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Grilled, battered or fried: Boris Johnson’s arse on the line

By Jane Rankin-Reid - posted Wednesday, 17 November 2004


He’s an archetypal, white, blonde, Anglo man-child with an apparently insatiable appetite for satire and self-ridicule. At just 40-years-old Boris Johnson was, until yesterday one of the youngest MPs on the British Tory Party’s front bench.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard and ALP leader of the Opposition Mark Latham would be wise to study Boris’ media bites, not to mention his principled stance on a range of uncomfortable topics. Describing George W Bush, Johnson infamously declared, “The President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy”. On Tony Blair’s Iraqi debacle, Boris is equally mordant; “It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall”.

Until yesterday, British commentators fingered Johnson as the future leader the Tories need for victory although others claimed this is wishful straw clutching. Sounds a bit like the Australian Labor Party really doesn’t it? But more fun with Boris driving the bus I’m guessing. Even so, with typical modesty, Johnson once stated prophetically as it turns out, that he had as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being “decapitated by a Frisbee, being reincarnated as an olive or of finding Elvis”.

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Boris Johnson has occasionally been called a Tory Adonis and he is dead sexy, although more typically lusted after in conservative circles as a bicycle riding Euro-sceptic. He is also the editor of The Spectator, the weekly magazine of almost canonical contrariness, a 170-year-old dose of brick throwing from the right and center of British life. 

Even when he isn’t busy chasing rabbits for the Tories, Johnson’s journalistic and literary output is prodigious with a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph, almost annual editions of Boris aphorisms, a blog site of his own www.boris-johnson.com, and a novel, Seventy Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors, due out in 2005. He’s also made BAFTA nominated appearances on Have I Got News For You, the much-loved BBC TV satire of news and current affairs. Did I mention that Johnson was also until yesterday, Shadow Minister for the Arts? But that’s enough about you Boris! Your meretricious rise and rise is enough to put a thinking girl off her crumpet.

As the beginning of what has turned out to be Boris’ lengthiest run of bad luck or just plain bad judgment in his intensely public political life to date, the week of October 17 certainly tested him. It began innocently enough the weekend before as he was listening a radio broadcast of the England versus Wales football game. Johnson was astounded by the irreverence of the crowd’s response to requests for a minute’s silence in memory of Liverpool born Kenneth Bigley, who after televised pleas from his family for the British Government to intervene in his kidnapping, was tragically assassinated by Iraqi insurgents.

Instead of the anticipated respectful silence the crowd jeered and catcalled, forcing the embarrassed referee to give up on the tradition of sharing 60 seconds of memorial tranquility and blow the whistle to start the game. Johnson was even more surprised to find no media coverage of this unusual occurrence in the following days. Later he’d write, “The crowd's reaction showed there was something by definition false in the decision to hold the minute's silence. The ceremony required people to show an emotion that - manifestly, alas - they did not all feel”.

Such irreverence inspired Johnson to commission The Spectator’s weekly editorial on the culture of grief in contemporary British society. Unfortunately, the theme’s enticing potential for exploring the awkward consequences that may lie in store for a society when its populace becomes saturated by the manipulation of sentiment, passed whomever ended up with the task, completely by. Instead, the football crowd’s behaviour prompted a searing indictment on Britain’s mawkish faith in grief qualified as an obligatory public experience, blame culture and state dependency.

Although the 67,000 or so football loving souls may have been simply stating a preference for grieving in solitude, the article connected unemployment, sobbing in public, single parenting and rumbling in football stands, in a blind-side of unhelpful observations about how awful things can still be in contemporary British life. It was as politically contrived as a TV game show give-away prize. Another central thrust of the article was the mounting public appeals for Coalition governments to intervene in the business of hostage taking in Iraq.

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It was implied Bigley, an independent contractor working in Bagdad, had dug his own grave by ignoring Foreign Office warnings advising against taking work in “one of the most dangerous places on earth”. Fortunately, The Spectator’s attention to the Blair government’s mistaken enthusiasm for the war in Iraq continues unabated but in the light of the article’s accusations of public blame shifting, this particular attempt at cold hard rationalism seems to have merely replaced one culprit with another in the shaming game.

