Prime Minister Poochie: Britain's press says the audience should always be asking, "Where's Boris Johnson?"
Prime Minister Poochie: Britain's press says the audience should always be asking, "Where's Boris Johnson?"
We are still, sadly, far from the time when Boris Johnson will return to his home planet. For the benefit of the security services: This is a Simpsons reference and not a threat.
Way back in Season 8 of The Simpsons — a show which went on the air one year before the fall of Margaret Thatcher but which can take no credit for that event — the long-running cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy attempts to refresh its appeal to viewers by introducing a dog called Poochie. At one point in the action, Homer (who’s voicing Poochie) visits the writers’ room to share his ideas for improving the failing character:
One: Poochie needs to be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine. Two: Whenever Poochie’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, “Where’s Poochie?”
Poochie is a deeply annoying character who spouts catchphrases instead of content and is ultimately killed off by the producer with a slapdash episode in which he decides to “return to his home planet” and before a bloody caption informs us: “Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet.”
Boris Johnson is the Poochie of the Conservative Party.
After 11 years in power, the latest instalment of the Tories’ long series run (they’ve been in power alone or in coalition for 82 years out of the last 100), he exists to refresh the old brand. That’s why his Conservative Party Conference speech could talk about “more than a decade [of] stagnation” — Mean Girls-ing his recent predecessors as Prime Minister David Cameron and Theresa May — while dropping Margaret Thatcher references for the heads.
The argument is that this is not the Tory Party but The New Tory Party… Now With Karate Chopping Boris Johnson Action. But, unlike the viewers of the Itchy & Scratchy Show, the political Poochie’s catchphrases and loud noises act works on the party faithful, a significant chunk of the public, and a media that can largely be distracted with jingling keys.
Eventually the Tory Party — which eats its own with more vigour than a tank of underfed gerbils — will tire of Boris Johnson when his electoral ‘magic’ fades. But that time is a long way off and when Johnson does “return to his home planet” it will mean ending his relatively ‘chicken feed’1 sabbatical as Prime Minister for his real job as a Telegraph columnist and a handsomely paid line in after-dinner speeches, delayed payment for favours done while in power.
In the meantime, however, Johnson’s Poochie performance is still pleasing the newspaper proprietors. That’s why we’re got reviews of his poochiest speech yet suggesting, despite real-world events including the hundreds of thousands of people — most of whom are working — having their benefits slashed, a fuel crisis, an ongoing pandemic, and the growing threat of food shortages, that it was a bravura performance.
The Times, a paper owned by sometime Simpsons guest star Rupert Murdoch (“…the billionaire tyrant.”) and which still presumably wants to be treated as a serious publication, headlines its analysis of the Prime Minister’s act: Boris Johnson’s speech showed serious intent as well as the usual jokes.
To be clear that’s a speech that began by calling Michael Gove “Jon Bon Govie” and featured Johnson braying Build Back Beaver and Build Back Burger, as well as comparing Keir Starmer to a Somali pirate and a bus conductor (both analogies that make the Labour leader vastly more interesting than he actually is). None of those comments were ad-libs; they were in the text supplied to reporters ahead of the speech.
The Times piece, written by the paper’s Policy Editor, Oliver Wright (no relation), concludes that:
… despite the jokes, the unusual style and Johnson’s need to entertain as much as inform his address underlined serious intent.
He may give a very different type of speech to his predecessors but his vision for Britain is very different as well.
Subject yourself to the full 44 minutes of Johnson’s speech and you’ll see that Wright’s conclusion is the product of hope rather than experience; he is writing what he wants to have happened, picking through the haystack and assuring the reader that what looks like the insubstantial straw of jokes and japery is actually the sharp needle of political intent.
In The Times’ op-ed section, the home of its most unhinged views, Spectator columnist and think-tank creature James Kirkup — imagine a David Walliams waxwork partially melted after a fire on a neglected Victorian-era pier — argues Voters want more from business than profits and writes:
Boris Johnson has little interest in economic theory. His lodestar is public opinion. His tax-to-spend urges rile colleagues and his jibes at business over immigration and wages make little economic sense but they put him just where he likes to be: in line with his voters.
