Opinion

Deaglán de Bréadún: Boris Johnson might be entertaining but he has a serious job to do

A 2012 picture from Madame Tussauds in which Boris Johnson was given a post-party makeover to mark his victory in the London mayoral election 
A 2012 picture from Madame Tussauds in which Boris Johnson was given a post-party makeover to mark his victory in the London mayoral election  A 2012 picture from Madame Tussauds in which Boris Johnson was given a post-party makeover to mark his victory in the London mayoral election 

How do you solve a problem like Boris?

He’s made it at last: king of the hill, top of the heap, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The only safe forecast about him is that he will defy a lot of our predictions.

The adjective that comes to mind when trying to summarise his personality is “colourful”. Apart from her Abba dance-routine at the Tory conference, Theresa May was rather low-key. David Cameron had his moments but you wouldn’t normally picture him rousing the troops and putting fire in their bellies.

Another label for Boris would be “entertaining”. You might disagree with what he says or does, but he often makes you laugh. If he was in your class at school you might be tempted to call him a messer rather than a swot.

I got distracted myself as a youngster, but years later a former schoolmate described me as a rare example of someone “who could mess and learn at the same time.” It seems fair to say Boris can “mess and learn” as well: you don’t get to move into Number 10 Downing Street without acquiring some political acumen along the way.

We Irish talk a lot about our nationalism and see ourselves in a similar category to the Catalans, Basques and Scots. We tend to forget that citizens of big countries with a history of power and domination over others can also be nationalists - and enthusiastic ones at that.

That’s the key to Johnson’s appeal: he comes across as a nationalist but with a sense of humour, like a Winston Churchill impersonator doing stand-up comedy. Just as we Irish are drawn in emotional terms to a 32-county republic, so do Boris followers long for the days of ‘Rule Britannia’.

Maggie Thatcher captured that mood with her response when Argentina tried to take back the Falklands/Malvinas and similarly Boris is in tune with Tory sentiment over Brexit.

It’s not unlike the sitcom ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ where, if memory serves, there was a scene where feisty Alf Garnett had a row with German tourists on a beach and ended up making a remark along the lines of: “Sometimes you’d wonder who won the bloody war.” Presumably some Brexiteers feel that way about German influence in the European Union.

So what happens now? Johnson’s rhetoric grew more hard-line as he went along and he needs to recall the old adage about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, although Boris’s critics would say he does everything in doggerel. Meanwhile, Brussels and Dublin have painted themselves into a corner by overplaying the backstop, which was meant to be a vaccine but turned into a virus that created problems instead of preventing them.

There is a saying that “reality bites”, and common sense might yet take hold. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently suggested that the backstop could be “overwritten”, in the declaration on future EU-UK relations, if the two sides reached “a solution for the management of the border”. Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney wrote recently in the Sunday Times that, “The goal on our side remains a future relationship between the EU and the UK that makes the backstop unnecessary.”

Meanwhile, Boris has argued that, if we can land on the moon then we can resolve the border issue with the use of technology, although others have dismissed that as space-cadet thinking. However, when the Irish government spoke about the possibility of customs checkpoints away from the border in the event of a no-deal Brexit, this aroused echoes of ideas previously put forward by “Vote Leave” campaigners.

As a youngster, I devoured the famous series of books by Richmal Crompton about a mischievous schoolboy, with titles such as ‘Just William’, ‘William the Outlaw’ and ‘William the Bold’. Now Boris, for whatever reason, evokes memories of those amusing reads. I’m not aware that Crompton ever wrote anything about William as a grown-up but it would have been fun if she composed a fantasy where he ended up as prime minister. In the absence of such a volume, one will have to be content with watching the saga of Boris Johnson at the wheel of the British ship of state. Whatever else happens, there is one thing we can be sure of: it will never be boring.

Ddebre1@aol.com