Johnson’s terrible impression of a human wins the day in UK
It’s bizarre that Johnson won a competition based on character and trustworthiness. So what happens when the British wake up, wonders Brendan O’Connor
BORIS Johnson’s campaign ended in the style in which it had been conducted, with the same simple message. Yes, that they need to get Brexit done, but there was another, more fundamental, underlying message. As he walked to the polling station with his dog on a leash, even picking up the dog and cuddling it for the cameras, the message was clear: Boris Johnson is a human being.
The whole campaign had been built around Boris Johnson doing an impersonation of a human being. Or maybe, to be more fair, because he is doubtless a human being of some kind, the campaign was built around Boris Johnson doing an impersonation of a normal, decent human being just like the rest of us.
So we saw Boris looking clunky and awkward as he went out and did things that ordinary decent people do, things with which he clearly had no familiarity whatsoever. He brought a bemused bafflement to it all. At times he looked quite humiliated by it.
But he did it, presumably because he was told it was a good idea by Dominic Cummings. Dominic Cummings, by the way, hid for the duration of the campaign, presumably because an impersonation of a normal, decent human being was totally beyond him.
We saw Boris making a pie. We saw Boris being a fishmonger. We saw Boris delivering milk. We even saw Boris driving a JCB through a makeshift wall, a metaphor for getting Brexit done. And a metaphor, too, for being a human being.
It was phenomenally condescending. The closest thing Boris has ever had to a real job is being a journalist — say no more. And here he was out like some kind of grotesque caricature of the working man. With that smug smirk that tells us that he finds it all a bit of a lark, a kind of jolly jape. Can you imagine some people actually do this stuff for real?
This stuff wasn’t even important enough for Johnson to pretend to do it right. Did you watch him putting a crate of orange juice on top of crates of milk when he was being Boris the milkman? He didn’t even seem to understand how drinks crates fit on top of each other.
Impressionists will tell you that it’s the little details that make an impersonation good. But there were no details to Boris’s impersonation of the hard-working man. He didn’t even bother to try. It was beneath him.
It didn’t help that when Boris puts on one of those white butcher’s hats or an industrial hair net, he looks even more like a character out of Little Britain than he usually does.
There were times where you absolutely could have been looking at
Matt Lucas as a kind of bumptious deluded politician character. But then, that probably did no harm either, for Johnson to look like a harmless clown.
The low point in Boris’s attempt to impersonate a human being came when an ITV reporter presented Johnson with a picture of that four-year-old boy on the floor of an A&E in Leeds. Some have argued that the journalist thrusting his phone with a picture of the boy at Johnson was an unfair stunt.
It was argued that he should have asked Johnson a straight question about the NHS, and let Johnson talk policy. But then the reporter wasn’t doing that. He was looking for a human reaction, a reaction from a man who is himself the father of an unknown quantity of children.
And the reaction he got was very telling. Johnson’s instinct was to pocket the journalist’s phone and keep waffling on. And for many people, something bled out there about Johnson’s true nature. Johnson dispatched the child to the darkness of his pocket, batted the image out of the way, and kept going. He couldn’t even pretend to care.
When the journalist politely pointed out to the prime minister that he had taken his phone and put it in his pocket, Johnson took it out and dutiful looked at the boy and gave cursory agreement that it was terrible. But something had been revealed. And it couldn’t be pocketed again.
Boris’s inability to do a good impersonation of a human being is presumably why he avoided some of the more probing interviewers on the UK scene. On his morning as a milkman, he even ran into a refrigeration unit to get away from Piers Morgan.
You may argue that we are focusing here on trivial aspects of the campaign. But these things were all the major talking points of the last week. Indeed, many people agreed that a lacklustre campaign had only really come to life when the phone-in-the-pocket incident happened.
It was followed by another big talking point when Labour Shadow Health Minister Jon Ashworth was recorded telling an old Tory pal that Labour hadn’t a hope and that if Corbyn became PM, the security services would move quickly to protect national security from him. That incident, a politician caught telling the truth as he saw it, was very newsworthy.
Apart from these kinds of skirmishes, this was essentially an election about nothing. It was a Brexit election that involved virtually no discussion about Brexit, because everyone was sick of talking about it and had said everything they had to say. Boris Johnson answered every question, down to what he wanted for Christmas, with the simple phrase: “Get Brexit Done”.
Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s position on Brexit couldn’t be summed up in a slogan, so therefore Boris won. He had a slogan.
The slogan itself was a lie. Firstly, why had Brexit now become something to get done, an albatross around everyone’s neck?
Brexit was supposed to be an exciting future, something that would make Britain great again. Now it was just a pain in the ass. Something that had to be done, so that everyone could forget about it and move on.
And, of course, the real lie is this: Getting Brexit Done, as all adults understand, is only the beginning of Brexit.
But even a lot of remainers seemed to get onboard with the idea of just getting the damn thing over with. Who thought the EU, and indeed Ireland to an extent, would be welcoming the certainty of a hard Brexit?
But, of course, we still cling to the hope that Johnson will turn out not to be Johnson and will use his majority to pursue a softer Brexit. Even Johnson probably doesn’t know the answer to that one. Johnson will do what Johnson needs to do.
It’s an ignominious end to this phase of things. Johnson, a bad impersonator of someone who cares, who is incapable of lying straight in the bed, somehow won a competition of character and trustworthiness, because the other guy was seen as even worse.
People were so weary of lies they just gave up, they just want it all to be over.
Many Brexit supporters started out wanting a return to some mythical notion of the way things used to be. And instead what they’ll get is a strange new world where everything will be different.
They craved the days of empire, but by the time this is finished they mightn’t even have a union.
They’re exhausted for now. But as the lies become clearer to them, it’s scary to think how angry they might get.
‘People were so weary of lies they gave up, they want it to be over’