It’s a classic “Boris Johnson is a political savant” column, pretending that the Prime Minister is a human divining rod for the public’s waters (yes, I know that’s a grim image, that’s what we do here) rather than accepting the reality that he makes it up as he goes along like five-year-old playing superheroes, always finding some complicated reasoning for why he’s totally not dead actually.
As ever the best part of Kirkup’s column is the line, “David Aaronovitch is away.”
There is a far grumpier review from Iain Martin of the unsurprisingly reactionary Reaction who could only truly be satisfied by a Johnson speech if the Prime Minister dolled himself up in Margaret Thatcher drag and did a song and dance act of the old hits (smash the unions! crush the poor!). He writes:
Johnson sounded as though he was being beamed in from Planet Boris, located somewhere in a distant, different universe. Back on planet Earth, hostilities between China and Taiwan are brewing; inflation is taking off and looking ever less like a transitory episode; and global supply chains already disrupted by the pandemic are being stressed further by power outages in China disrupting manufacturing.
… Johnson’s joke-filled speech will not have provided much reassurance. He sounded at times like a man standing at the bar in the first-class lounge of the Titanic ordering another round of drinks and regaling his fellow-passengers with funny stories shortly after midnight when it is just about to become clear there aren’t enough lifeboats.
And there we have another classic: The rare “right conclusions for the wrong reasons” column. Martin is right that Johnson is a deeply unserious clown but he simply wants him to hold slightly different clownish opinions which he would then deem very serious indeed.
Sketchwriter Quentin Letts — Gollum if he’d been made monstrous not by the one-ring but by clutching a copy of The Daily Mail for too long — is a man who treats politics as a low-stakes lark, the province of people like him who delight in the smell of their own farts. It’s not surprising then that he found Boris Johnson’s speech delightful (Frenzied, cartwheeling Bojo regains his mojo). He writes:
Vulgarisms and jests and literary allusions geysered out of Boris Johnson so fast that he became breathless. He had spurned the deadening consolations of an autocue and instead used a lectern that he kept thwacking… He must have been on a private bet to get the thing finished in 45 minutes, half the time Sir Keir Starmer took for his treacle-dropper in Brighton last week.
All of which makes Boris Johnson sound like a giant cock, spewing out verbal spunk, subjecting the audience in the hall to a kind of linguistic bukkake.
Of course, Quentin Letts liked that speech because it was exactly how he writes columns, piling non-sequiturs, bad puns, second-hand allusions, cheap jokes and bargain-basement bluster on top of each other. He continues:
News reporters were disgruntled. “No big announcement in that,” they grumbled. True. That was missing the point. In recent weeks it had become a tricky truism that “BoJo had lost his mojo” and that his government was Continuity Blair. This frenzied, cartwheeling, slightly mad speech, stuffed with vintage Borisisms, some of them even new, was more than anything a brand-buttressing exercise. It was a blizzard of linguistic curlicues. It had more whorls and volutes than Pevsner’s Buildings of England. Oratorically, it was the equivalent of that moment in the Olympics when the gymnast does her final flourish, makes a perfect landing and then saunters off with a “beat that if you can” shrug.
See, there are the clumsily applied references and the jokes that don’t work, just as Boris Johnson delivered in his speech. The Prime Minister is a profoundly unserious man who delivered a profoundly unserious speech full of lies and laughs for people who haven’t laughed genuinely at anything in decades; a hollow laugh for a party of mirthless monsters.
What people like Letts claim as great oratory (“a blizzard of linguistic curlicues”) was actually a collection of an after-dinner speaker’s cheap tricks. Not one line of it stands up to scrutiny — it disintegrates like Richard Harris’ cake in the rain — but Johnson’s delivery matters more to hacks than the content. Hacks hear tone, not content and cannot shake the admiration they have for one of their own doing the top job using the same sneaky rhetoric he deployed in columns.
