Mayoral pockets are bulging with bribes from the Telegraph, says Boris Johnson. Has the mayor no shame?
by Boris Johnson
Published: 6:18AM BST 19 Oct 2009
Boris Johnson who miraculously became Mayor of London a while back, finds time in his busy schedule of running a city of twelve million pounds, sorry, citizens to write Wodehouseian guff and drivel, stout fellow, for the Telegraph; guff and drivel like this which you are, ahem, reading at the moment, only not if you are Liverpudlian, obviously.
It beggars belief that a man with a full-time job as a gossip columnist and TV celebrity buffoon should be moonlighting in a job which any old bloke off the street couldn’t help but do better and I really shouldn’t do it. If it was the job at the Telegraph, or the job at City Hall, well, I know which side my smoked salmon canape is buttered. If I want to be PM and by Golly, I do, but not in a racist sense, of course, by Golly, I mean, not being prime minister. Start again, if I want to be prime minister and, fuck me, gently, I do, then I need to keep writing Good Egg, Boris drivel, for the weirdoes at the Telegraph but I also need to keep using the people of London as an experiment of my New Toryism, by Jingo. So, a chap should always have his cake buttered on both sides, and eat it. That’s that sorted-out, Good-Oh.
30 comments:
Regarding Boris on Scousetown, I though he was spot on with what he said, and a dear Scouse friend of mine agreed with me. That anyone should have to apologise for speaking the truth is beyond me. Fucking PC, I guess.
I also enjoy the huge anger he arouses in lefties, and most especially lovers of the truly hideous slime-ridden cunt Livingstone.
Also, as someone who abjures London like the plague, I don't really give a toss what happens there.
Long live Boris :-)
Says this Classics scholar manqué
Gimme that old slavish devotion to the blog line, that's what I love,
Re: Liverpool. That leader piece was written by Hefferlump. Johnson signed it off without reading it - or if he did read it, he forgot what Kelvin McKenzie found: the people of Liverpool are not a model of consistency.
As the editor it was right that he dealt with the flak - that's part of the job - but he has never whinged "S'not fair, wasn't me".
Otherwise, good luck with Boris. It's like fighting an immense cloud of candyfloss; you think it is going to be easy to cut through but it sticks on contact and melts in to a hard, immobilizing coat.
He's absolutely rock-star unstoppable on public appearances - blokes go all sentimental and start feeling like he's their bezzie mate from a stag do, women go hopelessly simpery and keep making excuses to bring him biscuits. Boris sits there like his literary doppleganger, Mr Toad. "I wonder if this is the kind of Routemaster which starts easily?"
It is a bit odd, I confess. The man is clearly a buffoon of the first water but is somehow forgivably so. I think it may be the apparent lack of artifice. "I am just Boris Buffoon. Don't mind me." His father, of course, is also as bonkers as a bat...
"On the train, on my way back, I found myself sitting opposite a very attractive young woman called Sarah, who was at Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). I had seen Sarah around the college, being squired by Chris, a lawyer in my year.
“How’s Chris, then?” I asked. “Fine, thanks.” The ice broken, we chatted away. Soon after the train had left Reading, I remembered Brad’s advice. Find some point of common interest. “Pretty awful place, Reading?” I nodded in the direction of the passing Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory. “Paris is much nicer, isn’t it? Do you like Paris?”
“Yes, I do like Paris!” “Hell!” I exclaimed. “I like Paris too! Why don’t we meet at Heathrow airport next Friday morning, catch a plane to Paris and spend the weekend there?”
In those days, the bus from Orly airport brought you to the terminus at Les Invalides. Sarah and I made our way along the Left Bank towards the Pont Saint-Michel. I left her sitting with her bag in a cafe on one of the little winding side streets. “You stay here,” I said. “I’ll go and find a place for us to stay.”
I probably sounded more confident than I actually felt. Sarah and I hadn’t discussed the “modalities” of our little expedition before setting off. When I found a suitable hotel, was I going to ask for two separate rooms? Or was I going to ask for one room, with two beds? Or one with a double bed?
