Off-piste Boris is ready to rock
REVER sat on a train that’s been shunted into a siding? There you sit, immobile, glum, increasingly impotent and impatient. From time to time a passenger announcement speaks confidently of imminent departure. But you don’t move.You start to go crazy with boredom and frustration.
Britain’s been like that over the last three years, hasn’t it? Stuck on a Brexit train to nowhere. Driver May kept coming over the public address, robotically promising we’d be back on track in a jiffy, until she was finally prised out of the cab and replaced by Driver Johnson.
A sudden lurch, a hiss of brakes, and we were jolting forward. Now the scenery, static for so long, flows past the window at increasing speed.We’re on our way again.We have momentum. Sweet relief.
Another massive lift to the spirits is to witness a British prime minister going about their business who isn’t a soul-searing embarrassment in public.
Towards the end of her tortuous tenure I actually had to avert my gaze from the TV whenever Theresa May appeared in front of the cameras. Gurning and bobbing and insisting robotically she was “clear” about whatever tangled syntax she was spouting this time.
She was at her anguished worst when she had to mingle with other world leaders.The body language was painful beyond words. Not that May had many words.Tongue-tied, and clichéd when she did speak, and always horribly tense. No one
knew where to look.And this was our leader... the British prime minister – a social freak!
One of May’s (many) problems was that she weighed every word, every clause, every aside, comment and ad-lib to the n’th degree. Everything was so filtered, checked, cross-checked, reviewed and risk-assessed that she ceased to sound human. Maybot, indeed.
But Boris is gloriously off-piste. He thinks aloud, ad-libs, jokes, and generally has a good time. May would have endured Biarritz; Johnson revelled in it. Did you see his off-the-cuff interview with ITV’s Robert Peston? The PM casually pointed to a huge rock a quarter of a mile out to sea and said he’d swum around it at 7am that morning. (Imagine May doing that?)
Peston couldn’t help grinning (did you notice how many world leaders smiled and laughed and threw their arms around Boris at the G7 this week? They liked him; they really liked him) and then Boris went on to make a terrific metaphor about striking a deal with an intransigent EU.
“From here you can’t tell there’s a hole in that rock,” he said. “There IS a way through, but you won’t find it if you just sit on the beach.”
Johnson, an experienced journalist, has a gift for words. But it’s more than that.Writer Clive James once said something remarkably prescient about broadcasters; he could equally have been talking about politicians.
“It’s not what you actually say that matters – it’s how you come over.”
Boris increasingly comes over as the person who’ll probably walk a snap October general election, and his temporary suspension of Parliament shows he’ll play rough when he has to.The polls are swinging in his favour. As summer turns to autumn, it’s Corbyn who’s being shunted into a siding.