US Court case ruled, and the lawsuits on his behalf were laughed out of court in most cases, including by Republican appointed judges. Of course you and the other conspiracy theorists on this site know better…. Apart from that his most egregious sin was in undermining, no, really attempting to destroy, any respect for elections in the United States, even as we saw in Georgia to his own and own party’s detriment.
Trump had some real achievements, and could have been a grown up over the handover of power, but proved himself to be what many critics had said all along, a narcissistic and self destructive bully. He may hold sway over the Republicans, but if he stood again, he’d lose more heavily.
Biden has only just started his term, I have no love for the man, but at least doesn’t spend his time tweeting blatant lies at every turn. At the moment his average approval rating is 56%.
Do you honestly think anyone can reform the NHS. Ever since the excessive layers of management intended to improve efficiency were introduced it was irredeemable.
NHS never was about health care really, it was Social Engineering, a way to lower health work pay and status till British would not do it anymore, so they could be the Poster Boy for immigration, the wonderful foreigners saving us, coming and taking care of us when we would not do it ourselves. It worked amazingly well, London is less than half Native Brits now, I know, I was from there, Britan is as healthy as a girl with anorexia Nervosa who NHS is managing by twice yearly visits to a Doctor who barely speaks English.
He hasn’t learned from the five years of populist protest because he is not teachable; he thinks himself just fine as he is!
” he thinks himself just fine as he is”
And so do bluecollar Tories like me.
An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I agree with you about much of this, but Boris just doesn’t have the same priorities as many of the commentators on on UnHerd. He is certainly no ideologue, which may be to his credit. He is an entirely different type of politician from, say, Margaret Thatcher, who was one of our most transformative PMs, but never popular.
Boris on the other hand likes to be liked, and is hated really only by the far or ‘woke’ left. (Mind you that lot hate any Tory as a matter of course).
He has always been a bit of a populist charlatan, and “Rogue” is probably a good word. I was in a small minority thinking he made a poor Mayor, wasting money in a very non-Conservative way on cable cars ‘an essential part of London’s transport system’ (not..) and a bus costing about double any other on the market and which no other operator has bought.
But, the thing is, he is good at winning elections, and now is far more in tune with the electorate than many of the lockdown sceptic comments (among other matters) than many of the comments on here. He probably doesn’t hate the BBC or the NHS as do many on here, or even have much enthusiasm for really getting stuck in on the culture wars.
Boris spent his whole life masquerading as a libertarian. I saw an interview between Douglas Carswell and David Starkey where Starkey said something like “you know both the front benches are full of trots” and Carswell said “I know”, since Starkey has been cancelled of course.
I believe this is the reality though, Boris along with most of our leading politicians are Trotskyites and therefore love all this authoritarianism and everything else they say or do is an act or should I say (clown’s) makeup.
Good that another sparkling, witty writer has been added to the unHerd stable (even if he was wrong about Brexit).
What is it about BoJo that makes me agree with both his critics and his admirers? OK, everybody has good points and bad points, and no grown-up judges public figures or anyone else in purely Manichean terms, but with most of them (eg Starmer, May), most of us have a fairly settled view about what we think of them. BoJo is more confusing! As of today I can’t stand the bloke, tomorrow who knows.
The writer had some great one-liners, and is a good writer, but jeering only goes so far in establishing an argument. Then this bit of gratuitous Lefty/Liberal drivel “play the hooligan and capsize the ship of state as Trump did,” popped up, my guess is the usual places he writes for require at least one of these per piece or they are rejected on principal.
Boris is a conservative, of the classical liberal strand, to his core. He is also a high functioning autistic. Such people often appear lazy and bungling on the surface, but are profoundly intelligent underneath. He’s attempted to hide his autism by creating a complex alter ego called ‘Boris’ – a bungling, lovable high class toff. However the stress of the pandemic has thrown him, creating cracks in his alter ego. Nonetheless, he remains something of a political savant.
Politically he had no choice but to implement mass restrictions. Boris tried his best to get around this dilemma through mass testing and vaccination. A strategy he announced at the start of the pandemic and met with derision in most quarters. The process getting there was messy, but we now test and vaccinate more per capita than any other major country in the world. That is the genius of the autistic at work.
Boris Johnson has found himself in the most acute political crisis since the second world war. His options were and are ‘bad’ and ‘worse’. The fact he is surviving, if not winning, an ‘unsurvivable’ political crisis tells you something about the political genius and obsessive determination of the man.
