Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Mini-Trump Boris destined for Number 10 - unless the Tories see sense

Tory leadership contender Boris Johnson. Picture by Brian Lawless/PA
Tory leadership contender Boris Johnson. Picture by Brian Lawless/PA Tory leadership contender Boris Johnson. Picture by Brian Lawless/PA

Mini-Trump Boris Johnson is on track to become next British prime minister, unless he combusts on screen tonight night and sense strikes Conservative party members seemingly poised to elect him their leader.

Keeping Nigel Farage at bay and Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street is accepted as all-important. Boris is near-worshipped as the showman who makes some laugh and cheer. Others cry for their country but recent days have seen formerly savage Conservative critics swivel to support Johnson, noses held. Conspiracy theories swirl, like tales of guilty secrets used to pull supporters away from the would-be competitors already well behind him.

With the exception of quirky outsider Rory Stewart none of the contenders has had the honesty to speak the painful truth; that there is no-renegotiation to be had and that no good deal was ever available, much less the easy, wonderful one peddled pre-Referendum by Johnson and his then comrade Michael Gove. (Audience reaction said Stewart won Sunday night’s Boris-less debate. More articulate than Gove? Another boost for the absent one.)

In the first broadcast interview of his campaign to take Downing Street, Johnson said on Friday that ‘the good bits’ of the withdrawal deal Theresa May agreed with Brussels could be ‘taken out’. Too slangy for some? In the next breath there was a long showy alternative. The deal could be ‘disaggregated.’ It was a perfect example of the style that has taken him so far up the greasy pole. First make them smile. Say nothing of substance then repeat it in more flowery English, though he may have been advised to hold the Latin tags until the last minutes in tomorrow’s debate.

Shallow media preparation, determination not to be accused of being pro-Remain and Britain-centredness have all marginalised examination of Irish economic fears. But then there is equal reluctance to avoid in depth discussion of the risks for the UK as a whole.

Johnson on Friday got away with pronouncing Brexit border difficulties ‘easily capable of solution’. Checks, by technology as yet un-invented, would supposedly take care of the backstop.

(Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson may secretly fear Johnson will lunge at a general election to banjax their Commons clout but the unknown technical solution was their favourite too, their ‘magical thinking’ before it was Boris’s.)

He had said he would take six questions. He suffered no cross-examination. What one reporter later called ‘braying’ and boos from Johnson backers met the questioner most determined to rehearse the charge that his behaviour, politically and personally, proves he is untrustworthy. In his non-response, Johnson smoothed over the braying at Sky’s Beth Rigby with an amiable smile, a PR tactic in which he has been newly schooled.

His natural style is much more expansive, his disinclination to check his tongue and lack of self-control the last hopes of those who dread his effect as prime minister on their party, and country. His ‘backstop’ on Friday was far from the version he came out with a year ago at a dinner for senior Tories, when he blabbed about a chat that day with Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state – well, this was the brief era of foreign secretary Boris – and downplayed Brexit tension on the border. Like general fear about Brexit customs chaos, this was exaggerated. ‘There are so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way.’

Seamus Leheny of the Freight Transport Association is a serious being but last Thursday on BBCNI’s The View he could not restrain an exasperated eye-roll when faced with a particularly limited but supremely confident Tory voice. The programme’s line-up of trade and economic experts agreed on the danger of no-deal or the hardest Brexit for the NI economy and cross-border trade. Kathy Gyngell of The Conservative Woman website (‘values unashamedly those of faith, married family and nation-state’) heard only their wilful ‘negativity’. Attitudes like that ‘would never have won the wars’, she told them.

Leheny might well roll his eyes. There was small chance of Gyngell taking in his tally of ‘13,483 goods vehicles crossing the border in a single day on six roads, 4,022 lorries travelling south on June 5th, approximately 1,300 of them carrying ‘agri-food’. And so on. Some tail.

And some dog. A tiny, disproportionately affluent and elderly electorate is about to choose a prime minister. One lonely consolation is that British superiority about their political system must surely now be holed beyond repair.