During the recent hustings in Northern Ireland, Boris Johnson made two more commitments (HERE) to add to the growing list of things he is going to do as PM. He has vowed 'under no circumstances' will there be a hard border in
Ireland and never to accept any deal that would
take Northern Ireland out of the UK's customs territory. He has also described the Withdrawal Agreement, which also seeks to avoid a hard border, as a 'dead letter' (HERE).
Remember, his first mention of the Irish border came as early as February 2016 when on another visit to the province he said Brexit would leave the border 'absolutely unchanged'.
However, Johnson's attitude to the backstop has undergone a transformatiom since it was first announced in paragraph 49 of the Joint Report published in December 2017. The report was intended to guarantee there would be no return to a hard border - that arrangements would continue 'absolutely unchanged' - apparently exactly what Johnson wanted.
At the time he tweeted his 'Congratulations to PM for her determination in getting today's deal' while other cabinet ministers like Gove 'heaped praise' on the prime minister for her achievement.
Later Johnson was to claim he had been 'taken in' and privately assured the backstop would never be invoked. More recently he has said there were 'abundant' technical solutions that would avoid a hard border, presumably all or any of which mean the backstop is never invoked. You would think therefore it would be a simple thing to agree the backstop.
The problem of course is that there are no technical fixes to the Irish border problem and Boris' apparent flip-flopping is actually the result of not bothering to read or understand the details. Perhaps this is one of the traits that people like about his character. He is the blustering 'everyman' that also doesn't do detail.
Someone posted a link to a recent article in the FT (HERE no £) by an Oxford contemporary of Johnson, Simon Kuper, which helps to explain a lot about the present lackluster bunch of privileged chancers that we have governing us at present. It's quite a long read, 20 minutes or so but extremely revealing.
It revolves around the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) in the late 80s. They all figured in one way or another, Johnson, Cameron, Gove, Rees-Mogg, Hunt, Toby Young, Simon Stevens (NHS Chief), Mostyn-Owen (BoJo's first wife), Nick Robinson (BBC journalist), Frank Luntz (pollster), George Osborne, Damian Hinds (Education Secretary), Theresa and Phillip May, Daniel Hannan and just about everybody who is anybody in political life now was at Oxford in the late 80s.
Now listen to this from Kuper:
"One thing you learnt at Oxford (even if you weren’t in the Union) was how to speak without much knowledge. Underprepared students would spend much of a tutorial talking their way around the holes in their essay".
"Kalypso Nicolaïdis, professor of international relations, says: “If a student is capable of producing two well-written essays a week, with well-structured arguments, they can kind of get away with not knowing much about the subjects. This may sound superficial, but communicating is useful in life".
Or this:
"You won debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with jokes and ad hominem jibes".
Timothy Garton-Ash the historian is quoted, “Public schools and the culture around them provide a training in superficial articulacy: essay writing, public speaking, carrying it off. The Oxford Union reinforces that, even among those who didn’t go to public school. Compare and contrast the German elite. For me, Gove is the ultimate example.”
Johnson himself is quoted from one of his own clever essays talking about surrounding yourself with a 'deluded collection of stooges' (i.e. Nigel Adams):
In an essay for The Oxford Myth (1988), a book edited by his sister Rachel, Johnson advised aspiring student politicians to assemble 'a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges' to get out the vote. 'Lonely girls from the women’s colleges' who 'back their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness' were particularly useful, he wrote. 'For these young women, machine politics offers human friction and warmth.' Reading this, you realise why almost all Union presidents who become Tory politicians are men. (Thatcher’s domain was OUCA, where she was president in 1946.)
Reading it also helps to understand why we are so badly governed. The people at the top are predominantly clever, erudite men and women (mainly men) who are brought up with a sense of entitlement that they ought to govern us simply because that is what they were born to do. They give all the outward signs of being clever when they are in fact dangerously stupid.
Michael Gove, as Union president in 1988, "wrote a paean to elitism in the Union’s house magazine: 'I cannot overemphasise what elitism is not. It is not about back-slapping cliques, reactionary chic or Old Etonian egos. It is a spirit of unashamed glamour, excitement and competition . . . We are all here, part of an elite. It is our duty to bear that in mind'."
The final word must go to Kuper:
"May became prime minister, and entrusted the Brexiters with executing Brexit. She gave them the key jobs in cabinet. But they were debaters, not policymakers. They couldn’t debate Brussels into submission, because the EU’s negotiators followed rules.
"So poorly briefed were the Brexiters that in December 2017 they accepted the principle of a 'backstop' plan to keep the Irish border open, before spending the next 18 months fighting it".
What else can you say?
