BoJo and Winnie: Blunderers in arms
ON the sun-baked slopes of Achi Baba, Gallipoli, Winston Churchill almost got my grandfather killed. Shrapnel from a Turkish shell went through Grampa Cooper’s knee as the Royal Scots Fusiliers tried to seize the hill in July 1915. Gallipoli was a debacle and its chief architect – Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty – was demoted and went to the Western Front trenches with, ironically, the Royal Scots Fusiliers. I’ve always been leery of Churchill as ‘the greatest Briton’. His myth-making glosses over blunders for which Britons paid a high price. So it is with Boris Johnson, who wrote a biography of the former Prime Minister and fancies himself both a latter-day Churchill and future PM. But there really was more to Winnie than a good soundbite and an ability to dash off a barnstorming speech after too much Pol Roger. Foreign Secretary Boris is an inveterate liar so craven as to be ready to offer up a journalist’s home address to a thuggish friend so that he could be assaulted. If the Conservatives think BoJo is the answer to anything, they are asking the wrong question. Johnson will leave them bleeding and broken on some godforsaken hill with only ignominious defeat as reward.