STRANGE STATESMEN
Boris Johnson and the Euro-Mythconception
The urban myths we invent about our politicians tell us a lot about what we think of them. It’s the same with the European Union itself, and the myths we tell ourselves about that much-maligned body. Did they really ban bent bananas? No, but it’s easy to imagine this was precisely the kind of thing those interfering, faceless Eurocrats would do, if they ever got the chance! The straight bananas idea is like the ur-myth template for the whole Euro-Myth field, in that while it is literally untrue, in spirit it is rather accurate. There are indeed unnecessary EU regulations relating to the classification and shape of bananas, but no demand that bent ones be banned. After all, have you ever
1 bought a ruler-straight banana? No, because such strange fruit are nowhere naturally to be found, any more than square strawberries. However, to adapt that great European Voltaire’s old saying, “If straight bananas did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them”. So somebody did…
EUROPEAN WRONG CONTEST
The Euro-Myth was more-or-less coined by our new PM Boris in a former life as Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph between 1989 and 1994, under the editorship of Max Hastings. Hastings knew full well that the stories Johnson (who had previously been sacked from the Times for inventing a quote) filed about the EU were basically made-up, but they were funny and readers loved them, so he kept on asking for more. According to Johnson, the EU intended to officially reclassify snails as fish, ban pink sausages and prawn cocktail crisps and employ specially-trained snoopers to sniff animal-dung in order to ensure it all possessed an officially approved scent of “Euro-manure”. This created a snowball effect, as other newspapers, in particular Eurosceptic tabloids like the Sun and Daily Mail, began imitating Johnson’s example and concocting silly-season stories of their own, all year round. The basic idea was to get hold of a new piece of Brussels legislation and then wilfully stretch its meaning so that, while dull in reality, it appeared to be suggesting something totally absurd and comical. Reporters started getting ear-bashings from editors if they failed to follow Johnson’s template; and so it was that sowing lies became an obligatory part of any good Brussels correspondent’s jobdescription (see the ‘EU Mythconceptions’ panel for some classic examples). Such has been Johnson’s influence that the European Commission has now created its own Snopesstyle website devoted to dispelling an entire A-Z of such Euro-Myths. Resurrected versions of tall Johnsonian tales still pop up today, all across the continent; in 2010, Polish media reported that the EU did indeed now intend to reclassify snails as “inland fish”, so that French snail-farmers could gain fraudulent access to EU fishing-subsidies.
2 When, in April 2019, Press regulator IPSO demanded the Telegraph amend online archive editions of a Johnson column containing patently false data, the newspaper tried to defend its star columnist (annual fee: £275,000 per annum, a sum he once dismissed as “chicken-feed”) by advancing the argument that the piece was “clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters”.3 Boris seemed proud of his unique literary invention, though, telling the BBC in 2005 that “Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote… was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.”
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In 2003, Johnson wrote an essay with the Spike Milligan-esque title Europe: My Part in Its Downfall, in which he boasted of how he had defeated the megalomaniac plans of Jacques Delors to, as the Telegraph had it in a blazing front-page headline, ‘Rule Europe’. This was in 1992, in the run-up to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which formalised the change of the old EEC (European Economic Community) into the EU (European Union), with its Single Market in goods, capital and services, and to prepare for which all kinds of harmonisation regulations were needed. Johnson was now convinced that Delors’s project was doomed, an epiphany rammed home when he saw a Spaniard remain totally unmoved, “staring at me with an expression of real pain”, while Boris himself laughed heartily at Manuel falling over in an episode of Fawlty Towers. In Denmark, the people were given a vote about signing up to Maastricht. They said no (a referendum result later reversed) after, Boris said, they read his article about Delors’s plans, “photocopied it a thousandfold” and “marched the streets of Copenhagen with my story fixed to their banners”. Or so BoJo liked to imagine. In fact, he admits this was a mere “babyish” fantasy, and that his “stunning, historic and now wholly forgotten article” was merely tomorrow’s fish-andchips wrapper.
