To those of us outside the circle this article (HERE) gives a pretty good idea of Boris Johnson. Martin Fletcher has written before (HERE) on BoJo but his current article in The New Statesman is more complete and brings things up to date. It is not a flattering portrait of the man who has fathered seven children by three different women, one while she was still married to another man. But his personal life, however amoral, is nothing compared to the incalculable damage this one man has and is inflicting on this country.
Mr Fletcher followed Johnson as The Times' Brussels correspondent but he has now produced the best article I have ever read setting out how Johnson almost single handedly turned the nation against Brussels. The cost of BoJo's little joke to this country over the next decades will be incalculable. Read it and weep.
Perhaps one can see in the story why he always appears, on the surface anyway, relentlessly optimistic about Brexit. It's because mentally he can't afford to be otherwise. Imagine yourself in his position. You are regarded by many as the father of Brexit, a public school prank gone wrong. It was meant to polish your Eurosceptic credentials ready for a leadership bid after the referendum had been narrowly lost, weakening Cameron but taking Europe off the agenda for a generation at least. You would have been guaranteed a period of stability with UKIP neutered and impotent.
Instead you catastrophically won. To admit afterwards you never actually intended to would have ended your career so you are now living a nightmare. You have to keep the shutters down on what Brexit will almost certainly become. The greatest political and economic humiliation any democratic nation inflicted on itself in modern history. The cost to this nation will be enormous, running into trillions of pounds. And like your worst nightmare everyone is looking at you, the overgrown schoolboy who is finally exposed as a fool, never really understanding what he was doing. Your dream of replacing Churchill in the nation's annals would be shattered.
For BoJo, losing the adulation he craves like a class A drug, would be far too painful to contemplate. The vilification and contempt too hard to bear. Somewhere in the article, a source who is said to know him well claims, “Deep down, he struggles with what’s happened since the referendum and why so many people hate him,”
I hate him not because he is Eurosceptic or even that he was probably decisive in the campaign. Others, like Redwood or Cash, are anti-EU by long held conviction and while I think they're wrong, one can just about respect their view. I hate him because he made the decision so lightly, basically on the toss of a coin, as if the outcomes were more or less equal. BoJo needn't worry about only half the country hating him, the entire nation will despise the bloated idiot by the time the calamity that is Brexit has played out
