“What are you getting Carrie for Christmas?” Boris Johnson was asked by BBC Radio West Midlands. And the prime minister replied: “I’m going to get Brexit done.” Wow. I feel like I know how this fairytale ends. Guest vocals by the late great Kirsty MacColl.
Yet even by his own standards of thermonuclear disingenuity, Johnson’s turn on ITV news on Monday morning reached new depths. In a fish market in Grimsby, ITV News reporter Joe Pike asked Johnson about newspaper reports featuring Jack Williment-Barr, a four-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia, who was pictured being forced to sleep on a concrete floor in an overcrowded NHS hospital this weekend. “I haven’t had a chance to look at the photo,” Johnson said. Look at it now, said Pike, who had it up on his phone. At which point Johnson simply took the reporter’s phone and stuffed it in his pocket.
What has happened to reality? What can you say? Other than: may all would-be statesmen disport themselves with the casual larceny of a guy who knows if you don’t let the legal papers physically touch you, then they haven’t been served on you. For my money, the inclusion of the auto-satirical words “prime minister” at the end of Pike’s next sentence mark it out as a contender for quote of the campaign. Let’s see them in action: “You refuse to look at the photo, you’ve taken my phone, and put it in your pocket, prime minister.” YOU’VE ROBBED HIS PHONE LIVE ON AIR. Sorry – you’ve robbed his phone live on air, prime minister.
A pause. “Sorry,” said the prime minister of the United Kingdom, eventually, fumbling around in his pocket for another man’s phone and some more lies. “I’m sorry to have taken your phone, but there you go,” blustered Johnson. “I was just …” But he couldn’t finish the sentence. How on earth could he have finished the sentence? He simply tailed off. Later, at a Q&A in a Sunderland factory, Johnson appeared to float scrapping the BBC licence fee simply to distract from this story – a move that vaguely reminded me of Bill Clinton bombing the Sudanese aspirin factory to distract from his blowjob hearings. As Johnson put it: “I’m under pressure not to extemporise policy on the hoof.” Incorrect. You’re under pressure because you nicked a phone live on telly.
When she was through the looking glass, the White Queen famously told Alice that “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things by breakfast”. No offence to Her Majesty, but this is an incredibly low score if you’ve been listening to Boris Johnson’s early morning media round.
That said, the PM’s breakfast interview with Nick Ferrari on LBC on Monday gave us a little insight into his process – kind of like an episode of Inside the Liar’s Studio. The prime minister allowed lucky listeners a real-time chance to see how he turns in some of his more memorable mendacious performances. Take the other sort of lying – lying on the floor in front of bulldozers, which he’d once promised to do if Heathrow went ahead with a third runway, but which now appears in direct opposition to government policy.
Is he going to do it? wondered Ferrari, rhetorically. “I would … have to find some way of honouring that promise,” mused Johnson, like one of those pundits who promise to eat their shoe live on air if something doesn’t happen, then are proved wrong, but eat a shoe made out of cake and imagine they’re quits. Like this, but with his entire climate morality. “It might be technically difficult to achieve,” Johnson continued, ostensibly talking about the bulldozers, but subconsciously surely weighing up the technical challenges of the lie. This would be a 4 ½ reverse ferret, in the pike position, with 2 ½ twists. Technically difficult to achieve – near-impossible to guarantee a perfect 10 from the Russian judge – yet somehow entirely doable for this most tireless of all competitors.
Even when not actively advancing one of his own lies, Johnson has developed a new tic of lying that he doesn’t understand his interviewer’s questions. “I don’t know what you mean by breaking a red wall,” he lied to Ferrari about a term that has been bandied about by his Tory strategists the entire campaign. It was the same last week when people were asking him questions about the film of him taking the piss out of Donald Trump with some other Nato leaders. “I really don’t know what is being referred to,” he lied then. “I don’t know where that’s come from.” The prime minister remains a man whose deep personal philosophy can be summed up by the video for Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me.
His other stylistic trait has been linking two things that have precisely no bearing on the other. Asked by Ferrari about Jack Williment-Barr, Johnson appeared to suggest that the real illness is Britain’s political constipation. Not having Brexit is “blocking things”, he explained. “Once we’ve got things motoring,” he suggested, situations like a small child being treated on a floor would no longer occur, “but that can only happen when we’ve got Brexit done.” Hang on, what? Why? What in the name of logic, never mind empathy, are you talking about? We expect sociopathy, but at least lace it with basic coherence.
Then again, we have reached the stage of the campaign where Johnson’s words feel terminally unmoored from reality. Take his Grimsby visit, where he offered fishermen “the chance to recapture some of that spectacular marine wealth” – a way of putting it that makes one of the country’s most hardscrabble industries sound easily as rewarding as running a hedge fund. Follow Johnson, even if it goes against your instincts, and he will make you fishers of men. Which is to say that you’ll be retraining as cold callers if you currently fish sustainably, then he ends up going for no-deal and you lose paper-free access to the single market. And that’s if he hasn’t had your phone off you, preventing you from even making the calls.