When I found a sweet little hotel off the rue de l’Université, I decided to go for broke.
“Une chambre double, s’il vous plâit.” I handed over my passport.
“Et le passeport de madame?” “Madame a toujours son passeport.” “Il faut la chercher, monsieur.” I went back, feeling nervous, to fetch Sarah and her passport. What would happen, I wondered, when we returned and they realised we weren’t man and wife?
As it happened, my anxieties on this score proved wholly superfluous. I tried to retrace my steps to the Pont Saint-Michel, only to find myself hopelessly lost.
Fifteen years later, quite by chance, I met Sarah at a reception in Brussels. She still looked tremendously pretty. When she saw me, she gave a start, then smiled frostily: “Oh, hello! Whatever happened to you that day in Paris? I waited for ages but you never showed up!”
Down in the smoke,we embrace the concept of ruin,and have taken the next logical step on the path of absurdity. After all,if we're to be ruled by clowns and jesters,why not go for the best that money can buy?
Johnson's idiotic clowning is the worst kind of vanity - making oneself impregnable to criticism by declaring oneself a failure from the start. It shows an abject incapacity for understanding power, duty, responsibility, position, indeed everything it is to be a man. It is the peak of anti-masculinity, so nauseatingly illustrated in his relations with women - the pink, gabbing, sweaty puffball, begging for sex.
Johnson is anything but a buffoon.
Bit harsh TDG but point taken.
Anything but a buffoon. I think, mr caractacus, that such is the opinion here. I have always felt as enraged by his truly sinister play-acting, seldom calm enough to articulate that rage as potently as does Mr TDG. I think the stuttering albino is an utter fucking monster and at our peril do we indulge his showy gamesmanship. Fuck off Johnson, you nasty bastard, more apposite than Oh, Boris, what a laugh, didya see him on the telly?
I accept that he does act a buffoon, Mr. Ishmael, but not that he actually is one and so on this particular occasion I have to disagree with your view that he is 'a fucking monster' - that to me is a little harsh. I've observed a number of politicians close up in a previous incarnation and he - in my humble opinion - is one of the better ones out of a truly awful, awful lot.
Being easily deceived - stupidity - is bad enough. But enjoying being easily deceived - fuckwittedness - is deeply depressing. It just goes to show how shallow many of your readers' understanding of Ruin is, Mr Ishmael; out of a thousand braying in applause at your every gesture, 999 would be thrown into ecstasy by its exact opposite - everything is the same to them as long as it is a nice shade of blue.
Maybe a thousand or ten for my friend, stanislav, but not for me, Mr TDG. But have no fear, I will see your Ides of March and raise you a poisoned chalice.
I doubt that any here bray in applause at my every gesture and I think you misjudge them and I; this is mere street entertainment, in which all participate, you, especially and with some aplomb, some distinction; just a nightly, or a daily collision of gripes and disatisfactions, occasional memoirs and shared interests, a mutual observation that what once was is now in Ruin. You should not try to deconstruct it put of existence, you would, I guess, feel its loss more than most.
No, Mr Caractacus, my emphasis was exactly upon his ACTING the Buffoon and what that says about HIS opinion of HIS audience.
So is there cynical artifice in it? Enough of same to outweigh the peas in a podness with his father? Is he capable of another mode if it suited his purpose?
I think "No" to all those.
And therefore I think that he is a buffoon. (I shall look the word up in a mo.) An arse, an eegit, a clown. In fact, a knowing clown is right. He is clever and sophisticated in all sorts of ways. I merely say that he appears to me to more incapable of complete falsehood than the rest of his brethren. God knows, it is distinction enough when we have Bob Ainsworth to listen to.
Now, is he a politician and therefore a swine to be kept at spear's length? Yes.
Mr TDG,
Why are we here? Is there cynical artifice in it?
fry and boris?
Mr. Ishmael, I had always assumed - and perhaps from the comment by Mr. TDG, incorrectly - that the vast, vast majority of people see through Mr. Johnson's buffoonery and take it - not him - for what it is and he, likewise, assumes the same; he is giving his audience the credit to recognise his play acting for what it is rather than some conniving trickery.
