[Johnson] speaks fluent falsehood as his native language. But he deceives no one. Everybody knows.[Lyrically witty or what?]...They don’t believe him – they just wilfully suspend their disbelief. They cannot say they were taken in by a plausible charlatan – they choose to applaud the obviously implausible, to crown the man they know to be the Great Pretender. They go along with the fiction that Johnson is a Prince Hal who will metamorphose into the hero to lead England to a new Agincourt, while knowing damn well that he will always be a Falstaff for whom honour is just “a word”.[Lyrically Shakespearean now -- we are in the presence of a bard]
Then some clever bits:
Johnson’s fictions have always had a kind of postmodern quality – everybody knows they are fictions... [not exactly a general scepticism toward metanarratives -- that would include O'Toole's own]...there is no more deception than there is at a pantomime. The point is not to make a claim about reality. It is to draw the audience into a knowingly comic complicity with unreality...he could never be found out because his mendacity was never hidden. Just three months before the Brexit referendum, Johnson was publicly and forensically exposed as a liar by his own party colleague Andrew Tyrie, who cross-examined him before the House of Commons Treasury committee and showed his claims about various EU regulations to be grossly distorted [ie rhetorical? political? --just 'lies' for the upholder of Truth]
There are no vestiges of solemn dignity to drape the nakedness of his mendacity and fecklessness...[it would be more acceptable if Johnson had so draped his views?] The usual arc of a premiership runs from illusion to disillusion, from great expectations to more or less bitter disappointments [really? ]...Johnson cannot disillusion anyone, for no one is under any illusion that he is truthful or trustworthy, honourable or earnest...the product of three decades of performances of the show called Boris Being Boris, an artful rearrangement of the standards of truthfulness and competence to which those who aspired to a public life had to at least pretend.[so pretence is somehow better?]
However, I doubt if anyone would really be able to pin down exactly what those apparently normal and widespread 'standards of truthfulness and competence' actually were. We have had the Blair/Campbell years after all. For most of us 'Yes Minister' blew the gaffe forever,not to mention the Gru's own knowing debunking 'postmodern' stances. . O'Toole has to exaggerate as usual, to make grey areas black, rhetoric into lies:
Insofar as he has a strategy, Johnson’s plan is all based on the power of a lie, or to use the polite term, a bluff. [very reductionist view of language for an Irish lyrical writer]. The bluff is a no-deal Brexit.
O'Toole might be right to say:
But bluffing only works if you do not already have a reputation as one of the world’s biggest bluffers...Everybody knows that Johnson is the lying captain of a very leaky boat. Nobody in Europe is about to climb aboard.
We shall see. It might all be an even more dastardly double bluff or a plot to make the EC kick us out?
J Freedland reverts to the usual virtue-signalling and hypocrisy:
[Johnson's] lies and insults have led the US president himself to hail him as the British Trump? [cosmo conspiracy theory]. The complexion of his first cabinet suggests victory for [this version of Johnson --the other was the nice liberal Mayor of London whom the Gru quite liked]...Start with his brutal purge of more than a dozen cabinet ministers, most of them former remainers. That was the handiwork of the Brexiteer-in-chief...suggesting Johnson has a mafia don’s view of disloyalty ... In comes Dominic Cummings, the maverick, anarchic mastermind behind Vote Leave – hired despite being found to be in contempt of parliament for refusing to appear before MPs. [Cummings' own blog has an interesting account of that episode -- he wanted all evidence to be given on oath for example,but they refused]. Along with Cummings arrive several other veterans of the red bus campaign, a neat reminder of Johnson’s complicity in the £350m-a-week lie and countless other Vote Leave deceits.[Still hurts]
After that it gets even sillier, suggesting that Johnson's pledge to do Brexit then get on with social reform indicates not a process but a contradiction: 'The great intellectual colossus touted by his supporters had not managed to shape this list into a coherent argument'. And there is the prissy belief after all in sensible Thatcherite housekeeping: 'shaking the magic money tree as if piling up the deficit was no longer taboo.'
The clincher?
[Johnson wants to be] both the Brexiter rabble-rouser of 2016, brutal in the pursuit of his goals, and the zipwire ringmaster of London 2012, provider of spectacle and amusement. The trouble, however, is that those two things will often collide. To take one example, Johnson said this sentence in his speech: “Let’s promote the welfare of animals that has always been so close to the hearts of the British people and yes, let’s start now on those free trade deals.” But what if one of those free trade deals involves the US, whose animal welfare standards so many British consumers find repellent?
The same British consumers who endured the UK BSE crisis, the horsemeat in beef pies, the outbreaks of salmonella in chicken and eggs. Why do so many cosmos think they will somehow be forced to eat US produce?
Freedland might be beginning to have doubts though:
Brussels will not easily offer a new deal, and parliament will not easily accept a no deal....[sounds like backtracking already] In which case, what we saw on day one of the Johnson era was the warm-up to an early election, with stubborn, vindictive Europeans cast as the villains and a new, hard-right, 100% Johnsonian cabinet, purged of dissent, lined up as the campaign team. Will it work? No one can yet know. But it’s worth remembering that Mayor Johnson and Vote Leave Johnson have one thing in common: when they faced the voters, they won.
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