Boris Johnson: a choricete, Gorgeous Gus or neither?

 

During a brief stay in Málaga I read a report of a senior member of the Partido Popular (PP) who held a meeting with legal figures who are members of an organization called Transparencia y Justicia (sic) to discuss how to suppress a police investigation. She was accused of avoiding a police fine by driving away and running over an officer’s motorbike. During a recording of the meeting the politician referred to two other senior PP figures as choricetes. A waiter in my hotel explained to me that a choricete is a thief, or one who greedily eats all the chorizo. However, a young bookseller in one of Málaga’s three independent bookstores told me that the chorizo derivation is a popular misconception. Choricete, he said, is an Andaluz term derived from chori, the Spanish Gypsy word for thief. The PP knows a lot about choricetes. A political scandal known as the Trama Gürtel, which has been under investigation since 2007, has rumbled on for years as numerous PP politicians have been found guilty of illegal fundraising, receiving sobresueldos (salary top-ups) and other illegal financial gains.

 

While we were in Málaga, the former King Juan Carlos (now known as the Rey Emérito) made his first visit to Spain since his abdication. He could have been remembered as the king installed by a Fascist dictator to preserve his legacy, but who instead helped to manage Spain’s transition to democracy and faced down an attempted military coup. Sad to say, Juan Carlos is now reviled as the king of Spain’s choricetes, known to have received large bribes to influence the allocation of government contracts. He has escaped prosecution only because the monarch has immunity from prosecution.

 

Juan Carlos sailing with friends during his visit in May

As we marked the platinum jubilee of our own monarch here in Britain, the Queen’s undoubted commitment to her duties stood in stark contrast to the behaviour and character of her current Prime Minister. Now, I do not think that Boris Johnson is a choricete in the sense that he has received corrupt payments, but I do think he is abjectly morally degenerate. It is common knowledge that his tastes exceed his income and that he eagerly accepts gifts from wealthy donors whose identity he is reluctant to disclose: for example, expensive holidays, an extravagant refurbishment of his Downing Street flat which far exceeded the budget allocated to each Prime Minister. But that does not put him in the league of Juan Carlos.

 

I think it is fair to say that even his admirers consider Johnson to be a bit of a loveable rogue. He has created a persona that has made him the most talented politician in Britain, in the sense that he seems able to persuade people who would not normally consider supporting a Conservative to vote for him. Thus, he was elected twice to be mayor of London, a city that is otherwise solidly Labour Party territory. He managed this feat by presenting himself as a surprisingly liberal mayor and – well – simply “Boris”. While his party became ever more anti-foreigner and anti-immigration, Johnson lauded the benefits that immigration had brought to our capital. While the Conservatives became an ever more small state party, Johnson enthusiastically favoured expanding public transport, and had an eye for expensive voter-pleasing projects, especially if they involved alliteration of the letter B. Thus, he introduced Boris Bikes that could be rented from and returned to bike stations around the city. Boris Buses, a nostalgic modern version of the iconic London red bus, the Routemaster, replaced the very un-Boris bendy buses. However, their windows did not open and their air-conditioning was inadequate. He proposed a floating airport in the mouth of the Thames rather than expanding runway capacity at Heathrow airport (which he vowed to oppose by lying down in front of the bulldozers) and commissioned Thomas Heatherwick to design a pedestrian-only “garden bridge” over the Thames, no doubt in part because of its alliterative potential (Boris Bridge). Neither project came to pass. The new runway at Heathrow was later approved under another Conservative Prime Minister when Johnson was Foreign Secretary. When the Heathrow project was debated in the House of Commons Johnson found that he urgently needed to visit India so that he did not have to cast his vote. He no longer talks of lying down in front of bulldozers. The garden bridge was eventually abandoned after Johnson left office as mayor at a sunk cost of some £250,000. However, he evidently had some difficulty in abandoning his search for a memorial Boris Bridge: when he became Prime Minister he proposed a bridge to connect Northern Ireland to Scotland. It too has been abandoned. Although most of his gestures as mayor had a certain liberal tinge, his innate Conservative instincts occasionally showed through. He responded to riots in London in 2011, caused by the police shooting dead a black man, by purchasing two used German water cannons which have never been used because he failed to ensure that they had legal approval to be used in the UK.        

 

He arranged to be photographed frequently, ideally engaged in some mildly comic stunt to prove that he is a “real person” not a “traditional politician”, who can speak his mind and say what others, intimidated by “political correctness gone mad”, dare not. Thus, he could write newspaper columns that described the “watermelon smiles” of African “picanninies”, or referred to gay men as “tank-top bumboys”. He invented fake news before Donald Trump had even thought of the term. He made his name as a journalist by filing stories from Brussels about dastardly and/or absurd European regulations, a favourite hobby horse of the fervently anti-EU brigade of the Conservative Party. Ludicrous as these stories often were (e.g. an edict to standardize condom sizes to accommodate the small penises of Italian men), Johnson has never been able to stop himself deploying a convenient lie to lampoon the EU. In 2019 he denounced the EU for requiring kippers in vacuum-sealed packaging to be transported on a “plastic ice pillow” as an example of ridiculous and onerous EU regulation. The only problem with this amusing tale was that the regulation in question was actually a British government requirement.