Boris Johnson is not an obvious leader of anything, autistics rarely are. He was a ‘use only in the case of an emergency’ option, chosen to solve the unsolvable Brexit impasse. It turned out the emergency was not Brexit, it was far bigger. I suspect in the fullness of time it will be shown that he was the right man at the right time.
We shall shortly see a rebirth of economic activity and freedom unparalleled in prior decades or even epochs. And it will be Boris Johnson, the autistic political savant, who will be the instigator of this.
Sorry to say I can’t agree with your euphoric view of the Blonde Bungler. He has proven time and time again to be an inept leader who actually made Covid worse in this country.
I’m not afraid to say that I will never vote Tory again given the evidence. One piece of factual evidence against Boris is what happened in care homes. Tens of thousands of the most vulnerable people died needlessly. In fact Boris threw care homes under the bus with no testing available for staff and Covid infected patients being moved into care homes from our not so wonderful NHS. This was state murder by another name. On top of this DNR orders were given to healthy elderly people in care homes without their or their families consent. Again this was a part of the government’s and NHS strategy, in other words not wanting to waste hospital beds and ventilators on elderly people. It’s an absolute disgrace that I hope will come out in an independent review.
This government has continually lied to the public and indeed deliberately scared people to irrationally fear Covid. The average age of death is over 82 years old and the survival rate is 99.8%, so you have to ask why.
Additionally there has been no cost/benefit analysis of Covid. There are tens of thousands of non-Covid people who have been denied urgent medical treatment, there are tens of thousands of people are suffering mental health problems and there are tens of thousands of businesses that have or will fail.
Our liberties have been trashed by a man who claims to be a champion of liberty. He’s consistently lied about lockdown and coming out of lockdown. The goal posts have been moved so many times by this buffoon that I’ve lost count.
How on earth, with respect, can you come out with “freedom unparalleled “, I’m sorry to say I must be living in a parallel universe.
I’m afraid your post is factually incorrect from start to finish.
1) The issue with moving people from hospital to care homes is complex. Almost every advanced nation in the world carried out the same process. The UK actually so fewer deaths from this process than most other countries, partly because mass testing was ramped up very quickly. It seems odd therefore that you see the care home issue as peculiarly a British issue. Even more odd that you see it as as a specifically Boris Johnson issue. I’m afraid you have made the mistake of taking the MSM’s opinion of Johnson and his government at face value. https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/05/09/many-covid-deaths-in-care-homes-are-unrecorded
2) The DNR issue again is complex and applies across all modern western countries. Many people who were near death would not survive a COVID infection. It’s cruel to attempt to use extreme medical measures to keep such people alive, often only for a few weeks or months, particularly when other people who could be saved needed the resources.
3) The pandemic has a fatality rate of about 5% if you are over 75 and a hospitalisation rate of 20%. Even if you are under 50, the hospitalisation rate is about 3%. So unmitigated, that is millions in hospital and millions with long COVID and hundreds of thousands dead. The science does not support your view that COVID is no big deal.
Your claims about ‘lying’ about COVID are largely based on conspiracy theories. Every developed nation has implemented similar measures to the UK, so presumably your issue is not with Johnson per se, but with every leader of every Western nation from left wing to right wing and everything in between.
The Boris in *not* a conservative. Nor are the Brexiteers. Conservatives do not plunge into radical reorganisation of the nation based on vague ideas and irrepressible hope.
A conservative believes that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Even the most ardent conservative will eventually have to face something so irreparably broken that it needs not merely fixing, but replacing with something that works. Some time before the second decade of this century the UK’s membership of the EU had reached that point, but many people were too keen to follow Hilaire Belloc’s advice in “Jim”:
“And always keep a-hold of Nurse,
For fear of finding something worse.”
Maybe we will, like Jim, be eaten by a lion, but at least we’ll have tried.
He is certainly the person we need at this time. I hope you are equally right about the future.
I have never seen such a wrong person for the time than Boris and Biden. Pretty much handed the world to China, the money to the rich, and the ruin to the middle class. (the poor are also done for, but will not know it for some years as they live in a bubble of free money).
Freedom unparalleled? We’ll be lucky if we get back a fraction of the rights which we’ve taken for granted for hundreds of years. The man and the shadowy forces he fronts for are tyrants.
Lord Haw-Haw passing off as a Patriot.
