The time has come for me to write about the most incredible charlatan and mountebank the UK has seen since the days of Horatio Bottomley.
The background we all know (though when I say “we”, of course I diplomatically pretend to mean “all British people” but in fact mean “the tiny minority who take a serious interest in how the country and society they themselves live in is run”).
In outline, therefore: the UK has a combined political and electoral system that no longer really works. Part of that is the sclerosis of the major political parties of the System.
The LibDems, heirs to the great late 19th and early 20th Century Liberal Party, failed in 2010 to demand (as they had the power to do) some form of proportional electoral system. They are flagging, though may benefit from not being Conservative or Labour, if Brexit Party grows stronger.
Labour is doing well within its boundaries, as the party of the public services and of the “blacks and browns”. In terms of MP numbers, Labour under Corbyn is doing about as well as it has generally done in the past, if one excludes the Tony Blair years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#UK_General_Elections
though it may struggle to get a popular vote much above 30% in future.
Then we have the Conservatives, for long considered “the natural party of government”, but which now struggles to attract votes from anyone much under pensionable age, or from those not in the most affluent 10%-20% strata of the population. Its MPs are mediocre or worse, and its ministers no better. The leading contender to take Theresa May’s purple is now Boris Johnson. He is the leading contender because the Conservative Party is terminally sick. In its healthier days, someone like Boris Johnson would not even be an MP, let alone promoted (briefly, disastrously) to Foreign Secretary; the idea of someone like him becoming Prime Minister would be a joke, rather like that of The Simpsons, c. 1993, casting Donald Trump as a future President of the USA. Jokes are dangerous!
A serious point from Lewis Goodall. It has been a long time since the Conservative Party had anything like a solid majority in the House of Commons (1992; arguably, 1987). 27 or even 32 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK)#UK_general_elections
So we now consider the candidate considered most likely to lead the Conservative Party after July-August 2019.
I have in fact already blogged about Boris Johnson and some of the other would-be Conservative Party leaders:
Boris Johnson: a few tweets from journalists, commentators etc
https://twitter.com/bexin2d/status/1138401617248698369
[Below, Boris Johnson, the part-Jew public entertainer, clowning and posing as the great patriot…]
https://twitter.com/ajimmydixon/status/1129019292601769984
“After the briefest of honeymoons,” he wrote, “the voters would quickly start to wonder how this spectacularly incompetent braggart, with a Churchill complex but no Commons majority, had ended up in Downing Street in the first place.”
There was a Mafia leader in New York once, John Gotti, who at one time enjoyed the newspaper-invented title “The Teflon Don”, because he was always being arrested and even charged with serious crimes, but who always seemed to get away with whatever. No charges stuck. There is something of that in Boris Johnson.
“Matthew Engel in The Guardian notes [Bottomley’s] ability to charm the public even while swindling them; one victim, cheated of £40,000, apparently insisted: “I am not sorry I lent him the money, and I would do it again”. If London had had a mayor in those days, says Engel, Bottomley would have won in a landslide.”
A transparent reference to the (one-time) Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Johnson seems able to shrug off, not so much allegations against him, but allegations proven beyond all doubt and repeatedly, against him.
Boris Johnson, journalist trainee (sacked), journalist (sacked), Spectator editor (hopeless, largely absent), MP twice, Shadow minister (sacked), Foreign Secretary (“resigned”), Mayor of London (useless). That’s before we even look at detail, or about his personal failings (easily available elsewhere, so no need to again detail them here).
One of the most risible aspects of Boris Johnson is his am-dram reprise of Churchill. Johnson affects not only the voice (slightly) at times, but (also occasionally) the solid buffalo-like massed body posture, hunched, looking down etc. I may have my trenchant criticisms of Churchill’s historical role, but the man was a titan compared to Boris Johnson!
There is something sick here about the Conservative Party, the UK, and the UK’s political system. The Conservative Party consists now of between 50,000 and 120,000 mostly elderly, mostly affluent persons, who are going to vote on a leader. The majority will vote and a majority of those will elect the leader. In other words, about 40,000 or so of those elderly people will, in effect, elect the next Prime Minister of the UK, a position which the “elected” candidate may hold for nearly three years, until 2022!
