I LOVE Boris: nobody can say he is not fit for priapus. The pollsters won’t detect this, but I sense there’s still a massive secret admiration for virility in a male politician. Don’t shoot me, I’m just reporting on the data.
Is Boris fit for prime ministerial purpose? Nobody knows. If an uncomplicated personal life was a sign of leadership, Theresa May would have been our greatest PM ever. Why do we want the bland leading the bland?
Even Tony Blair’s neighbours would have described him as someone who kept himself to himself. ‘You’d never guess he was capable of mass murder,’ they’d tell reporters.
Still, imagine how differently ‘invest-e-gate’ would be reported if Boris was a Remainer. Nothing to see here, they’d report, do grow up. They don’t get excited about this sort of thing on the Continent, Zoe Hockey-Sticks would write in the Guardian. It’s time we woke up and read the directive.
A politician’s private life should be just that, they’d say, were the booty on the other foot. At the BBC a completely different set of reporting conditions would apply.
It doesn’t matter what the media say now. There are no unbiased professionals, outside Laura Kuenssberg, Andrew Neil and Matt (the Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist.)
If I eventually become Boris’s damage limitation coach (once they realise those letters I’ve been sending are serious) I intend to channel his rising sap. If God gives your client libido, make lemons.
He’s quite obviously a randy old goat, as they used to say on Carry On films. Our love of that bawdy sense of humour stems from that grudging respect for fertility I mentioned earlier. Harold Steptoe would chide his dad, Albert, with the words You dirty old man. The Corbyn lookalike would return the compliment, branding his son a randy little sod.
If Boris has to explain his private life to the media, maybe he should describe his actions in the exact terms that they’d use if, say, Jean-Claude Juncker was having an affaire de coeur with Angela Merkel. What’s sauce for Goosing Merkel should be sauce for Boris’s Ganders.
The real problem is Boris’s business sense.
It’s bad enough that he’s been taken in by a succession of bridge salesmen. First someone sold him on the idea of a new bridge for London. That left us £53million out of pocket. I wouldn’t mind, but Boris is a historian. You’d think he’d know the story about the American tourist who thought he was buying Tower Bridge.
He’s still falling for the old ‘bridge scam’ now.
Will this man never learn?
Then there was Boris Island, followed by those incompatible water cannons. (They should have kept them. They could just fire the jet streams up in the air. Unlike the iconic fountain on Lake Geneva, our Super Geyser would be mobile! Touche Jet d’eau!)
These purchasing mistakes are forgivable, because Boris is an ambitious visionary. To misquote Ernest Hemingway, you can’t underwrite anything good until you’ve written off a load of rubbish.
What’s great about Boris is that he’s not afraid to take on the difficult challenges.
Still, it’s difficult to believe he was taken in by someone who claimed to be an ethical hacker.
Mind you, I once questioned the veracity of this person’s ‘ethical hacking’ in a regular column I had for Telefonica. I got the push soon after.
I still think the idea of ‘ethical hacking’ is nonsense. But you learn from your mistakes.
So I hope this siren has not fatally lured our Boris on to the rocks.