“Johnson has found himself in the most acute political crisis since the second world war” This is just not so. There have been far worse: the Cold War, Korea, Suez, the economic crisis of the mid ’60’s, the economic crisis of the mid ’70’s. This is no crisis; the medics and the politicians have created one, understandably perhaps early last year when nobody really knew what the implications of the virus were, but unforgivably now. Our liberties and structures are in danger of fast vanishing and the population does not see it. And by the time they do it may be too late because they think chief buffoon is funny, friendly, and knows what he is doing.
You are correct on two of those, the economic fiascos
of both the 60’s & 70’s.
However Korea was a very minor affair for us, Suez a humiliation, but by that time we were inured to such disasters, and the Cold War was rather profitable if one invested in Defence stocks.
The long term economic damage inflicted in the 60’s & 70’s coupled with the advent of Comprehensive Education has now proved to be the killer blow.
Flash to Bang, it may not have taken a generation but this current self induced panic has proved that the heart of the nation has been progressively eaten away, and all that remains are millions of obese, bed wetting slobs with no moral fibre and precious little common sense.
How Ernest Bevin would weep!
The cold war was not an acute crisis, it lasted almost 50 years. Korea, Suez had almost nil impact on the domestic popuation. Suez saw few if any deaths, Korea was 1,200 deaths (mainly armed forces) against 120,000 for COVID (all citizen deaths). Economic crises in 60’s and 70’s so few if any additional deaths, hospitalisation and less impact on employment / businesses (the later would of occurred irrespective of lockdown, mass pandemics are not good for business)
If the ‘politicians and medics’ artificially created this crisis, then practically every leader of every nation, their entire governments and almost all members of the medical profession across the world conspired to create this crisis. That would of required an act of unity, across nations, regions and political divides that has never been seen before at a speed hitherto thought impossible. Either that, or the pandemic was real. Which do you think is more likely? In either case, it clearly isn’t a ‘Boris Johnson’ thing.
evidence for high functioning autism please
King’s Scholar (KS)Eton.
QED?
High Functioning Autism Symptoms
https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisprograms.com/lists/5-symptoms-of-high-functioning-autism/
He does NOT have any of those symptoms.
What he DOES have are occasionally noticeable before, now very obvious, symptoms of megalomania. As a child he said he was going to RULE.
It’s an interesting take, I’ll give you that. Personally, much as I’d like to believe it, I think the truth is far more prosaic. Johnson is a lazy, bungling, serial liar. He’s been a disaster for the country. Despite voting for Johnson,I now wish I’d voted for Corbyn. I genuinely believe he’d have made a better job of it. He could hardly have wasted more money, and wouldn’t have handed it to his cronies either.
” Despite voting for Johnson,I now wish I’d voted for Corbyn. I genuinely believe he’d have made a better job of it. He could hardly have wasted more money, and wouldn’t have handed it to his cronies either.”
I think we must be from different planets.
How do you know he’s autistic?
Which clown in America you talking about? China Joe is a demented old crook who’s not even remotely funny.
Biden is a mere puppet whose strings are being pulled by the Soros school of Global Elite. Kill the Western Middle Class and the world is theirs. Boris may well be in their control too, probably is, because he is killing more Middle class membership, and bumping them down one step of the economic ladder, than Castro Managed, and Castro impoverished his Nation for 80 years.
I wonder if Howard ever thought he’d live out his retirement years living under health apartheid in Britain. Johnson is ushering in a totalitarian digital ID state under the guise of ‘public health’. He, Gove and Hancock are psychopaths and need removing fast.
Well said Jonathan Oldbuck.
“It is true that Johnson did not play the hooligan and capsize the ship of state as Trump did“.
They just can’t help themselves.
TDS is incurable.
Apparently is also mandatory.
What a highly unpleasant person you are – a friend of Miriam Margoyles presumably.
Better be open about one’s unpleasant views than like Boris who plays the jolly Patriot but underneath is the enemy of all traditional Western Freedoms.
Ah another ‘Bumbling Boris is just a bumbling waffling clown’ article. Fascinating stuff!! So witty & original!!
At least he didn’t give us ‘dither and delay’. The most successful vaccination roll out in the world along with the largest testing regime of any major country, has made the term slightly redundant. Not bad for a bumbling, waffling clown.
Bumping elbows … stranded on a zip-wire .. something about greed? OK. But he got Brexit done and he got the vaccines out. Now if can level up the North, permanently realign the Tories and save the Union then he will have a place up there with the greatest Prime Ministers.
IF !!
If he was going to do any of that as he promised there would be some signs of it being put into place. Instead of which, all he has done is grab power into his own hand and those of his cronies.
A typical socialist hatchet job.
Seems to me that Boris has done well under very difficult circumstances with both the EU and Covid crises.