What kind of fake “democracy” is that?!
What will happen if Boris Johnson wins this contest?
Either Boris Johnson will take the UK out of the EU without a trade “deal” with the EU in place (I am sanguine on that score), in which case there is every chance of his losing a House of Commons confidence vote either immediately or not very long afterward, or Johnson will renege on his meaningless “pledge”, in which case he will be giving Brexit Party a gift worth rubies. Either way, the Conservative Party will be toast. Any loss of a confidence vote will result in a general election in which the Conservative Party might well be wiped out.
The Daily Express (meaning the Jew who owns the Daily Express) has been pushing an opinion poll which says that a Boris Johnson Conservative Party might win a landslide 140-seat House of Commons majority. That is very unlikely, for several reasons.
What Britain needs is a powerful social-national movement. So far, there have been mere straws in the wind only. No movement, no party exists, as yet. An inevitably-disastrous Boris Johnson government might create the socio-political conditions for one to emerge.
Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Bottomley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gotti#%22The_Teflon_Don%22
(“It’s quite something when Liz Truss, Gavin Williamson and Chris Grayling are three of the brightest people in the room.“)
(“No, he didn’t want to talk about his record at the Foreign Office. Probably because his tenure had been an unmitigated disaster. Rather, he wanted to claim other people’s achievements during his time as London mayor as his own.”)
(“Just as the event threatened to unravel, Johnson remembered his instructions and dashed for the exit. Some journalists shouted that the whole event had been a total disgrace, but for Boris it had done the business. He had got through the day more or less unexamined. Onwards and downwards, further into the cesspit of Tory party politics.”)
(“This was the Tory party in survival mode, reduced to its basest instinct. Things were serious now. The Tory party had decided it must live, and so everything else must die.”)
(“All dignity dispensed with. All integrity gone. Survival is everything.”)
(“The most telling fact of the speech was how bad it was. Boris Johnson is on his best behaviour, but bad behaviour is all he is.“)
(“What was he offering exactly? There was something or other on “investing in the infrastructure this country so badly needs”. His current record on infrastructure is an utterly pointless cable car in east London that recent TfL research showed is used by precisely six actual commuters. It now serves alcohol in the evenings to try and stay afloat.
Then there are the rolling windowless sauna buses, and his decision to make himself chief executive of the London Legacy Development Corporation, and personally see through the execrable Olympic Stadium deal with West Ham United – the only aspect of London 2012 over which he had any executive control, and the only aspect considered to be an utter failure.”)
https://twitter.com/ToryFibs/status/877583434184609796
We keep hearing that “Boris Johnson has the ability to be Prime Minister, but does he have the necessary character?”
My response is “where has Boris Johnson proven that he has the ability?”; on the contrary, he has, if anything, proven that he has not the ability.
Afterthought, 20 June 2019
It occurs to me that some readers, on reading my assertion that Boris Johnson is the most egregious charlatan and mountebank since Horatio Bottomley, may object “what about Robert Maxwell?”, and it is true that Johnson does invite comparison with “Maxwell”.
However, Maxwell was a far more organized and intelligent figure, and in some respects far more sinister (he is supposed to have been Israel’s chief secret operative in Europe). Also, though “Maxwell” was indeed an MP (in the UK) for 6 years (1964-1970), Britain in those days was still decently “anti-Semitic” and (rightly) somewhat “prejudiced” against “Maxwell” (though Britain still allowed him to become an MP, defraud pensioners etc). No-one would ever have even thought of “Maxwell” as a potential Prime Minister.
It is true that Maxwell was every bit as much of a charlatan as Boris Johnson is, but there was an element of seriousness or even tragedy in Maxwell that does not exist in Boris-Idiot. I don’t suppose that anyone would entrust Boris with millions to invest, neither would he know what to do with it, though his incompetence in every sphere would still ensure that every penny was lost! One could ask, “then why is Boris being entrusted with the fate of the whole country?” God knows. I don’t.