Nonetheless The Spectator’s October 17 commentary left a number of gift-wrapped opportunities unopened. If there had been the slightest political point to be scored, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s infamously ambient piety and selective politicisation of regret throughout his years in government may also have been worth testing. Do Blair’s big wet ones constitute an historic revision of the traditional stiff upper British lip? Or perhaps another underhand attack on the survival myths of the English establishment his party pays him to hate?

Instead, the dry-eyed crowd’s nose thumbing at the very convention they’d been accused of evincing left the leader writer hot under the collar and scratching for insight. Harvesting a dated batch of biases, the anonymously penned article attacked Liverpudlians’ welfare dependencies, victim mentality and the city’s “disproportionate convulsion of grief” over Bigley’s murder. Unsurprisingly, the opinions pock marked with such useless generalisations, not to mention a few factual inaccuracies about the 1989 Hillsborough Football tragedy, caused a public outcry in the UK.

Further evidence of the symbolic revival of bear baiting in modern British life saw media swoop upon Johnson for publishing the offensive commentary. Faced with an almost complete meltdown in the days ahead, Boris was persuaded by Tory Leader Michael Howard to travel to Liverpool and apologise. Howard added for the public record that he thought the article was “nonsense from beginning to end”. According to one media report, as few as seven copies of the week’s offending Spectator actually sold in Liverpool, but for the vote hungry Tories, the damage had well and truly been done.

The Spectator’s observations of institutionalised political correctness and the commercial and political manipulation of public empathy are well known. But there were other voices emerging across the political spectrum to take issue with the recycling of individual rights and responsibilities in an age of Diana-ised expectations of public empathy as a set performance piece.

Risk aversion observers see these phenomena fitting an emerging pattern of engineered appearances of political guardianship as a viable form of social responsibility. Perhaps the modern left’s political grazing patterns are also unwittingly contributing to what Atlantic Monthly’s Cullen Murphy describes in the October issue of similar initiatives in the US as the “outsourcing of personal responsibility”? In some respects, the endemic culture of risk aversion, or the “precautionary principle” conditioning contemporary British life is to be expected after decades of pervasive civic neglect, unaccountable governance and corporate malfeasance. But in reprising the so-called nanny state as the antidote to ensure greater liability, are individual rights being menaced in the bargain? Will the present degrees of state intervention in social protectionism invite new forms of repression into western society?

Articles appearing in www.spiked-online.com by Hume, Josie Appleton, Brendan O’Neill, Jennifer Bristow and Helen Gulberg, among others, consider the implications of preemptive policing to track the children of criminals, over zealous warnings against sun-tanning and coffee drinking as well as in-depth analysis of television as a “theatre of fear”. These tests of the cultural and legal consequences of risk aversion are worth every minute of reading for comparisons with contemporary Australian life.

Remember the Queensland judge awarding a drunken “hooray” damages to be paid by the inconsiderate hotelier who’d neglected to stop the poor lad strapping pork chops to his feet and slipping over and hurting himself during drinking hours? Or the Federal Health Department’s threats of lawsuits over News Ltd’s publishing stock images of sexagenarian film director Ridley Scott smoking his customary cigar? Or the verdict handed down by a Victorian judge several weeks ago diminishing a murder charge to manslaughter on the grounds that a husband was provoked to deadly rage by his wife’s threats of leaving him.

Cullen Murphy’s refreshing essay cites the notorious “Twinkie” defense, where a murderer’s actions were blamed on his elevated blood sugar levels as a vivid example of how swiftly “ the outsourcing of responsibility” has caught on in US society, not to mention the Iraqi war room. Questioning terrorist suspects can be outsourced (to Egypt and the Philippines), prison guarding not to mention the big job of enlightening Iraqis on democracy, have all been subcontracted to the private market, where someone else is always paid to take the rap. The costs and contradictions in comparable moments of lunacy in the UK leave little question that the legal rationing of responsibilities have similarly begun to shift beyond the limits of conventional imagination in Australian society.

Read Boris’ comments on www.boris-johnson.com about efforts to regulate the ancient tradition of English school boys’ fighting with conkers, with lobbyists insisting they should be made to wear goggles as protection against possible injury. It goes without saying that if your child obeys the edict and gets called rude names on school property (assuming you’ve failed to assist him see the funny side of life) he’ll be eligible for compensation for the psychological damage caused by all this unsupervised bullying.

