What a dangerously persuasive Svengali Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is. How long must he have spent crafting the speech that he delivered yesterday afternoon to conference? How smoothly it all came out in that familar dark brown voice like rich shiny gravy pouring from an expensive silver sauce boat. It was a tour de force. The audience loved it, for that is what they came to see. The self deprecating joke about Hammond's only accurate recent forecast being the one that said Johnson would never be PM, went down well. How they laughed, and hoped it wasn't true.
Whereas mainstream politicians, those with gravitas and statesmanship anyway, begin drafting a speech with an outline of what it is they want to say. Johnson does no such thing, he has no idea what he wants to say until he starts with a blank sheet and crafts a speech that simply sounds nice in a mysterious Alice-in-Wonderland way. He disdains any sort of fact or even a nod to reality. Perfect if you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, as many of his adoring fanzines can and usually do.
It's as if he hypnotizes his audience to suspend disbelief, coming out of the trance having heard only what they want to hear. Words pile on words in a crazy jumble. How many politicians could fit Mohenjo-daro (an archaeological site in Pakistan since you ask) and praemunire (a 14th-century law prohibiting papal jurisdiction) into a conference speech? Sitting though a BoJo speech is like listening to the late Stanley Unwin albeit much slowed down and with real if very obscure words. It's a bit of verbal prestidigitation designed to distract.
It's as if he hypnotizes his audience to suspend disbelief, coming out of the trance having heard only what they want to hear. Words pile on words in a crazy jumble. How many politicians could fit Mohenjo-daro (an archaeological site in Pakistan since you ask) and praemunire (a 14th-century law prohibiting papal jurisdiction) into a conference speech? Sitting though a BoJo speech is like listening to the late Stanley Unwin albeit much slowed down and with real if very obscure words. It's a bit of verbal prestidigitation designed to distract.
I give you an example of the stupidity in our pantomime villain's peroration:
"And if we get it right [negotiating a Super Canada deal] then the opportunities are immense. It is not just that we can do free trade deals. In so many growth areas of the economy this country is already light years ahead. Tech, data, bioscience, financial services, you name it. We can use our regulatory freedom to intensify those advantages".
This soaring rhetoric isn't grounded in anything. It echoes around the fantasies inside his own cavernous but totally addled mind. He literally thinks we can conquer the world with our own standards! Using our newfound regulatory freedom to design stuff that no one else wants and won't integrate with either EU or global standards (often they're one and the same). The world doesn't use pecks or Whitworth screw threads or BSP pipe connections any more, for heaven's sake.
He told conference he had been a professional Brussels watcher for 30 years, but omitted to say he was the originator of fake news about the EU, a liar who painstakingly built a mountain of lies about EU regulations (HERE) and who is responsible perhaps above any man alive for the anti EU poison that has made rational understanding of Europe all but impossible.
I've spent 50 years in industry and if he thinks we're light years ahead in so many growth areas, he needs to explain why we have such a large and very persistent trade deficit. Perhaps we're so far ahead nobody's found a use for our stuff yet.
And what about this for the central idiocy in his plan:
"So now therefore is the time truly to take back control and make the elegant dignified and grateful exit the country voted for. This is the moment – and there is time – to chuck Chequers, to scrap the Commission’s constitutionally abominable Northern Ireland backstop, to use the otherwise redundant and miserable “implementation period” to the end of 2020 to negotiate the Supercanada FTA, to invest in all the customs procedures that may be needed to ensure continued frictionless trade, and to prepare much more vigorously for a WTO deal".
This is with-one-bound-Jack-was-free sort of stuff. Presumably he would do it all on a wet Tuesday afternoon while having his nails manicured. Scrap the backstop, tear up the Joint report of last December, repudiate it all and zip along to the Berlaymont building in Brussels to thrash out a quick free trade deal. Except, you will find nobody on the other side of the table, for without a backstop there are no negotiations, no implementation period and hence no FTA and no deal. Disaster.
It's hard to know whether to laugh or be angry at someone so gifted in language who is unable to think. None of it is serious stuff.
He is like Lord Henry Wotton, in Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, "a man possessed of “wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories.” This is Lord Henry holding forth at a dinner party, in a particularly apt way, mesmerising the young Dorian. One can easily see him in BoJo and Dorian Gray in the Tory party:
"He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's back, dripping, sloping sides.
"He charmed his listeners out of themselves and they followed his pipe laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips, and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes".
Facts flee before BoJo like terrified Wildebeest racing across the Serengeti. What an idiot, but don't underestimate him. A dangerous man if ever there was one. He thinks he's the prince in waiting and the premiership is his birthright. Let us all pray he never gets into Downing Street. The Tory parliamentary party wouldn't allow it surely - or would they?
While BoJo massages parts of the Tory party that others wouldn't touch with double marigold gloves, Raab threatens the nation with self harm (HERE) like a sullen, recalcitrant teenager suffering from severe acne. He says no deal isn't unthinkable - although plenty of people would think it is, like the car makers (HERE) and the Food & Drink Federation who rushed out a tart response :
"It's all very well for Dominic Raab to decry scaremongering on a 'no-deal' Brexit, but just two months ago he was the one raising the possibility of stockpiling food and calling in the squaddies to help.
“The 'lurid predictions' he mentions are from his own colleagues in DExEU. Their technical notices lay bare just how severe blockages at the ports would be for food coming in and out of our country. Indeed, the Government takes this so seriously that just last week it appointed a food supplies Minister. The last person to occupy such a position oversaw the end of rationing in 1954".(HERE)
In case you think we've accidentally gatecrashed an anarchist convention, this is the Tory party Brexit conference 2018.
