Back, sack or crack.

A witless blend of our current political mess (which one would imagine could be none more fucked, but in doing so would be wrong) and thinking of a good title first and then working backwards.
Hey, who’s that tough guy over there? Bruce Lee? Charles Bronson (either one works well enough)? Tony Montana? No it’s Boris ‘I’m hard’ Johnson. The man who would be king. Top of the tree, leader of the pack, alpha male and big swinging dick. Another Prime Minister no one has really voted for and he’s really starting to flex his flabby, milky white muscles – because he’s had to wait so long to show us who’s boss. At a time of crisis a tough guy is called for. And we got Boris Johnson. Oops. And shame he doesn’t really get us either.

But why should he feel obliged to get us? He went to Eton, don’t you know, and he’s never been what you’d call unsure of himself. Sleep is not something Boris Johnson has to worry about because his levels of empathy for anyone besides himself are slightly slighter than an autistic hyena. So, he says he’s trying his best to sort this country out, garumph garumph, but all he’s really doing is what he always wanted to do which is be the natural heir to Winston Churchill and that, it is plain to see, is something he will never achieve. That would be like Michael McIntyre thinking he could be as funny as Peter Cook.

Churchill was far from perfect, certainly a lot further from perfect than his fiercest fans would ever admit, but he managed to capture the bulldog spirit, the essence of the fighting Brit up against the odds. Like Harold Shand. Like that ‘never surrender’ kind of a thing. Well that was really useful because his time to shine came when we were up against hoards of slippery Nazis trying to re-paint the map of Europe with tar and shit. Churchill’s cunning, tenacity, oratory brilliance, foresight, work ethic and sheer self-belief kept Britain, and to a lesser extent Europe, in the game, and as a nation we owe him a debt that cannot be repaid. Johnson is just a deluded plonker (other names spring to mind) who has at least been graciously consistent in being unable to either walk the walk or talk the talk.

And now, to express his own puerile, facile, playground thug version of the bulldog spirit, Johnson has got his big hairy balls out and is starting to throw them all over the place, or rather is telling other people to do it for him. You want to try to stop him? You’re fired. You don’t want to back his ludicrous, deeply misguided and enormously dangerous plans? You’re sacked. In fact, try to mess with him and there’s a chance you’ll get another general election. You might think a general election is a good idea but don’t forget that Jeremy Corbyn really, really wants a general election too; so it can’t be a good idea. He hasn’t had a good idea since his potty training was complete.

So the age of Boris is upon us and it feels like we’re even closer to cracking than ever. No one can agree on anything with anyone else and all this with a man in charge who will never be anywhere near as talented as he thinks he is, because that level of imagined talent is unfeasible in any human being. In 10,000 years a new breed of super squirrels will be burying their mutant nuts in the soil under what was once Trafalgar Square, next to the defaced, toppled statues of Boris Johnson in various idealistic poses. But he’s a bowl of thick rice pudding with hair and a loud speaker and he is a national misfortune on even his bestest day. It feels like what can go wrong these days will go wrong and so, I the words of the same Harold Shand, “If I was you, I’d run for cover and close the hatch”. Fuck only knows where this will all end up.
G B Hewitt. 03.09.2019