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

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


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?

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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.

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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”.

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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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