 

Searching for a metaphor to explain Johnson’s uncanny political appeal, I remembered a regular story in the boys’ comic, The Victor, which arrived weekly at the Jacobs home in Ipswich in the 1960s. A regular feature of the Victor was Gorgeous Gus, the story of a British aristocrat who, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, bought a football club, a quintessentially working-class institution. Gus was not only the owner, he was also, naturally, being of superior aristocratic stock, the star player in whatever position he was required to perform. He would typically sit on the bench in a silk dressing gown attended by his butler Jenkins, waiting to be called on in the event of a player being injured, which invariably happened. After his butler had removed and carefully folded his dressing gown, Gus would enter the field to rescue his team. If the team was losing, he would score the winning goals. Everything Gus did was effortlessly achieved, without the need to run, hurry or break a sweat (perish the thought that a gentleman should sweat) unlike his working-class players. If required to keep goal, he expended minimal effort to maximum effect. Instead of leaping to save a high shot, he would turn to face his goal and wait for the ball to strike the crossbar before rebounding straight into his hands at a convenient height.

 

I was more than once told a story by an old Etonian member of the House of Lords, who probably thought of himself as a sort of modern-day Gus. He claimed (apocryphally I am sure) that when he was at Eton his he and classmates challenged a group of coalminers to change places with them. The Eton boys worked in the mines and the miners took classes at Eton. According to the old Etonian, the miners found the work at Eton much too much or them. In other words, privileged Eton boys were effortlessly superior to the most radical working-class group at the time. This old Etonian clearly fancied himself as a sort of super Gus.

 

There is a lot of Gus in Boris Johnson, but there is one difference between the two. For boys (like the four Jacobs brothers) who read the Victor, Gus embodied the character traits of the British aristocracy that we were encouraged to admire: a man of superior intelligence and ability, graciously condescending, honourable. Gus would never stoop to foul an opponent or break the rules. Johnson has created a jovial, somewhat buffoonish pseudo-aristocratic character, Boris being Boris as the saying goes, who considers rules an absurd impediment to his ambitions and desires. Gus would never play the buffoon for self-advancement, nor would he lie or denigrate others as Johnson delights in doing.

 

One might be tempted to reassure oneself that, unworthy as he is of holding his high office, Johnson will eventually cease to be Prime Minister, just as he was replaced as Mayor of London after his two terms, by a Labour politician, Sadiq Khan. However, as Prime Minister Johnson has a malign agenda which could do permanent damage to the United Kingdom. The charge sheet is long, too long to cite in full, so here is a small sample:

·      Johnson is the man who “got Brexit done”. Brexit has already wrought cultural damage: Britain has left the Erasmus Programme which enabled students to study at any university in any EU country and has failed to make arrangements to continue UK membership of the EU’s Horizon scientific research programme. At a more mundane level, visits from schools in the EU to the UK have ceased almost entirely because of the costs and administrative burden of new UK immigration controls. Trade with the EU has plummeted, some economic sectors have permanently lost market share in EU countries, administrative costs and taxes have increased.

·      As the damage caused by Brexit increases and spreads, our political class, including Johnson’s opponents, and most of our media remains silent on the topic because Johnson has created a narrative in which anybody who questions Brexit is an undemocratic and unpatriotic “remoaner” (or “remainiac”). He paints a picture of plucky little Britain standing alone against the evil empire of the EU (on one occasion he compared the EU’s behaviour to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine).

·      Johnson’s Brexit imperils the very existence of the UK. When Scots voted against independence from the UK in 2014, they were told by the Conservative government in London that an independent Scotland would cease to be a member of the EU. The same London government then called an “in-out” referendum on EU membership in 2016 in which Scots voted to remain in the EU. They now find themselves taken out of the EU against their will. Similarly, the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. In order to “get Brexit done” Johnson proposed, agreed with the EU and signed the Northern Ireland Protocol, which keeps Northern Ireland in the very EU free market which the rest of the UK has left. Johnson falsely claimed that the Protocol would not require any customs checks between the UK mainland and Northern Ireland, and now argues that the very checks that he claimed would not exist justify unilateral abrogation of the Protocol, against the wishes of the majority of Northern Ireland’s elected politicians and therefore, presumably, of its voters. He also claims that the EU has refused to negotiate changes to the Protocol. The truth is that the EU has negotiated and offered changes, but Johnson is insisting on rewriting the text of the Protocol in ways that he knows the EU cannot accept. This narrative conveniently ignores the assurances given by Johnson and his associates during the Brexit referendum campaign that trade with the EU would continue much as it had in the free market because the EU needs the UK as much as the UK needs the EU. Now, his government explains that it was compelled to sign the Northern Ireland Protocol because the EU had the upper hand in negotiations. In short, Johnson has repeatedly lied to his own people and to the EU.

·      Johnson is undermining democratic norms in the UK. His government passed a bill that requires photo ID in order to vote, supposedly to deter fraud should it occur in the future, but certainly not not in the present since electoral fraud does not exist. Because the independent Electoral Commission investigated allegations that the pro-Brexit campaign in the 2016 referendum received illegal donations, the Johnson government has ended its independence. A government minister now dictates the objectives and policies of the commission. Johnson ignored an investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 referendum.

·      Johnson has actively undermined norms of ethical conduct, the rule of law and has sought so stifle dissent. His prorogation of Parliament to end debate of Brexit was unlawful. His government has proposed to restrict citizens’ access to judicial review, the most effective means to challenge the government’s conduct. New legislation restricts the right to protest and gives the police new and arbitrary powers to do so. The government recently revised the Ministerial Code, which is supposed to set standards for ministers’ conduct. The revision removed the requirement for ministers to act with honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability. The government further proposes to reform the Human Rights Act so as to give government ministers the right to ignore rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. In other words, politicians will give themselves the right to ignore the rule of law just as Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Mohammed Bin Salman and other autocrats and dictators do. If one is tempted to think that UK ministers would never behave in the arbitrary manner of a foreign autocrat, one needs only remember the WIndrush scandal.

 

Boris Johnson is not a Gorgeous Gus. He is a disreputable man who is a danger to the integrity of our country and to our rights and freedoms.