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The way that fact and fiction quickly mingled within the realm of the Euro-Myth can be seen in the saga of the ‘Euro-Sausage’. This was invented for the 1984 Christmas special of the classic BBC sit-com Yes, Minister, in which the titular Minister, Jim Hacker, sees off a threat from Brussels to standardise sausages across the continent and re-label the British variety as an “emulsified high-fat offal tube” due to the low-quality meat-content of the average British Banger. However, in 2001 Brussels made genuine proposals to re-label sausages if they contained low-grade “mechanically recovered meat” and the story was recycled by the Sun as if the TV show had come true – even though it hadn’t. The thing was, in Yes, Minister, Jim Hacker manipulates his own media campaign against the ‘Euro-Sausage’
FACT AND FICTION MINGLED IN THE REALM OF THE EURO-MYTH
in such a way that, by appearing to stand up to interfering Brussels bureaucrats, that he ends up becoming PM. Did Johnson, already convinced of the EU’s imminent demise by Manuel, model the most recent phase of his political career upon that of another decades-old BBC sit-com character? If so, maybe he had good reason to. In April 2019, it was reported that the EU was making actual proposals to force vegetarian burgers to be relabelled as “discs” and vegetarian sausages to be relabelled as… “tubes”. Talk about ostension.
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During the 2016 Referendum campaign, Johnson specifically mentioned some of his old Euro-Myths, leading to accusations that the EU he was campaigning against was an imaginary Yes, Minister-style version of the institution he had created in his Telegraph columns, rather than the real thing. There is some truth to this – but not all criticism of Boris is entirely fair. When he claimed in 2016 that only 4% of EU Commission employees were British, he was loudly accused of lying … but when this was looked into, it transpired he had overestimated how many were British. In fact, it was only 3.5%. Likewise, on the campaign-trail, he moaned about Brussels saying bananas could not be sold in bunches of more than three. Boris had indeed blundered… very slightly. In 2011, the EU prohibited retailers from selling most bananas in bunches of fewer than four (except as single fruits), rather than more than three. As Johnson’s basic point was to illustrate how petty many Brussels regulations really are, does it matter that he said more than three instead of fewer than four? The Europhiles who accused him of lying were perhaps more deceptive here than he was.
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THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF BRUSSELS
To combat anti-EU lies invented by other men called Boris, in 2015 Brussels began funding a website, EUvsDisinfo.eu, aimed at countering anti-EU propaganda pumped out from Putin’s Russia. This site does some good work, such as exposing a series of bizarre pseudo-documentaries with titles like Europe Is the Kingdom of the Gays which seek to convince Eastern European audiences that the EU has a secret plot to turn schoolchildren transgender via the influence of homosexual politicians. The EU’s team also found amusing Kremlinpushed nonsense claiming the world is actually flat and that English secretagents must have tried to kill the Skripals because Shakespeare’s plays are filled with poisonings.
However, there is a certain genre of Euro-Myth not busted on any EU website, because they happen to actually be true. For example, Brussels really does waste money on producing ‘free’ (to the consumer, not the taxpayer) EU-themed colouring books for schoolchildren – kids need plenty of grey pencils handy to colour in all those faceless bureaucrats. This was revealed by the Daily Telegraph in 2013 when it found a multi-language publication, Mr and Mrs MEP and Their Helpers, of which 15,000 copies had been printed at your expense, with pics of Eurocrats’ free limousines to colour in. The glossy booklet, intended for use in a ‘Kids’ Corner’ during EU parliament opendays, was waved around by then-PM David Cameron as a prime example of EU waste; but, such was the Telegraph’s reputation, some EU leaders like Angela Merkel refused to accept that the booklet was real, thinking it merely a Boris-aping parody. But it wasn’t. And, when asked how much it had cost to produce, officials refused point-blank to release any figures. But still the EU did not
8 learn. As an alternative to Panini footballsticker albums, in 2014 they produced an EU Farming Policies sticker-book, so kids could collect images of vegetables, grain silos and other things relating to the exciting, childfriendly world of the Common Agricultural Policy.
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The reasoning given by rampant Federasts for targeting helpless Euro-infants in this way is that “it is strategically wise to go where the resistance is least” to such propaganda, as revealed in a rather creepy document, Reflection on Information and Communication Policy of the European Union, whose existence was revealed by Boris Johnson in the Telegraph of 1 April 1993 – but this was no April Fool’s joke. Following continent-wide disquiet over the Maastricht Treaty, Jacques Delors commissioned megabrained Belgian MEP Willy de Clercq to head a Comité des Sages, or Committee of Wise Men, to fight back against scepticism about “the worthiness of the good project”. These Elders of Brussels plotted to create an EU-wide Office of Communications, devising
new methods to market Europe as a “brand”. They proposed that the text of treaties like Maastricht be downplayed as “far too technical and remote from daily life” for ordinary Euro-plebs to understand. Instead, the EU should “invest in programme-units” and encourage soap-operas to insert pro-EU storylines, so that the brain-dead populace would subliminally imbibe how wonderful the EU is simply by seeing Phil Mitchell praise the Schengen Zone. Children and women, having weak minds, should be particularly targeted, the report implied. “This will probably be the first time in European history that a statesman makes a direct appeal to women,” the document laughably stated, while citizens should be encouraged to think of the “nurturing” Europa as their loving mother, with the EU being “instinctively opposed to wars and aggression”, just as all females are. The “mystical connotations” of the approaching year 1999 should be drawn into all this too, in a rolling media-programme that “must be total and continuous”. It was “a welldocumented fact” that “most people derive their ‘knowledge’ of complex subjects” from viewing TV, wrote De Clercq – do note those inverted commas – so this policy of counterBorising was bound to work. Watching doctored shows would “tell [voters] all they need, or have patience, to know.”
