How does it feel to come to work every day under the salute of Carson, to be a member of the British government? ‘No, I’m not actually – uctually – I don’t swear an oath of allegiance to anyone other than the people who elected me.’ This is still part of the UK, isn’t it? ‘Well, the British – the Bratash – tell us it is, but we want to change that.’
You may have recalled by now who the agile interviewee was, though perhaps not the interviewer. May 2000, education minister Martin McGuinness interviewed by Boris Johnson a year into editing the Spectator, which thinks of itself as wittily right-wing. Snip of snobbery at the accent, jibes at the IRA-man’s happiness to spend ‘British money’. So McGuinness might have a car and driver ‘paid for by us, the British taxpayers?’ Easy to answer that. ‘No “might” about it. I will get one.’
The interview began in a mode unlikely to charm unionist readers. ‘What a place, I think to myself, as I arrive at Stormont. ... great bronze statue of Carson waving defiance, everywhere signs of the British imperium; the vast ghostly pediment fringed with marble palmettes...the lion, the unicorn, and honi soit qui mal y pense...’
But ‘keep going and you will come to something rather odd; a notice on a door ‘barks’ in Irish to use the other door, ‘crinniu ar siul’. (The misspelled ‘cruinniu’ maybe a Sinn Féin slip?) The notice is for the benefit of the interview.
‘Behind the door sits the blond-curled and sweatered form of a man who has spent his entire adult life engaged in a programme of terror, whose objective has been to destroy British power in Northern Ireland.’ Who ‘welcomes me with great friendliness... his charm partly explains the chronic weakness of the British government in dealing with him.’
Very readable. Not disgusting Boris, 'piccaninnies' with `watermelon smiles', niqab-wearing women as 'letter-boxes', 'tank-topped bumboys'. Instead a smidgen of fan-boy, a coat-trail or three. ‘The best hope now – and of course it is morally bankrupt, but not wholly despicable – is that the “peace process” should grind on...’
As Johnson the journalist went, this was a remarkably honest job. Unlike the colourful hogwash that made his name, the anti-EU fictions he filed from Brussels that other journalists were pestered by their newsdesks to rival.
Yet in his recent spate of photo ops, this one apparently a ‘jobs fair’, he mused through his mask from a school-desk about the wonderful job that is journalism. But it came to dissatisfy him, because journalists ‘are always abusing people.’ He meant they criticise politicians.
Labour shadow Northern Ireland secretary Louise Haigh responded sharply. ‘As a former journalist who tried to arrange to have another journalist beaten up, the Prime Minister speaks from experience here.’ Others were wearier. Never a journalist, several said, he had been a columnist. No facts, just opinions.
Which must surely chime with those of us who moved from reporting to columnising with difficulty, and no natural inclination. Johnson has the inclination; need for attention, some humour, willingness to sound wrong as long as it’s striking, gift for phrases that grab but don’t necessarily go anywhere.
Johnson is a one-man distraction machine. On a good streak thanks to vaccines, today’s British government gloms on to rare success and tackles all its problems in the same way. A blast of upbeat sound and a silly photograph is enough for a daft image on TV news and a headline in the papers Conservatives rely on. It won’t distract anyone who is sad and hungry.
Boris drove a bulldozer through a Brexit gridlock made of polystyrene, now he wipes a chair in a vaccination centre. Only anti-Conservatives, and who cares about them, will seek out the chair-wiping image with the unfortunate remark about OJ Simpson and the David Attenborough voice-over.
Government by columnist, oh boy. As contradictory as Brexit, and just as funny.
