Boris, not good enough

For almost a year, politics.ie has had a thread,

Boris Johnson’s administration is smelling of sleaze

I suspect it flourishes because:

• it represents an existential truth;
• it plays to negativism, one of the main drivers of many posters there;
• it kicks against the old enemy;
• it anatomises one of the more bizarre characters in modern politics.

So, I am reminded that all the best Tory scandals concern sex — let’s identify that as 💋for brevity; while all the best Labour ones involve money 💰. Oddly enough, in both cases, the persons involved stick to, and ultimately resign (or are resigned) by the rules 📕. And, until now, I never thought I would fall for emojis.

Johnson is different, especially in his contempt for 📕.

Yesterday’s Guardian had a column by Heather Stewart, its political editor, Boris Johnson yet again avoids paying the price for his cavalier attitude. Her focus is her starter, the Mustique jolly and therefore mainly 📕, but with added 💋 and incidental 💰for zest.

Stewart listed:

• Mustique: £15,000-worth of accommodation from the Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross. Ross, a vampire capitalist, says Private Eye and other sources, has a casual relationship with general 📕. Another dimension is the family fortune began with fish in Grimsby — so a touch of the #Brexits 🇪🇺.
• The Lulu Lytle/Carrie Antoinette ‘tart’s parlour’ at Downing Street, initially financed by £58,000 from Conservative peer, Lord Brownlow. Brownlow’s contributions to Tory funds were £714,690 in 2017, and his elevation to the Lords followed some months later. So mainly 💰and 📕.
• Jennifer Arcuri (always very much to the fore) gets short shrift on wikipedia. It suggests only a couple of bunces from public funds, and three overseas trips. Other sources go larger, and add in the hundred grand awarded to her firm. So a grand total of at least £126,000 for (admittedly) several years as Johnson’s grande horizontale. I’d award that another full house: 💋,💰and 📕
• Then there’s Peter Cruddas, City wide-boy, commuting ex-pat, who acquired a Lords nomination on the back of (his own claim) £1 million to the Tories — though only a third of that can be actually accounted. When the Lords soured on his nomination, he sealed it with a further £50,000 — and Johnson casually over-ruled the objections. 💰and 📕.

Stewart skims lightly over:

• Priti Patel’s bullying, which required a substantial pay-out to the bullied — 💰 and 📕.
• Jenrick playing footsie with former pornographer Richard Desmond, to do down Tower Hamlets rightful community charges. £12,000 of Desmond’s £50 million gain to the Tory party, money well spent. More 💰and 📕— even Jenrick acknowledged what he did was illegal.
• Re-treading Gavin Williamson as the most useless education minister in living memory. Williamson had been defenestrated from the defence ministry by Theresa May for security reasons. 📕.

Other highlights should include the catalogue of untruths Johnson has perpetrated from the Dispatch Box. No need to list them: Peter Stefanovic’s little movie does it 📕:

Not to mention Johnson’s decade-long tussles with the UK Statistics Authority. That goes back to his days as London Mayor, intensified over the spurious £350m a week for the NHS and continued over small matters such as Universal Credit 📕 Remember, folks, insisting on raw numbers makes one a ‘Labour stooge‘ (2011), or suffering from ‘amnesia‘, or guilty of ‘wilful distortion‘ (both 2017) 📕.

That’s not ‘smelling of sleaze’. It’s wallowing in it.

Personal confession: along the lines suggested by Noël Coward:

Elyot: Nasty insistent little tune.
Amanda: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

I have recurrent flashbacks to school poetry anthologies, and the tumpty-tumpty-tum stuff found there.

Yes, I know he was a bigot of the first holy water, and a near-fascist (his brother went the full trip), but Chesterton got so much correct:

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.