Today’s newspapers feature many comparisons between the stolid tone of Starmer’s speech — with its ugly focus-grouped slogans and eye-dabbing references to family pain — to Johnson’s clowning; the Prime Minister’s machine gun shitticisms and policy-free, chuckle-heavy chuntering is deemed a success because the hacks were entertained. It’s no coincidence that Letts spends a chunk of his sketch on grumbling again that Starmer’s speech was too long.
Boris Johnson has the hack’s disease of delighting in alliteration and ‘obscure’ references. Where Starmer quoted WH Auden, Johnson quoted Thomas Gray. But if opposition by lawyers like Starmer means turgid speeches and all the flexibility of an Action Man, then government by columnists like Boris Johnson is government by missed deadlines and cheap quip.
Johnson’s speech had his usual bizarre diction, was peppered with phrases that meant nothing (“fiberoptic vermicelli”, “steering wheel-bending traffic lights”, “groovy new architecture”) and relied heavily on rehashed tabloid stories and slurs (“They like kids to run races where no one actually wins…”, “the powder rooms of north London dinner parties.”)
That Johnson himself lived until recently in Islington, married to an Islington lawyer or that the idea of sports days where no one wins is a tabloid cliché ends up being irrelevant. There is no point in fact-checking Boris Johnson’s speeches because any facts that are present are incidental and every line contains a lie, a distortion or a tabloid tale retold even further from reality. Johnson may not understand pig farming but he’s a master of serving up bullshit and persuading a lot of people that it’s gold.
And on the subject of bullshit, let’s move on to The Daily Telegraph — Boris Johnson’s once-and-future home — which offers a smörgåsbord of the smug, smarmy, and cynical offering up their analyses of the speech. Allister Heath — picture a pinch-faced estate agency owner cloned from cells taken from Norman Tebbit’s testicle — delivers a doomy headline (The three mega-risks2 that could doom Boris’s high-wage gamble to disaster) while still raving about the “brilliance” of Johnson’s speech. He writes:
Boris the showman is back, and what a performance he put on.
The Prime Minister’s ebullient speech in Manchester was a perfectly pitched peroration to the median voter, reminding them that the Tories share their values and aspirations.
That phrase “the median voter” tells you plenty about how Heath sees the public: Rubes to be gulled by showman Boris while he sees what’s really going on. His praise of the speech reads like a pop stan trying to persuade the world that their new repetitive new album is a masterpiece:
The points Boris Johnson made, the opinions he proffered, may not have all been ideologically consistent or even, at times, especially credible, but their common thread was their popularity. He was his old self again, oozing charisma, delighted that Covid is all but over, poised for another fight with Brussels. Some of his biggest cheers came when he savaged the M25 protesters and attacked cancel culture, yet it was also a masterpiece in cakeism…
Just as the right has relentlessly turned the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” from a satirical statement of the impossible into a credo, so Heath writes of a “masterpiece of cakeism” as if pretending you can have your cake and eat it is a desirable quality in a national political figure.
Returning to The Simpsons references, Johnson’s ‘charisma’ — which Heath pretends to be so convinced by — is the charm of Lyle Lanley, the con man who convinced Springfield of the wonders of the monorail, monorail, mono… with arguments that were “not… ideologically consistent or even, at times, especially credible”. It takes more front than Selfridge’s warped Inception-style to write blatantly that the Prime Minister you support makes no sense but you loved it.
Elsewhere in the paper, Juliet Samuel writes Captain Boris is sailing straight into a hurricane, concluding like Heath that Johnson gave “a brilliant speech” and writing fannishly that “the good ship Tory is captained by no ordinary skipper” who “looks like a man invigorated by the dangers”. The speech she witnessed was not the one I did — a shit show where each line brought a new turd splashing into my drink — but “a vivid, ambitious and inspiring” vision.
She keeps her options open in the conclusion though, prepared to say “I told you so” whatever happens next:
The Government has poured scorn on “Captain Hindsight” leading a hesitant Opposition. Mr Johnson is proud to style himself Captain Crapshoot, taking his party straight into the hurricane with sails unfurled.
