Courtiers are keeping Johnson from his subjects like a porphyric king they daren’t parade in public Journalist, novelist, Churchill biographer, politician, urban planner, diplomat. At this stage in Boris Johnson’s storied career we have to ask: is there anything he CAN do? Have a crack-eroo at being prime minister with Britain facing its greatest challenge in peacetime, seems to be the obvious answer after this radioactively dispiriting week in the Conservative leadership contest. Or “the good old days”, as we will be thinking of it in around six months. One pantingly auto-parodic article in the Boris fanzine, the Daily Telegraph, decided the runaway favourite looked like “a prime minister in waiting”. So close, but not quite. Johnson looks like Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge, or what would happen if you started making Margaret Rutherford out of papier-mache but got bored halfway through. This week amounted to watching the live abortion of that time-worn cliche that the Conservative parliamentary party is “the most sophisticated electorate in the world”. Do me a favour. They’ve just spaffed 114 first-round votes on a subclinical narcissist whose chief qualification for the gig is knowing the ancient Greek for raghead. Continue reading...
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