To put the final nail in the coffin of Great Britain, let’s elect Boris Johnson as the next Prime Minister

Fans of failing football clubs may recognise that moment when you start craving the absolute worst

Matthew Norman
Tuesday 03 October 2017 17:00 BST
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A country feckless enough to tolerate a system under which such a reckless chancer could come this close to No 10, deserves him
A country feckless enough to tolerate a system under which such a reckless chancer could come this close to No 10, deserves him

Being a classical scholar – if not a classical gentleman – Boris Johnson favours ancient history over modern sport. So in honour of his Ciceronian triumph before the party faithful in Manchester, I will begin with the Roman reference and save the football analogy for later.

Anyone publicly proposing Boris for Prime Minister needs a powerfully lateral argument to limit the risk of a sectioning under the Mental Health Act. Mine is drawn from the Emperor Claudius.

This is not because Claudius came to power despite being regarded as a grotesque embarrassment to his homeland, and a galaxy-class buffoon. It is because he picked Nero to succeed him, knowing that the amoral, ruthless, narcissistic, lyre-plucking little ponce would be a catastrophe as ruler.

“Let all the poison that lurks in the mud hatch out,” Robert Graves has him explain himself in I, Claudius. Only when the monarchy had sunk into abject farce, chaos, and horror, he reckoned, would Rome finally shrug off its imperial chains and restore the Republic.

This is my rationale for a Boris premiership.

We all know in our bones that something is drastically wrong with our politics, as it is with our country. The challenges – unaffordable housing, underpaid and insecure work, food and fuel poverty, lack of social mobility, an NHS in steep decline and the trivial matter of Brexit – are immense. And the people elected to conquer them are pygmies.

Theresa May would have been lucky to be appointed Under-Secretary of State for Urban Sheep-shearing in a Thatcher or Heath government. In David Davis, she chose a Brexit negotiator so inept at negotiating that if he tried to haggle with a Cairo taxi driver, he’d end up paying six times the requested fare.

Liam Fox, Jeremy Hunt, Andrea Leadsom, Michael Gove… these are pastiche politicians mystically misrouted from the lower rungs of the Camberwick Green parish council.

Theresa May asked if Boris Johnson is unsackable

But knowing something in your bones isn’t quite the same as seeing it with your eyes. An electrifying jolt might focus the vision on the Tories’ deathly decline and the urgent need for radical change.

This is where Boris as PM appeals. If anyone is designed to work as aversion therapy, and shock us out of the confusion between politics and showbiz, it’s him.

His sensational unfitness for the job wants no underlining. You’ve seen enough of him for long enough to appreciate that his ambition is in inverse proportion to his commitment to public service, and that the power of his intellect is matched by the weakness of his judgement.

Boris Johnson 'recited colonial poem in Burma's most sacred Buddhist temple'

The latest casual racism faux pas, in a sequence of which Prince Philip would be proud, occurred in Myanmar a few days ago, when Boris had to be diverted from reaching the part of a stridently imperialist Kipling poem that openly insulted Buddha.

Magnified by his office, the international embarrassments he would visit on us as PM would be multiple, crushing and no doubt gruesomely hilarious. He might not do the Basil Fawtly goose step to Merkel, or give Shinzo Abe the ironic bow and a cheery “Ah so!”. But you wouldn’t rule it out.

Fans of failing football clubs may recognise that moment when you start craving the absolute worst. When the team’s trailing 5-0 after 27 minutes, you don’t want it to end 5-1. You want it to end 17-0. That’s partly to make history, and partly for the masochistic thrill, but also in the hope that an unparalleled humiliation might startle the board into a strategic rethink about how best to run the club.

Musical, Boris Johnson-themed protest ahead of Tory Party conference

That Theresa May has lost the dressing room is as transparent as Boris’ tremulous machinating to replace her. It’s no surprise that the author of those two pre-referendum Telegraph columns can’t make up his mind to strike, but this game of Knock Down Ginger becomes wearingly stale.

He charges up to No 10 to ring the death knell with a treacherous article or speech, and scurries off into the bushes when the bell brings the kitten heels clicking towards the door. He makes Michael Portillo and David Miliband, the pant-wetting laureates of the cravenly abandoned assassination bid, look like Michael Heseltine.

Heseltine didn’t simper sardonic declarations of loyalty to someone he despised, or cower in the shadows fretting about the assassin never wearing the crown. He swaggered centre-stage and cringingly declared he’d be better than Thatcher.

Never forget 
Never forget 

Boris, I think, would be worse than May, or anyone else. His contempt for both the fine detail and the plain truth (he recently reiterated that £350m a week for the NHS fantasy, in the Trumpian belief that repetition alchemically transforms a lie into the truth) is a minor inconvenience in his Foreign Office sinecure. In Downing Street, it would be lethally exposed. His inanely utopian witterings about our post-Brexit golden age wouldn’t survive the next vision of David Davis gaping like a traumatised goldfish after another beating from Michel Barnier.

Boris’s belated championing of Leave decided the referendum result and made this Brexit bed. Now let him lie in it, as well as about it. He deserves the job he did so much to make a living hell. A country feckless enough to tolerate a system under which such a reckless chancer could come this close to No 10, deserves him.

Let all the poison that lurks beneath the mud hatch out… well, so much for Claudius’ theory. Nero didn’t revive Roman democracy, and the neo-Nero who fiddled about on holiday in Canada while the 2011 riots burned the London of which he was mayor might not do the trick for ours.

But these are seriously desperate times, and the most desperate imaginable measure must be worth a crack.

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