The point here is that humans have survived minor acts of accidental self-mutilation for eons without any form of playground supervision, let alone the increasing restrictions of market-derived public liability management agendas.

Such worrying trends in blame shifting are a long way from a crowd of impatient football fans’ failure to meet conventional expectations of collectivised grief expression.

After Howard’s critical remarks about the offending Spectator article, Johnson, wearing his editor’s cap at a rakish angle, fired back saying that to agree with Michael Howard “would require me to perform a kind of pre-frontal lobotomy”.

“Operation Scouse Grovel” was the title Johnson gave the ensuing campaign to demonstrate his ongoing support for The Spectator’s liberal legacy. Accounts of his reception in Liverpool vary, although he spent some time in a chilly three star hotel, fearing he’d be beaten up if he showed his face on the streets. “As everybody knows, I’m on a mission to apologise to the people of this great city, and my heart is in my boots”, he wrote in the October 23 issue of The Spectator. “The operation is bedeviled with difficulty, not the least that no one seems to want to accept my apology”. It was raining, and he’d reluctantly rejected a plan to sign the book of condolences for the late Ken Bigley, “on the grounds that it will look as if we are playing politics with a tragedy”. Meanwhile inside the ranks of The Spectator itself, literary sedition was accruing with media writer Stephen Glover declaring in his Daily Mail column that Boris was being treated as “a political plaything by his masters”, less than a week after he’d been given a raise, Johnson grumbled.

Regardless, the Liverpool Post and Echo published his letter of heartfelt contrition the following day. Johnson also appeared on local talk back radio receiving a call from Ken Bigley’s Amsterdam based brother Paul. “You are a self centered, pompous twit”, he claimed, leaving Johnson feeling “winded, drained by a sudden proximity to personal suffering and grief. I felt like Police Chief Brodie in Jaws, slapped around the face by the mother of the little kid killed by the shark”.

Poor Boris! But if “Operation Scouse Grovel” failed as a public relations exercise for the Tory party - although Boris watchers hasten to note the numerous Liverpudlians who’ve publicly defended his views - “Action Editor” as Johnson’s gutsy effort in defending The Spectator’s capacity for inciting public debate may well be described, has at least succeeded in my opinion.

But the week from hell had yet to fade for Johnson as accounts of Michael Howard’s testiness lent weight to rumors that Boris would soon be forced to give up at least one of his day jobs. At the Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Award ceremony Howard and Johnson sniped at each other with the best of British sarcasm. Thanking Howard for presenting the awards in spite of his vehement dissent over The Spectator’s opinions, Boris noted the Tory leader had “taken time out from his busy multi-tasking day”. Retaliating with unexpected fervor, Howard hinted at tabloid coverage of Johnson’s rumored affair with author and Spectator contributor Petronella Wyett.  To which Boris could be heard muttering, “I think that’s enough!” Later when Howard quipped that Boris’ public life could be compared with Liberal Democrat Charles Kennedy’s prolific appearances, Johnson very nearly lost his cool. “I don’t see how he can be allowed to get away with this, its absolutely outrageous!”

Yesterday Tory Leader Michael Howard sacked Boris Johnson from the party’s front bench in evident response to increased media attention to his initial denials of his Wyatt affair. Forced to apologise yet again, his detractors were having a field day but Boris fought on with all he had. “I am very sorry this decision has been taken in response to tabloid stories about my private life. I am very much looking forward to continuing to promote the policies we have developed on the arts, and will do my utmost to serve my constituents in Henley.”

Could it get any worse for Boris Johnson? We can only image that by the time this nasty portion of life’s beat me ’til I’m blue lesson is over and digested in full, his job as editor will be even more meaningful to him. But this too is potentially under threat after the publication’s proprietors, the Barclay Brothers, announced a reshuffle of the current board of Directors. Boris is tougher than he looks and he’ll survive to grow from learning the hard way that in this age of media’s supreme mastery of the art of public shaming, democratic debate is often the first casualty.

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About the Author

Jane Rankin-Reid is a former Mercury Sunday Tasmanian columnist, now a Principal Correspondent at Tehelka, India. Her most recent public appearance was with the Hobart Shouting Choir roaring the Australian national anthem at the Hobart Comedy Festival's gala evening at the Theatre Royal.

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