But such, mr caractacus, is a wilderness of mirrors; ok for art or showbusiness, not for war or peace, prosperity or ruin.
And are we content, now, to be audience rather than electorate? Is the politician's legitimate cry, now -as your argument must ulitmately conclude - Let Me Entertain You?
That's a good point, Mr Ishmael, and sadly illustrates in this great age of celebrityhood that style often triumphs over substance. I now realise your intellectual starting point was different to mine but that seems to be a natural hazard in all these 'discussions'.
are we content, now, to be audience rather than electorate?
You've gone and nailed it again, Mr Ishmael.
N.B. I know you don't go over there, but GF has noticed today that Ben Bradshaw was in the audience for the Robbie Williams concert, assumed to be on a freebie ticket from the BBC.
Mr Ishmael,
This is one of the logical outcomes of four-legs-good orthodoxy. If to be a politician you most toe the line and say the accepted words, well, there is no point to you. As soon as you give the buggers something to adhere to, they adhere to it and are lost forever. Thus we have just witnessed the spectacle of the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime braying the same PMQs shite at yet another old Etonian Tory leader. (Just a more disciplined, more user-friendly version of Boris BTW.) It may as well have been 1959 as 2009. I just wish they wouldn't shout the same slogans all the time. It becomes tedious after a few decades.
Boris, at least, abandons the orthodox from time to time. At least he's not a party automaton. And I think because he has not the discipline to keep his trap shut until his political brain has engaged. Perhaps it's why The "Jolly Old Boris" Show gets away with it. Good egg, you know, was in Pop with Lumpy. Didn't his sister go out with that friend of Tubbs? You know, went down the Cresta starkers, blind blootered after JJ's girl's coming out bash, farts like my old lab. Had a good war though...
I'd rather have Boris than the ghastly git Osborne. Odious, self-satisfied runt.
But, God save us, it is going to be just plain ugly.
How would you like it, guys, if your doctor laughed at your mother's illness? Threw a little gag in, about the old bint being too long in the tooth, all harmlessly jovial. If you would not like it, then what makes you think the business of governing, which has a bearing on millions - both living and unborn - is any less serious, and should be approached with any less self-conscious seriousness and care? Or is that a different "intellectual starting point", blundering into which is a "natural hazard" if, like Mr Caractacus, you happen to be a bit thick?
For goodness sake Mr, TGD... why is it that your comments always seem such gobbledygook? If you don;t understand something why don't you just ask rather than resort to insults? How do you know what my 'starting point' was? All I said was that it was different to that of Mr. Ishmael's. You don't know what I was referring to since I have yet to explain it. Please try engage what little grey matter you may have before deciding who is or isn't thicker than you.
And just for further clarification (since someone may need it).... I thought I had gracefully accepted a good and valid point made by Mr. Ishmael. That's not to say that there is nothing further to be said on the matter. I am merely acknowledging a good point and, from my perspective, letting the matter rest. I am not certainly not here to win arguments. The caravan moves on....
There was just, on BBC Four, a most interesting documentary on the 'thirties, demonstrating how, despite the plight of many unwashed and unfed marchers, many in Chamberelain's UK enjoyed, if that is the word, unparallelled improvements in quality of life, consumption, housing, transport and health care, much of it available through a weird combination of the National grid and Hire Purchase making luxuriant consumption possible and affordable and how Chamberlain, by failing to nail Hitler down, in the early 'thirties, doomed his own otherwise excellent reputation to Hell; the war destroying his own wildly successful attempts to make No More Boom And Bust a reality, for most. One of the claims of the programme was that the Atlee government did not build the welfare state from the ground up, much of it was started by Chamberlain - an unusual observation for the BBC to permit and one which many will find unsettling.
I preambleise thus, however, not to indulge the Cameronites but to illustrate that stuff emerges, often, not precast in stone but after argument; insult and all is enjoyable but beyond itself generally unproductive. Mrs WOAR conjectures:
"'are we content, now, to be audience rather than electorate?'
