He’s clown and out Johnson’s jokes fall flat just like his premiership

PRESS PM ON LETTER BOX SLUR

AN estimated 7.92 million of us are stricken with coulrophobia – a fear of clowns.

I understand. Crazy dress sense, odd manner, weird antics.

Must be terrible for you at the moment.

I’m not sure what the prescription is for genuine coulrophobia.

With the head clown Boris Johnson, probably the only cure is a general election.

At the time of writing we are definitely getting one but no one knows for sure when.

Jeremy Corbyn and the rest of the rebel alliance look like they’re being sensible. They will ignore the chicken jibes and string it out as long as possible. For various reasons.

Jokes

The first is that letting Johnson unravel is simply the right thing to do.

He has promised a metaphorical “do or die” Halloween Brexit. So if he can’t do then he has to die.

Delaying the election means a couple of months of positive press releases dripped out by the government.

No one takes them seriously and they come apart pretty quickly.

The other point is that the more exposure people have to him, the less appealing he will be.

That’s what happening now.

At first it’s funny. Then it’s not. A friend of mind spent the afternoon in an airport bar with a bloke who matched her gin and tonic for gin and tonic over the course of several hours.

He was flirty, funny, had an endless supply of anecdotes and dirty jokes. LOTS of decent performances in a big week in Parliament.

Chief among them was Tan Dhesi’s stinging attack on Boris Johnson at PMQS.

The Opposition benches burst into applause after Britain’s first turban-wearing Sikh MP took him to task over past comments The hours flew by until he looked at his watch, bent down, put his pilot’s hat on and went to try and find his 747.

That’s what’s dawning on people now. The bloke you want to spend the afternoon with is not necessarily the bloke you want at the controls.

Johnson is good on TV, knows lots of long words and has swagger.

But it’s not enough, as we saw at Prime Minister’s Questions.

The same man, of course, but the mood has changed.

The jokes fell flat, the flashes of anger were nastier, the bizarre public in which Johnson likened women wearing burqas to letter boxes.

Mr Johnson spluttered a response but no one was convinced. He has yet to apologise for his remarks.

And he refused to acknowledge his contribution to the 375 per cent spike in reports school insults jarred. It seems the more exposure the public, press and Parliament get to Johnson, the faster the novelty is disappearing.

Jacob Rees-mogg having a lie down didn’t help.

Nor have the three out of three votes lost so far, people defecting the moment he gets up to speak, the 21 “rebels” he’s sacked, police cadets fainting at his speeches, an out-of-control bull, and people asking him to leave town.

And on Thursday, in a Shakespearian flourish, his brother Jo quit.

Shakespearian is right, isn’t it? There of Islamophobia we’ve seen lately. The Tories have yet to prove they are taking Islamophobia seriously despite promising an inquiry.

It needs all of us to follow Slough MP Mr Dhesi’s example and remind them at every possible opportunity. are bits of Macbeth and Hamlet in Mr Johnson, ambition and revenge. Iago too. And Caesar.

Maybe there’s a play to be had. Boris of Uxbridge.

The flawed hero who plots and schemes his way to his dream job – sacrificing all he believes in along the way – only for it to end up destroying him. Maybe we’re living in King Lear, the play where the fool is actually the wisest character.

But I doubt it. Sometimes it’s not Shakespeare. And a tragic hero is just tragic and a fool is just a fool.