A talent for verse and worse
Two facts: men who make you laugh will one day make you cry, and men who say they’re feminists are the most cynical womanisers of all. Take Boris Johnson. And they do. Read about Britain’s current prime minister and women’s names leap out in varying degrees of indignation. He has been busy. I suspect a high carbohydrate diet with puddings for more energy, which have also given him a cuddly paunch. That would be attractive, a human hot water bottle in a cold northern climate, as autumn starts to bite.
Johnson, who currently fascinates me more than Donald Trump, has great advantages in being an educated bumbler, which can pass for stammering sincerity, and he can also be funny on purpose. Women like that.
His tousled appearance suggests he doesn’t bother about hair and clothes, and as the poet Robert Herrick put it, ‘‘A sweet disorder in the dress/ Kindles in clothes a wantonness’’. Johnson can probably quote the whole poem. I wouldn’t put it past him.
We know his type. Literary and posh, the kind of Englishwomen I picture wearing faded floral prints and cooking on Aga stoves. There’s more fun to be had in an educated conquest, even if they squeal later. But the likes of Johnson just respond, ‘‘What nonsense, it never happened.’’
I am reminded of Donald Trump, with his ‘‘grab them by the p….’’ gallantry to women. They might be brothers from another mother, the same tousled yellowish locks, the same way with women, and the way they resort to jabbering instead of normal speech when cornered.
Johnson ‘‘can’t remember’’ groping Charlotte Edwardes at a Spectator lunch soon after he became its editor, but she can. She can remember sitting bolt upright and flinching as he squeezed her thigh, then discovering later that he’d groped the woman seated on the other side of him as well. He’s possibly on permanent autopilot.
Another literary allusion emerged when Johnson, bothered yet again with her account, mumbled about the inevitability of coming under ‘‘shot and shell’’, a reference to The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
It’s handy to have English literature at one’s metaphorical fingertips, even if the poem describes an appalling lapse in judgment by a commanding officer in the British army that led to pointless, therefore glorious, British dead.
I sense a no-deal Brexit in the air.
In his defence, Johnson says he ran a ‘‘feminocracy’’ when mayor of London. How thoughtful. The human chooks he gathered about him were – naturally – beneath him in the pecking order.
As for the groping, comedian Shappi Khorsandi backs up Edwardes, recalling the time Johnson grabbed and squeezed her hand under the table before a TV show was about to be recorded. Coming from a man she’d never met before, she found it weird. Others find it odd that Johnson helped channel funds to an American businesswoman, and yet others were intrigued at his shouting match with his current girlfriend in her flat just as he rose to power.
This happened as his second marriage, which he entered into as a result of being unfaithful to his first wife with his second, fell apart. And now the current girlfriend is in a familiar scenario. It’s hard keeping track of the various liaisons, I imagine.
Meanwhile, politics. Protesters in Cambridge condemned Johnson’s fancy footwork when he prorogued Parliament, reading aloud Percy Bysshe Shelley’s radical poem, The Mask of Anarchy.
The poem was written to protest against the Peterloo massacre of peaceful protesters in Manchester 200 years ago. They wanted the vote, and died for it. Now look where it got them.