Dishonest, cruel and sly... the withering assault
ON Saturday, former Tory MP Matthew Parris wrote a devastating critique of ‘dangerous charmer’ Boris Johnson in The Times. Here, we reproduce the most cutting extracts about the London Mayor and his leadership ambitions: Look, this is a joke but this is not a joke. Somebody has to call a halt to the gathering pretence that if only you’re sufficiently comical in politics you can laugh everything off. Somebody has to remind us that it’s not enough for those who seek to govern us simply to be: they have to do. Incompetence is not funny. Policy vacuum is not funny. Administrative sloth is not funny.
‘Breaking promises is not funny. A careless disregard for the truth is not funny. Advising old mates planning to beat somebody up is not funny. Abortions and gagging orders are not funny.
‘Creeping ambition in a jester’s cap is not funny. Vacuity posing as merriment, cynicism posing as savviness, a wink and smile covering for betrayal… these things are not funny.
‘There’s a pattern to Boris’s life, and it isn’t the lust for office, or for applause, or for susceptible women, that mark out this pattern in red warning ink. It’s the casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal; and, beneath the betrayal, the emptiness of real ambition: the ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained.
‘In parliament Boris has never shone. He was lacklustre as a junior spokesman (the highest Commons post he reached). His eight years as mayor are characterised by success as a celebrity figurehead and almost no mayoral achievements at all.
‘But if you want to see for yourself a blustering, bantering hole in the air, watch online his encounter on Wednesday this week with Andrew Tyrie MP, chairman of the Treasury select committee. Watch him refusing to admit that his Telegraph claims, that the EU has banned the recycling of teabags and the inflation of balloons by children, were simply false.
‘Watch a portrait-in-miniature of Johnson the politician: underprepared, jolly, sly, dishonest and unapologetic but (and this is the worrying part) horrifyingly vulnerable.