The only prospect worse than a big storm is a still day, when the wind turbines stop turning and we’re left at the mercy of gas prices. The weather and the market will determine whether this speech marks a new era of renewal or a last gasp of delusion
Still, anyone writing for The Daily Telegraph in 2021 should understand what “a last gasp of delusion” is like. It’s all they’ve got in that office.
Meanwhile, Janet Daly, whose long career has taken her from radical trot to Telegraph column-penning Boris booster, contributes exactly what you’d expect from her, a piece headlined A barnstorming performance that will restore confidence in Boris with a lede (“Those who had forgotten why they voted for the Prime Minister will have been cheered by this plausible, passionate speech.”) that obliterates all meaning from the word “plausible”.
Her review swims with implausibility, arguing that Jonson was “pitch-perfect” and that his “jokes were genuinely funny” while “the conviction sounded absolutely, uncompromisingly, and sometimes bravely serious”. That’s deranged. The willingness of the fan to claim the sky is green if their hero says it’s so. Like Heath, Daly admits repeatedly that Johnson’s speech was unconvincing, with “obvious gaps in the argument”, but still crows that it was “easily the best speech he has ever given.”
The Daily Telegraph continues to piss on our legs and say it’s refreshing rain that’s certain to extinguish this room on fire.
Over at The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph’s sinister weekly sibling, Katy Balls writes Johnson’s speech will have reassured his supporters and writes about his special stage as if it’s entirely normal:
When Boris Johnson addressed his party in his first in-person conference leader's speech since winning a majority of 80 seats, he did it in a different hall to the room his ministers have spoken in this week. The larger set not only helped make the Prime Minister's speech stand out, it also meant that it could take on the form of a rally. The main stage was surrounded by supporters holding placards with various government slogans. It was a theme of Johnson's rallying speech as he crowbarred 'levelling up' and 'build back better' (at one point morphing into 'build back beaver') into a lively address to his party — aimed at reminding them why he was an election winner.
Imagine having to write that the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland said “build back beaver” with a straight face and even more having to claim that the ranting, raving, clownish performance was “a lively speech”.
Like Samuels, Balls leaves herself wiggle room…
With many problems coming down the track on the economy, energy and general cost of living, Johnson could soon find himself under pressure to show that he has fresh answers to looming painful questions.
… though anyone who reads the British press knows Boris Johnson will be eminently capable of dodging “painful questions” as he’s done over and over.
Also from The Spectator, Sam Leith — Eton and Oxford — declares the speech “a triumph” and dismisses the fact-checkers and “sobersides” to conclude: “It positively radiated confidence, relaxed good humour and cheerfulness.”
In the i paper, Ian Dunt preaches to the converted that the speech “was a machine gun fire of vacuity, delivered at almost impenetrable speed, without policy, structure, argument or any kind of meaningful intellectual content”.
The Guardian calls it an “upbeat speech” and presents a panel of reviewers3 including former Tory MP Justine Greening (“The prime minister must now match rhetoric with action…”) and Theresa May’s former pollster James Johnson (“He might be an entertainer, but Johnson is juggling to win…”) The Guardian doesn’t just let the foxes into the henhouse, it offers them chicken drumsticks.
Swerving back to the right, The Sun offers up a list of what it considers the key points of the speech…
Boris deployed his secret weapon Carrie4 who he kissed in the hall
He vowed to make good on his promise to fix the social care crisis
He branded Michael Gove "Jon Bon Govey" for his disco dancing
He blasted Insulate Britain and was pleased Priti Patel was "insulating them snugly in prison where they belong"
The PM said people have to get back to the office after the pandemic
He hailed the deal with the US to sell them Welsh lamb as "build back burger"
And he burnished his conservationist credentials by joking he was "building back beaver"
… which shows why Johnson made the jokes in the first place and headlines its leader column Boris Johnson’s upbeat speech hit all the right notes – but his solutions to Britain’s many problems seem a long way off. It writes:
No one in politics rallies, entertains and stirs the passions of his troops like Boris Johnson. It works for voters too. Because no one can touch him when it comes to talking Britain up either. Boris could find the positives in a nuclear attack on London.
