Blond butterfly Boris able to transcend party
expecting Ed Miliband to win over the voters.
It just hasn’t happened and it shows no sign of happening. In fact the reverse phenomenon has occurred. People have started off with a liking for Boris and have – almost counter-intuitively – implied a competence from that affection.
Neil Kinnock’s momentary soaking on Brighton beach in 1983 was used against him for a decade to demonstrate his haplessness. Boris suspended, close up, from a zip wire, his legs dangling helplessly, for a full five minutes, on the contrary represents what could happen to any of us. He’s a sport. He is the hero of the age of the ice-bucket challenge.
Despite everything I have thought and predicted, the fact is that now, in a year of decision, voters like Boris, regard him as somehow qualitatively different from the normal politicians and, in all probability, would ‘‘give him a chance’’.
He’s like a man who breaks wind in a lift and everyone wonders what smells so good.
Boris transcends party and
No one seems immune to the London mayor’s charisma, says David Aaronovitch. He’s like a man who breaks wind in a lift and everyone wonders what smells so good.
gives the voter something political to relate to that has nothing to do with manifestos, spending commitments and other tedious electoral fictions. Meanwhile inside he is – and has always been – a man with a very serious sense of purpose. Being able to disguise the unusual intensity of your ambition under a very bearable lightness of being is a great and hypermodern gift.
I have now begun to realise that the question is not ‘‘could Boris lead his party?’’ but rather, ‘‘who could stop him?’’. If David Cameron were to step down, for whatever reason, who would bet on Theresa May or George Osborne out-polling Boris among the Tory grassroots?
In fact, in the event of a parliament so badly hung that no party could assemble a majority, I could even imagine a scenario where Boris, like the Roman aristocrat Cincinnatus, might be called in to save the state. After all, just because David Cameron or Ed Miliband couldn’t form a government, why shouldn’t someone else try? Someone who could bring together people from several parties in a government of all the talents? Someone who had the charm and the steeliness to get very different people to work together? Except, unlike Cincinnatus and more like the hero of his most recent book, Winston Churchill, Boris would – in effect – send for himself.
This fantasy of mine will turn out to be wrong, too. But if it happened, a very large number of British voters who don’t care much for the Tories or even for politicians, would probably – like the people on Channel 4’s Gogglebox – turn to each other on the sofa and say: ‘‘That’s all right. I quite like him."