In schools, history books should be rewritten to “ensure a European dimension is given to our past”, and newspapers massaged to provide “a more positive line” about the EU, by “establishing systematic bridges with the national and regional Press”. Crucially, “Newscasters and reporters must themselves be targeted, they must themselves be persuaded about the EU. It is crucial to change their opinions first, so that they subsequently become enthusiastic supporters of the cause… The media must be persuaded to present the achievements, the benefits, the opportunities [of the EU] in a positive, optimistic way, and not delight in criticism and failure.” Willy also bemusingly suggested targeting bicycle clubs for pro-EU brainwashing with his notat-all Soviet slogan “EUROPEAN UNION TOGETHER TO PROMOTE PROGRESS & PROSPERITY, PROTECTION & PEACE: TOGETHER FOR EUROPE TO THE BENEFIT OF US ALL!” The media should be “willing” to give discount advertising-rates to such “campaigns that are so obviously in the public interest”; campaigns which imparted vital data such as “Who is the EU’s chess champion?” These suggestions led to a temporary walkout of outraged Brussels hacks, who accused the EU of “acting like a military junta”. But resistance was futile.
The EU was already in the business of giving friendly reporters lucrative freelance work for in-house magazines and newspapers that nobody ever read, or commissioning them to perform meaningless ‘research’ tasks on the side, which could double or even triple their salaries – with all expenses paid, naturally, as they always are in Euro-land.
10 Is this blatant corruption of the journalistic process not just as bad as what Johnson did with his own intentionally misleading antiEU articles in the Telegraph? Arguably it is worse. At least Boris’s lies were sometimes funny. As Sir Henry Wotton once said, “An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country” – and there’s many a true word spoken in jest.
NOTES
1 I won’t bore you with the specific details of Commission Regulation 2257/94 and its successors, 1333/2011 and 565/2013; full details are at https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/ bananas-and-brussels/; www.europarl.europa.eu/ unitedkingdom/en/media/euromyths/bendybananas. html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromyth
2 www.crikey.com/au/2016/06/20/boris-johnsonstarted-eu-bashing-before-it-was-cool/; www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/15/ brexit-boris-johnson-euromyths-telegraph-brussels; www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/ boris-johnson-peddled-absurd-eu-myths-andour-disgraceful-press-followed-his; www.politics. co.uk/comment-analysis/2016/07/20/borisgoes-back-to-brussels; www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/feb/26/boris-johnson-latesteuro-myth-brexit; www.rferl.org/a/In_France_Snails_ Are_Now_Fish/1962107.html
3 www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/12/ daily-telegraph-forced-correct-false-brexit-claim-borisjohnson
4 www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/ boris-johnson-peddled-absurd-eu-myths-and-ourdisgraceful-press-followed-his
5 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1441470/ Europe-my-part-in-its-downfall.html
6 https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ europe/6481969.stm; Times, 24 April 2019
7 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/ boris-johnson-accused-of-making-it-up-as-he-goesalong-after-cla/; www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politicseu-referendum-35959948; Boris also mistakenly said that, thanks to the EU, you now “can’t recycle a teabag”. Indeed you cannot recycle a teabag, the BBC Fact-Checking Team pointed out online, but only in the same sense that you cannot recycle a bomb; whatever its faults, the EU should not be blamed for the laws of entropy.
8 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ eu/10148268/Mr-and-Mrs-MEP-colouring-bookbecomes-surprise-hit-of-EU-summit.html; If you visit this website, you can print out full-page reproductions of the booklet for your own children to colour in.
9 Sunday Times, 9 Mar 2014; I couldn’t find any images of this alleged sticker-book online anywhere, though, so hopefully I haven’t just fallen for yet another Euro-Myth myself here …
10 Booker & North, 2016, pp.374-375; http://aei. pitt.edu/29870/1/DE_CLERCQ_REPORT_INFO._ COMM._POLICY.pdf