You've gone and nailed it again, Mr Ishmael."
when it is not I who arrived at this admittedly neat summation but the discourse with others and especially Mr caractacus which prompted it.
Mr TDG is often part of the strange discourse which sometimes, here, leads to someone's well-distilled thought dripping from these exchanges, to the benefit of all.
young stanislav has mentioned time out of number his eschewing, his rejection of comedic honours; that his bits only emerged because of his audience, that the two, he and his readers, were, creatively, one and the same - no audience, no performance.
And so it is here, if I sought no audience, no dialogue, these things would be diarised not blogged.
Many of them are long winded and morally tedious, lofty unrewarding, hard work, often a newspaperswort of words; lengthy and convoluted, so much so that I would not describe those who read them and respond to them as a bit thick, for that is to exclude people by dint of some intellectual or educational etiquette when self-evidently they are able and willing.
Rather than the climate of insult, which we have discussed, more productive than dismissal, more undermining of Ruin is, I suggest, the hand of kindness.
Well all I can say is I have been chastened. Caractacus's point is clear enough - Johnson's buffoonery is fine because we are in on the irony. Ishmael's rebuttal of this is also as clear as it is devastating - politics is not meant to be fucking theatre. To attempt to evade the force of this by saying "your intellectual starting point was different to mine but that seems to be a natural hazard in all these 'discussions'", with its insulting parenthetics, is either cowardly or stupid - I just chose the less offensive option. And things like "All I said was that it was different to that of Mr. Ishmael's. You don't know what I was referring to since I have yet to explain it." pretty much seal the deal, as Caractacus's grandchildren probably say.
Of course you have to be polite to your regulars, Ishmael: it is the duty of any host. But if what it so distinctive about this place is its insistence on clear thinking, unmuddled by intellectual fads, tribal allegiances, political colour swatch-matching, etc., there is another duty to consider too. You won't know from the number of comments if you neglect it.
I would rather have Boris as PM than Cameron. Because he would do little. He who governs best governs least. I don't want them to be good except in extremis. Churchill was more or less useless except at winning a war. Right man, right time. Everything else was nonsense. It is seldom to be found in policy and cleverness. But that's politics and we have found ourselves to a more interesting place.
We are all in error. It's a crap medium for tight debate. The lateness of the hour and the remoteness of reason lead us into confrontation sometimes. We cannot see the nod of the head, the blush of the cheek nor the wink of an eye. This all leads us to trim and tack and try to find common cause - or it should. This is not just the statement of opinion and fuck you, Jack. Those who think it is fuck off rather fast, I find. And Mr Ishmael has given his answer...
"Rather than the climate of insult, which we have discussed, more productive than dismissal, more undermining of Ruin is, I suggest, the hand of kindness."
But blessed among bloggers, I have you, Mr TDG and where I falter you are swift to the breach - that is what I'm saying, here is a dynamic quite properly beyond my control and although you are not to know, I try to be polite to everyone, virtual or corporeal, as, I guess, in real life, do you.
That politics is not, should not be theatre was the essence of spoofing Johnson's cod indignation at bankers' greed; it seems that in a relatively few steps the idea was explored and confirmed even by those who originally opposed it. Where is the failure to the greater duty?
Although I would have it otherwise, the overwhelming majority of readers here do not comment, we can but assume that their regular visits assign some worth to the observations of those who do.
That's right, mr mongoose, we miss the ninety per cent of conversation which consists of the visual signals you mention and others. So, insomniacal ten per centers, lonesome obsessives, moonshiners and windbaggers, all the more purposeful are such politenesses as those we honour.
I think, for different reasons, that I, too, would prefer Johnson - or Davies - to Cameron, although, with his sense of duty over utility, I would prefer, rather than either, Mr TDG.
Sorry Mr. TDG, your summation of my standpoint is wrong again. This may be explained through Mr. Mongoose's comment, 'It's a crap medium for tight debate'.
Further, I have no grandchildren - thankfully still too young for that.
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