Shambolic, shameless, untrustworthy and dishonourable. It would seem there are not enough adjectives in the Oxford dictionary to describe the character of the incumbent at Number 10.
A half baked classicist with the entertainment skills of a third rate Falstaff. He is the jester who got to wear the crown. If he was from Kerry he would be known as An Poc ar Buile. Only Johnson, unlike the goat, has not come to warn of danger - he is the danger.
When the highest court in Scotland unanimously and unequivocally declared that Johnson’s proroguing of parliament was unlawful, the Brexit spokesperson for the British Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, said ‘No one in their right mind’ would have believed the PM’s reasoning for the suspension. But many in the Conservative Party are clearly not in their right minds. It is as if Brexitmania has infected the Tory cabinet. They are feverish.
And yet bizarrely Johnson could yet win a general election because of the dithering Jeremy Corbyn. Tom Watson is far from helpful either. Johnson’s legendary charms failed to woo our easily flattered Taoiseach. Leo didn’t flutter as he did on his first visit to Number Ten to see Mrs May. In fact, he towered over his British counterpart, statesmanlike, whilst the dishevelled Johnson sounded incoherent and looked as if he had missed the bus to school and arrived with shirt tail out.
Though it must be said he was more successful with his soirée for the grandees of Northern Ireland’s business community. They whooped, laughed and cheered as the clown prince of British politics entertained.
Grandiose promises and apparent largesse with public finances would be flung to Northern Ireland along with the kitchen sink to enable our to grow. Johnson offered his audience a dowry on the never never. And they loved it. However his caveat was that - the bride, ie the Assembly, had to show up.
A strange logic when we stand on the cusp of direct rule.
An extra £300 million - no problem. And again his audience lapped it up. Business audiences should read more Shakespeare - ‘All that glisters is not gold: Often you have heard that told: Many a man his life has sold’.
As Johnson spoke about building an actual bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland the Treasury mandarins must have been reaching for the whisky. As Mayor of London, he proposed an additional bridge over the Thames which came to nought but still managed to waste some fifty million in consultancy. The promise of £15 billion for his fantasy bridge fell from his mouth as loosely as confetti at a Kardashian wedding.
Even if the project stayed on budget - which it won’t - that is more than the entire budget for Northern Ireland on what would be the biggest waste of time since the deranged Colonel Nicholson oversaw the construction of the Bridge on the River Kwai.
Unionist politicians salivate at the prospect of a land bridge to Britain. The fact that Scotland may not be in Britain much longer seemed lost on them. But these days the DUP would accept a rope bridge to the Mull of Kintyre rather than a high speed rail link to Dublin.
As Colum Eastwood pointed out, we do not even have a dual carriageway linking Derry and Belfast and yet here we have a prime minister offering another unicorn project.
Soon the reality of Brexit is going to bite. Fifty nine medicines by the government’s own reckoning may become harder to source or be more expensive in the event of a No Deal Brexit. The cost of some tablets have already rocketed by a staggering 260 per cent.
Despite the chaos, this writer believes that this hapless prime minister, notwithstanding all his bluster, now actually needs a deal with the EU. He is hamstrung in a zombie government. Verbosity and loquaciousness can’t mask his ambition to be more like Churchill than Chaplin.
