The Boris Johnson Show: Not a Comedy

[Stavros]

All spruced up and ready to kiss the hands of our Noble, and Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Boris Johnson, who, according to the Princess Royal of the USA, Ivanka Kushner, will tomorrow become the Prime Minister of the United Kingston. Not sure if that is Kingston-upon-Thames, or Kingston-upon-Hull. The difference? Swans in the former, skittles and a pint in t'other.

[Crazytrucker]

When Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary last month, it meant that for the first time since 1721, there were no Old Etonians in the British Government, defined as the Cabinet of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Eton College was founded by King Henry VI in 1440 to educate poor boys who would then be permitted entry to the King's College, Cambridge, which Henry founded in 1441. It has since become one of the most exclusive -and expensive- schools in the world; 19 British Prime Ministers have been Old Etonians, the last one being David Cameron, a few years younger than Boris when he was there, and regarded by Boris as a silly little twerp. It is not known if David fagged for Boris at Eton, but they were both members of the Bullingdon Club when they 'went up' to Oxford.

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (born New York City, June 1964 when his father was studying economics at Columbia -he has dual US and British Nationality) has been in the news because of an article he published in The Telegraph on Monday 6th August 2018. (article is hidden behind a paywall).

The article concerns the legal ban that Denmark has imposed on people wearing full-face clothing, and though it has been called the 'Burqa Ban' because when debated in Parliament it was this item and the Niqab that was most cited, in fact the law covers more than the Niqab, and

• forbids the wearing of full-face veils such as the niqab, balaclavas, face-covering ski masks, face masks and fake beards.
  
• It does not include protective masks, winter clothing such as scarves or costumes, motorcycle helmets and masks often worn during Carnival or at Halloween.

https://www.dw.com/en/denmark-bans-f...lic/a-44021340

[The law may have included the last clause cited above because when a similar law in Austria was passed it led to two men being arrested: one was dressed as a rabbit, the other as a shark].

These details are lost on Johnson who has been accused of Islamophobia with multiple calls for him to apologise for an article in which, written in his flippant style, he likened the appearance of a woman in a Niqab to a 'letterbox' and also wrote 'If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber' arguing simultaneously that such woman should remove their veils in public spaces or when talking to him as an MP at his surgery but that Denmark was wrong to make this clothing illegal. It is not even known if anyone has ever worn a Burqa in Denmark and they estimate the law affects less than 200 Muslim women. The difference in clothing can be seen here-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/24118241

This is how Boris Johnson, who in the first part of the article lauds Denmark's 'Liberal' culture and defends the view of it proposed by 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill -'that you should be able to do what you want provided you do no harm to others'- appeared to defend a basic principle of liberal democracy, while raising the flag of prejudice against Muslims to appease those in his party and anywhere else he wants to support his long-term campaign to be the Prime Minister, because that is his greatest dream, something he cannot let go of, believing it is his destiny. Or some other inflated rubbish of the kind only his bloated idiot can invent.

It goes deeper, though because Johnson has been meeting Steven Bannon, who is on a quest to revive European fascism through something he calls 'the Movement,' bringing like-minded people across Europe together to oppose most of the Liberal values Johnson claims to defend in the Telegraph article. Indeed, there is some belief that when John Bolton met -in secret and in violation of Diplomatic Protocol- the European Research Group of Tory MPs in July, it was to convey the President's message: Theresa may must Go! Replace her with Boris! Bolton's visit taking place shortly before the President gave his interview to Rupert Murdoch's comic, The Sun, in which he suggested May was not up to the job of PM and that he liked Boris Johnson.

Where is Boris Johnson headed? The calls for disciplinary action will probably not produce more than censure, because Theresa May knows that Boris Johnson is popular in the party -but not all the MP's who will select the candidates to succeed her- and doesn't want to give him more power than he already has. But on Radio 4 today (Weds 8th August 201 Dominic Grieve MP said explicitly that were Johnson to be elected leader he would leave the Conservative Party, regarding Johnson in his words as 'an unfit and improper person to lead the Conservative Party'; raising the prospect that either Johnson could split the party if elected, or if expelled, would take a lot of Tories with him.

So now we have Labour tearing itself apart over anti-Semitism, with Corbyn's leadership challenged; and the Conservative Party convulsed by Islamophobia with Theresa May under fire because of her useless Brexit plans.

