Thursday 18 February 2021

Boris is Hillary in drag

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I keep saying that Boris Johnson is not Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton in drag, if you can imagine her with eloquence, a sense of humour and a quick mind, which obviously you can't. 

The things he has in common with the Donald are charisma (dread word, Wallace Arnold would say) and the ability to make good jokes, but not ideas or political philosophy.

After he bottled out of his initial, short-lived inclination to try the Swedish policy of going for herd immunity Boris has instituted three lockdowns.

In 2008 when he was Mayor of London he called for an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of (or maybe well over a million) illegal immigrants in London, saying that deporting them from the UK is "just not going to happen". He is right about that last bit. 

He repeated his call for an amnesty in 2013 and in 2015.

Now he has announced that he is in favour of three million Chinese in Hong Kong having the right to settle in the UK. 

Hillary Clinton, eight days before she lost the 2016 election, said that regime change in Syria was her 'top priority'. It was also Boris Johnson's policy as British Foreign Secretary back then and he would happily have helped her achieve it. He rowed back from it after Donald Trump became president and said President Assad could stay for a while. 

He advocated defeating ISIS by using air power, which was reasonable, and thought his hero Churchill would have thought the same. Churchill, who was always warlike, probably would have done and have favoured using chemical weapons

In an article in December 2015 Boris said that ‘Britain should do a deal with the Devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria’ to defeat ISIS, which is very reasonable, so you could say he span round like a weather-cock. 

He has now promised to spend £12 billion to help the UK achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Boris Johnson, unlike Donald Trump, does not have bold, iconoclastic ideas. If he did, he might have come to the conclusion that Nato is obsolete from the UK's point of view and that his countries' enemies are non-state actors. He might have decided that climate change, if it is happening, is not something much can be done about. 

But he is as much a globalist as David Cameron or Hillary. He also, like Messrs Cameron and Blair, wants to be loved and he wants achievements for the history books, but he does not worry about examining received ideas.

Boris was the necessary man to save Brexit from the disaster Theresa May and Olly Robbins had made of it. He has great political gifts, is clever and lucky. He is also an habitual liar, with few convictions, who washes his repulsive skin in women's tears. Even so I find it hard not to like him, but I expect very little or nothing from him now. 

Still, Brexit is enough to secure his place in history. 

And then he almost died of Covid. 

His fame is secure. 

Theresa May and Gordon Brown, by contrast, are already forgotten. 

She leaves no achievement. 

His great, lasting achievement is not adopting the euro and thereby making Brexit possible. 

David Cameron's achievements are Brexit, single sex marriage, letting a princess inherit the throne instead of her younger brother, destroying Libya and destroying the Labour Party in Scotland.

2 comments:

  1. Don’t forget austerity. Another achievement of Call Me Dave.

    Boris seems to be performing effectively with the vaccine. Something to be proud of that may also prove memorable.

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    1. Well pointed out. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is a great achievement by Boris's government, not just for his country but for the world. As for austerity, I got the impression that it wasn't very austere at all but did no good. But honestly I am too far away to know.

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