Those are sentences that get more disturbed with each time you look at them. “Boris could find the positives in a nuclear attack on London,” writes a very normal newspaper in a very normal country, evoking Donald Trump’s boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose votes, just with the blast radius turned up.
In The Sun’s Opinion section, Trevor Kavanagh — whose Nazi rhetoric-echoing “Muslim problem” column in 2017 led to nothing but a continuing contract with Rupert Murdoch who he has served for 43 years — writes Boris Johnson’s speech was a display of boosterism that sent the crowds home happy but there are rocks below the surface. He calls the speech “a full-throated roar of optimism” and declares it “livelier than last week’s scum-spitting Labour conference” (if only Starmer was the punkish figure that description suggests).
Kavanagh ends his piece with almost an identical line to Balls…
The Tory faithful… love Boris Johnson and want him to succeed. But this time next year they might have some difficult questions to ask.
… keeping both his options open and sending a message from his proprietor: Deliver or we might decide to invite the polite Sir Keir down to Hayman Island for a “chat about policy”.
But for now, Johnson is echoing Sun headlines in his speeches — OUR WOKEST HOUR Winston Churchill erased from his own charity in unprecedented display of wokery (8 September 2021), howling “…and when they began to attack Churchill as a racist I was minded to ignore them… this isn’t just a joke, they really do want to re-write our national story.”
The truth is that Johnson, along with his tabloid collaborators at The Sun and The Daily Mail and those possessors of equally reactionary but more syllable heavy opinions at The Daily Telegraph and The Times, don’t want to tell the true story of our history but to keep the rewrites they are so comfortable with dominant. Johnson’s Churchill biography is actually an autobiography stuffed into a Winston costume, a fable about the war leader where the lesson is meant to be that ‘Boris’ is his successor.
For all the get-out-clauses in columns today, Boris Johnson’s Poochy act will be tolerated as long as it continues to serve the interests of his party, its donors, and the newspaper proprietors with whom he is so close. The cast list of British politics and media is nearly as small as The Itchy & Scratchy Show’s set of characters. Consider the faces seen at The Spectator’s Conservative Party Conference champagne bash (sponsored by the Betting and Gaming Council).
Along with most of the Cabinet, a rash of SpAds and the former hack-turned-gambling-shill Kevin Schofield and former-MP-turned-gambling shill Michael Dugher, half of the British media were there, according to a list published by Politico London Playbook’s Alex Wickham (ex-Guido Fawkes), including:
BBC’s Nick Robinson, despite being apparently terribly anti-Tory since his interview with Boris Johnson earlier this week
ITV’s political editor Robert Peston
the i’s Hugo Gye (formely of The Sun and MailOnline)
Times Deputy Editor (and former Sun and Daily Telegraph editor) Tony Gallagher
The Sunday Times’ Deputy Political Editor (formely of the Express) Caroline Wheeler
The Times’ Steven Swinford (Deputy Political Editor, ex-Daily Telegraph), Henry Zeffman (Chief Political Correspondent, ex-New Statesman and Observer), Matt Dathan (Home Affairs Editor, ex-Sun, Mail, and Independent) and Mhari Aurora (Red Box Reporter)
… and Sky News’ Sam Coates (Deputy Political Editor, ex-Times)
Is it suprising most of the media goes so easy on the gambling industry or that there’s such consistency of reaction to the Poochie Prime Minister’s speech?
Patrick Maguire, one of the few Times employees seemingly not at The Spectator party, said on Times Radio that Johnson’s speech was “governing by Telegraph column.” He’s right. But his paper and those of his contemporaries don’t interrogate that idea today. They’re just asking where Boris Johnson is whenever he’s not on screen.
“Chicken feed” was how Johnson dismissed his £250,000 a year salary from The Daily Telegraph for writing one column a week while London Mayor.
Heath loves to throw the “mega” prefix around. It was only in August that he was howled about Four mega-trends that condemn the West to irreversible decline. I think he’s watched Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus one too many times.
The panel also includes Ellie Mae O’Hagan, Simon Jenkins and Nesrine Malik.
Harry Cole wasn’t bylined on this particular piece but his… uh… spirit is all over it.