Woof woof! Bouncing Boris loves life at the top
ONE of the things about Boris Johnson is that he enjoys life. He is plainly loving being Foreign Secretary. This only makes Leftwingers all the crosser and that in turn heightens the gaiety of the nation.
They want Boris to look weighed down by worries. They want him squashed, dented, with deep- set eyes and a deathly pallor.
But there he is, full of Bonios, beaming at the world as if to say ‘second helpings? Woof woof. Don’t mind if I do!’ Mr Johnson took Foreign Office Questions in the Commons Chamber yesterday. He has developed pretty fast as a parliamentarian. A year ago he was hopeless in the Chamber (see footage of him asking David Cameron a question about sovereignty roughly a year ago). Now he is far more competent. The voice has become a little less staccato and he is spending more time preparing for the exchanges. He is slightly less fat. I wonder if he has given up drinking. He certainly looks like a man taking more care of his liver.
Yesterday he batted away Opposition complaints about the Trump administration in Washington DC – Labour and SNP MPs seemed to think he was some sort of White House spokesman. He also coped fine with sharp queries about Israel, Ghana, Yemen and more.
Alex Salmond ( SNP, Gordon) asked: ‘Given that the Foreign Secretary once declared that he would not go to New York in case he was mistaken for Donald Trump, is there any chance that President Trump will not come to London on a state visit in case he is mistaken for the Foreign Secretary?’ Laughter. Mr Salmond, as ever, was on to something. Messrs Johnson and Trump are both custardy blonds. It would indeed be calamitous for AngloAmerican relations if, on arrival in London for his state visit, Mr Trump were to be slapped in the face by some willowy Sloane Ranger who told him never to darken her doorstep again. Such incidents, after all, have been said to afflict naughty Boris from time to time.
In response, Boris yesterday told Mr Salmond that he had indeed been mistaken for Mr Trump. It had happened in Newcastle and it ‘rather took me aback’. He added: ‘It also happened in New York, which was a very humbling experience for me.’ Dangerous, too. It would be a bore to be assassinated by mistake.
BORIS’S
hair, though somewhat less tweezered and industrially blow- dried than the Trump barnet, is nonetheless more disciplined now that he is in the Cabinet. A yard or so away from him yesterday sat the poor clerks, now wigless. They looked greatly denuded without the horsehair legal topknots which, at the say of Speaker Bercow, they have just discarded. The top clerk, David Natzler, is a tall, beaky fellow, one of those bookish men who sometimes manage to get out of the house in the morning without their wives firmly reminding them to brush their hair. Yesterday Mr Natzler’s slightly threadbare locks were distinctly undisciplined. How much tidier he appeared when he wore the wig.
When Liz McInnes (Lab, Heywood & Middleton) mentioned suspected corruption by the outgoing president of the Gambia, Boris burbled some Foreign Office spiel before going off piste. He said that when he recently went to the Gambia ‘there were crowds in the street dancing – not necessarily because they were pleased to see me but because they were delighted that the Gambia was being welcomed back into the Commonwealth’.
The thought of Boris surrounded by ululating, boogie- woogieing, quite possibly topless Gambians is a cheering one. Do you think his predecessor, Philip Hammond, even noticed when African ladies bounced around for him? And after a question from Martin Vickers (Con, Cleethorpes) about Kosovo, Boris reported that Tony Blair is so warmly regarded in that part of the world for his part in the war a few years ago, there are now ‘eight 16year-old boys in Kosovo who have been christened Tony Blair’.