The English and Welsh voted for a cuddly puppet

FIRST of all, I would like to wish Boris Johnson and his fiancée Carrie a happy Hugmanay and a Guid New Year. I’d like to but I can’t. I might have wished it had they spent the New Year in Sedgefield or Bishop Auckland. But they didn’t. So I can’t.

In a way, Mustique was a good choice. It’s a private island. So people like you and me, or journalists or photographers, won’t get to see Mr Johnson in his Speedos. We must be grateful for small mercies. A rock star friend of mine who regularly visits Mustique tells me that the staff have been told that they will be immediately sacked if they take photos of Mr Johnson, whether in his Speedos, fullydressed, sober or slightly tipsy.

OK. Enough about Mustique. Let me tell you about the highlight of my year. Well, actually it’s a lowlight. I’m an expat Scot (Dumbarton Academy, Glasgow University, the two greatest educational institutions in the world, in case you were wondering). On December 12 this year I got up at the crack of dawn. I was the first person at my polling station in Richmond upon Thames before 7am.

Don’t laugh, but a wee voice was telling me that if you’re first to vote, it will count more. It will set the trend. It will influence the exit polls. I know that’s stupid, but I’m Scottish.

So I voted. I’m not politicallymotivated. I’ll vote for whomever is best for the nation my whole family fought (and died) for. Obviously, there’s no SNP down here so the choice was simple: Johnson or not Johnson. So I voted Libdem. We massacred the incumbent Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith, beaten by a landslide. A week later, on December 19, the telly said that Boris Johnson had promoted Mr Goldsmith to the House of Lords and he’d therefore stay part of Mr Johnson’s cabinet.

So now we have Lord Goldsmith, a nice boy – I know him personally and even voted for him in a previous election. Wee Zac never worked a day in his life. Yet he will have a major say in the future of the folks of Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, even Scotland. Can you believe that?

And Boris Johnson talks of democracy, and of corruption in other countries. The just-overone-third of Brits (check it out – 17.4 million out of 45 million) who voted for Brexit in 2016 were told that the European Union was an “evil, unelected imperialist empire.” Unelected? Every Member of the (still) 28-nation European Parliament (the MEPS) was democratically elected. Otherwise, how would Nigel Farage have got there?

Imperialist? This coming from a nation which colonized North America, much of Africa, India, Pakistan and much of the

Caribbean? The nation which banished the Palestinians from their homeland? The nation which created racism in the first place? And we’re meant to believe that Europe is imperialist. Gimme a break.

The December 12 election was an English and Welsh election. The best-educated and wisest folks in these islands – in Scotland, Northern Ireland (and I don’t include that lightly, I’ve spent many years there), the big English cities and London – feel European, want to be European and always will. The NFKAGB (Nation formerly known as Great Britain) is not great any more. Get used to it. We’re tiny. We no longer rule the waves, we should no longer want to. In the EU, we had a powerful voice. Merely because of our history.

Look. The English and Welsh voted for a cuddly puppet manipulated by a puppet-master called Cummings. God bless them, the English and Welsh. They got conned.

But they’ll always be welcome in Scotland. To quote a young man who died a couple of thousand years ago. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Let’s be honest, though. People voted for Mr Johnson because they see him as Churchill. We’re British. We won the wars. The Yanks, Canadians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Indians, Gurkhas, French resistance had nothing to do with it.

So let me end on another lowlight. For as long as I can remember, our Christmas Day was built around the Queen’s speech.

But when Her Maj came on this year, she let me down. She first talked about the Yanks landing on the moon. Then she mentioned something that happened 75 years ago. Then she had the gall to say we must move on.

Your royal highness, my family moved on from D-day 75 years ago. We killed a lot of Germans. Now their country is more successful than ours. So let’s move on and try to catch up with them.

People voted for Mr Johnson because they see him as Churchill. We won the wars