To conclude: the Boris Johnson Show is not a comedy, or a tragedy. It is a warning. As in the USA, it is democracy itself that is threatened.

And here is the man himself, describing the Republican candidate in the US elections as unfit to be President-

[Crazytrucker]

BloJob is inherently a lazy SOB, who is only out for himself and his paymasters, he would and probably has eaten his own large intestines to get the keys to #10 though I suspect he'll barely be able to move his furniture and his tart into the place before he's evicted! He cares not a jot for anyone with less than multi millionaire status, to paraphrase my late Mum, BloJob is all wind and piss and will fuck us here in the UK like we've never been fucked before, if we thought the last 4 PM's we've had were bad we ain't seen nothing yet, he's only had the job a week, elected by a few thousand dead folk from the Shires, not by us I might add! He will take us to hell in a handcart and not give a shit about it for he has assembled around him the most right wing Cabinet not seen since the days of Hitler and the Reichstag! He has scraped the bottom of a very deep and dirty barrel to put this lot together, to quote Fraser from Dad's Army, "we're doomed I tell yer, we're all doomed!"

Attachment 1176154

[Stavros]

Ouch!

[buttslinger]

Bring the HEAT CrazyTrucker, you warmed up my old cockles.
Who's Boris Johnson?

[sukumvit boy]

Wow , I didn't realize how crazy this guy was , being an American we don't get the thing in perspective on the news here , but this recent New Yorker magazine article opened my eyes.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...-boris-johnson

[buttslinger]

I think the problem with Johnson over there and Trump over here isn't that we don't understand them, the problem is we do understand them. And not that you don't believe them, they lie. What is impossible to believe is that the majority of our fellow Countrymen voted for them.

[filghy2]

What is impossible to believe is that the majority of our fellow Countrymen voted for them.

Actually they didn't. BoJo was never voted in by the electorate. He's only PM because a majority of only 160,000 Conservative party members voted for him. As you should know, Trump received 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He only got 46 per cent of the vote.

[buttslinger]

Actually they didn't. BoJo was never voted in by the electorate. He's only PM because a majority of only 160,000 Conservative party members voted for him. As you should know, Trump received 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He only got 46 per cent of the vote.

Thanks for the correction.

[Stavros]

Rumours have been floating around that Boris Johnson can't cope with the pressures of being Prime Minister, that he has not fully recovered from his bout of Covid 19, and will be gone in six months. I think the aim of the rumours is to give vent for those members of his party who think he has lost control of the Government. The shambles over A level and GCSE results, and the 11 u-turns the Government has made on health policy since March (see link below) have undermined public confidence, with the result that a spectacular election vctory in December now looks like a one-off oddity that mostly happened because so few people could vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Having transformed the Conservative Party into a Brexit party, I think he is desperate to lead the English into a new dawn of Freedom at midnight on December 31st, and the real question is, if the UK leaves without a trade deal of any substance, willl Boris be Prime Minister on December 31st 2021?

As for the curious case of Ministerial Responsibility. the exams fiasco is now blamed on a 'mutant algorithm'. One assumes a now sentient computer, fed with an algorithm by the exams regulator OFQUAL, pinged to itself, 'I can do better than this' and the mutant was born.
Or it could be that a human being somewhere knew months ago there was an algorithm and was 100% confident it would produce better results than teacher assessments, and is thus unable to explain how it all went wrong. That the person or persons involved made the wrong decision, is of course speculation that will appear as fact -or not- in the report into the fiasco when it appears, probably next year when the news is all about some trade dispute with Bulgaria, or Tuvalu, or most likely something fishy.

It at least enables Boris to shift responsibility to a computer when he is after all, as Prime Minister, the man responsible for it all. Maybe if he was actually doing his job, he might know more about what happens, and not delegate everything to the galactic superbrain of Super-Information, Dominic Cummings, who I am reliably informed is not an Android.

Responsibility -is this now the dirtiest word in politics?- be it the UK, the USA, Belarus, Russia, China, Brazil -the list goes on....

"Boris Johnson got an angry response after telling school pupils that the exam results crisis was caused by a “mutant algorithm” and he was glad it had been “sorted out”.
The National Education Union (NEU) called the prime minister “brazen” after he appeared to shrug off responsibility for the fiasco."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...r-exams-fiasco

U-turn if you want to, the Government will carry on spinning, around and around-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...s-and-missteps