I suppose we could have had Howard’s favourite candidate in charge? Corbyn? Or Blair? Now we can see the poison that Blair inflicted on the UK as literally everything he touched went bad, whether the Iraq war, the Afghan war, the GFA (letting terrorists off and hounding British servicemen in their twilight years who risked life and limb for us), Devolution (splitting up the UK to help the EU make us into EU “regions”), his human rights act that gives power to the agressor and takes all rights away from the victims.
Corbyn? Hand over power to a Britain hating Communist? No thanks.
Boris may not be perfect – but when I see who else is around he’ll do nicely.
As it happens, Boris has published at least one novel. And it’s damn good.
Interesting dilemma here. Which Boris would you prefer? A leader who tells lies? Or a leader who keeps his promise to his electorate? You can’t have both because oddly enough, Boris is human like the rest of us not perfect. The reason he does not pander to us and the media is that he is actually focussing on running the country. But just not in the way that our intelligentsia would wish.
Which promises did he keep? “£350 million a week to the NHS”? “Have your cake and eat it”? “Easiest trade deal ever”? “No border in the Irish Sea”? “We can get out of lock-down in X weeks”? “World-beating track-and-trace”?
To get us out of the EU.
Rasmus is still smarting about the election bus? Come on!
“Don’t kill your Gran”?
This man has set NI on fire and broken the GFA. 50 years of turmoil and a fragile peace now gone, because he is a liar. Here’s Boris Johnson pretending to care about N.Ireland back in 2018; pretending (to the nonchalant chuckles of one of Westminster’s client journalists) to oppose a border down the Irish Sea.
He did this for one reason and one reason only: to depose Theresa May (in the hope of replacing her as PM).
It worked.
Then, he fished Theresa May’s piss-poor Brexit deal out of the bin, removed the backstop (which protected the GFA) and… slapped a border down the… wait for it… Irish Sea.
In one swivel-eyed dash for the top job Johnson succeeded in betraying his party leader, his allies (the DUP), the integrity of the United Kingdom and peace in N.Ireland.
This is vintage Johnson. His entire life has been one betrayal after another, leaving a trail of devastation, lies and scandal in his wake.
Could any of us have known?
Yes.
f**k yes.
Thousands of us warned, day after day, month after month, that this pathological liar would throw anybody/anything under the bus (including peace in N.Ireland).
We were right.
…
Today, N.Ireland burns.
I blame the EU, Ireland and even more so the Remainers who stuck the UK into such a terrible position.
Another establishment nose (that believes it is still anti-establishment) out of joint- go Boris.
A bit laboured, Howard. Not much there except an extended description of elbow-bumping, and that could have been sorted in a couple of lines.
Goodness! Howard seems a tad obsessed with the Boris elbow-bump doesn’t he? It’s certainly got his goat! Perhaps he had a pre-existing animus and this just the container his spleen has flowed into. Also, in all that stuff about great leaders who were previously writers, do I detect some frustrated ambition?
This article is neither particularly witty or well written. To be honest it’s rather boring. Boris is far from my first choice as Prime Minister. But this article teaches us nothing except perhaps that the author has too much time on their hands. Could do better.
What is revealing is that English nationalism so strongly brought a clown to power and in USA white capitalism brought nutter Trump to power with full blown GOP support. Worrying
There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! Two Owls and a Hen, Four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard! Ha!
Where is Boris Johnson? In Hartlepool, celebrating the fact that they don’t agree with you, Mr Jacobson.
Delighted to read another of your articles, Mr Jacobson – entertaining and insightful as ever.
I’ve got to ask where you are seeing “insight” ?
Into Johnson’s character. Spot on.
I think the writer has been seduced by Boris’s act. People assume he behaves like a buffoon but in reality has a keen intellect and razor sharp wit. The reality is that he IS a buffoon and ONLY a buffoon. And a selfish, greedy one at that. The naughty little boy act is neither charming nor winsome, particularly when it’s played by a man over the age of 50 in a position of trust and responsibility. As for ‘gravitas’ – Boris Johnson has no idea what the word means.
The clowning was always there and very obvious. We voted him in because he seemed the least worst option at the time. We’d waited too long for Brexit.
He had often opened his mouth and put his foot in it. Also he had often lied his way out of that.
On top of those faults there were signs of megalomania but these were relatively hidden.
NOW THE MEGALOMANIA HAS TAKEN HIM OVER COMPLETELY.
Someone please tell him it is long covid and he must resign.
Must admit I wish the covid had carried him off.