The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson
Has anyone else been watching this on Channel 4? If so, what do you think?
So far (9th March), only two of the four episodes have been broadcast live, the the whole lot are available on More 4. I watched this last episode this evening. It has surprised me watching recent events I've lived through, quite how many of them I'd half forgotten, occluded by more recent developments.
He's not a popular person. I don't like him, and didn't even when he was more popular. He's a type of person I don't respond well to. The series hasn't changed my feelings about him. It has tried to be more generous to him than I would be, but IMHO it hasn't succeeded. It has given quite a lot of attention to the possibility that some features of his upbringing might have inhibited his ability to become a fully functioning ethically adult human being. That's possible, but lots of people have difficult upbringings, including, if true, presumably his sister and his brothers. Many other people, including so far as one can tell, his siblings, make a reasonable go at overcoming them.
I've never met him. None of us know what goes on within many of those we know personally, yet alone those we don't. It does, though raise the philosophical and ethical question whether ones upbringing and limitations can excuse anything, yet alone everything. Or should we measure ourselves, and in some cases, theirs, by what how we make of the cards we have been dealt with, how we play them.
I've little doubt that public life puts the average human soul under greater pressures than the lives most of us live. Do shipmates think that's a defence, or is it more that those who are not up to those challenges shouldn't take them on. So if they do, and that exposes the weaknesses in their personalities, then hard luck. They put themselves forwards. If that results in public exposure, shame and ignominy, that is the price to their estimation that it is only right that they should expect to have to pay?
If you've seen it, what do you think? I've deliberately started this thread in Purgatory so as to restrain my own, and I suspect many others' temptation to rant.
So far (9th March), only two of the four episodes have been broadcast live, the the whole lot are available on More 4. I watched this last episode this evening. It has surprised me watching recent events I've lived through, quite how many of them I'd half forgotten, occluded by more recent developments.
He's not a popular person. I don't like him, and didn't even when he was more popular. He's a type of person I don't respond well to. The series hasn't changed my feelings about him. It has tried to be more generous to him than I would be, but IMHO it hasn't succeeded. It has given quite a lot of attention to the possibility that some features of his upbringing might have inhibited his ability to become a fully functioning ethically adult human being. That's possible, but lots of people have difficult upbringings, including, if true, presumably his sister and his brothers. Many other people, including so far as one can tell, his siblings, make a reasonable go at overcoming them.
I've never met him. None of us know what goes on within many of those we know personally, yet alone those we don't. It does, though raise the philosophical and ethical question whether ones upbringing and limitations can excuse anything, yet alone everything. Or should we measure ourselves, and in some cases, theirs, by what how we make of the cards we have been dealt with, how we play them.
I've little doubt that public life puts the average human soul under greater pressures than the lives most of us live. Do shipmates think that's a defence, or is it more that those who are not up to those challenges shouldn't take them on. So if they do, and that exposes the weaknesses in their personalities, then hard luck. They put themselves forwards. If that results in public exposure, shame and ignominy, that is the price to their estimation that it is only right that they should expect to have to pay?
If you've seen it, what do you think? I've deliberately started this thread in Purgatory so as to restrain my own, and I suspect many others' temptation to rant.
Comments
Hopefully.
If we never see or hear of this wretched man again, it will be a blessing. However, he's like that floater in the loo - impossible to flush away...
Ah, will he therefore attract floating voters?
Martin 54, well done - your best post in years!
🤣🤣 🙇♂️🙇♂️
More seriously though, his rise, and the refusal of his fan club to fade away, still puzzles me. There's a tendency in the media to admire him simply because he strides the stage on a larger scale than most of the other politicians. He's described as a vote winner, but why? what is it about him that appeals to some people, and which I can't see? And how is it that some people still think he's wonderful, despite all the evidence?
Am I some sort of misanthrope, out of sync with my fellow men and women that I can't see it? I don't even feel any sneaking admiration towards him for his success in fooling so many people for so much of the time.
I don't even feel shame that I was fooled because I wasn't. Whatever his alleged magic was, I was never able to see it.
Indeed. Here (for your edification!) is an old metrical version of a psalm which looks more to the downfall of the tories wicked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fZ-2ENH2EA
He's well known from TV, he comes over as affable and witty. I've never met the man in person, but if I was to judge him from his appearances on HIGNFY and the like, I'd probably enjoy having a beer with him.
But "being pleasant company for a beer or three" isn't really a qualification for government. I'd rather have someone exceptionally boring but competent than someone charismatic, but either incompetent or just wrong.
My impression?
Affable. Witty. Ruthless. Eye to the main chance. He had a 'routine', an act. Rather like a comedian. I heard him use wise-cracks to deflect every single question he was asked. Ok. We know that but when you see him do it live half a dozen times in a row you realise how much of a 'turn' it all is.
My impression was that he was shorter than I imagined, but he also had this weird hulking energy about him, and yes he had a routine and a definite point at which he switched it 'on'.
Psalm 73 strikes me also as a telling description of Johnson and his ilk.
He strikes me very much as someone who uses an apparent affability, and comic touch to conceal the person underneath, though whether he even knows who the real person underneath is, rather than just what he wants, who knows?
Yes. Absolutely.
I'm not a big bloke so lots of people are taller than me. But yes, he did have a 'weird hulking energy about him.' Excellent description.
Boris is still a pillock, though.
I believe these people represent the monarch and are empowered by them to do so. That is what this British Lad understood
A technical point, perhaps. I wonder what might happen if the King one day refused the Royal Assent to some especially ghastly plot of *his* government?
As to Boris (PM Failed), I dread to think it, but he may well re-appear on the political scene in the not-too-distant future, in daemonic conjunction with Farage, perhaps, and other figures of nightmare...
Carrie might have other ideas, of course, if she's still Mrs J at that time.
Well, Boris at least caused some wry merriment, whatever the reason for his ahem lapse of memory...
Yes, that was the point I was making. And during the depression, the NSW Governor (ie the Viceroy) did in fact sack the Premier of the day. That precedent was followed in 1975, when the Governor-General dismissed the Prime Minister. While the conservative forces on each occasion supported the viceregal action - it benefitted them - it's very doubtful that such a course would now be followed.
He certainly feels entitled and thinks the rules are for others.
When he was a trainee reporter in Wolverhampton the late 80s he probably spemt many hours in court.
Here's another point to take.
Even if you'd taken your ID, you wouldn't be eligible to vote in a UK election any more than I'd be eligible to vote in a US one.
😉
A pretty pointless point you're making there ITSM.
@Telford - it may have been different when he was a cub reporter but from what I've heard about his subsequent journalistic career he rarely put the hours in and was notoriously sacked for making things up. For some reason - chutzpah, privilege, sheer gall - that didn't appear to harm his career.
It's well known that when he was in The Foreign Office he used to turn up without reading the briefing notes and would try to wing it - often with egregious results.
Ok, he was a colourful London mayor but he had a good team behind him. Being 'the one who got elected' is no commendation in and of itself.
We can all think of bozos, ne'er do wells and even dictators who've won at the ballot box.
That's not to disparage the democratic process, of course.
I think you’ve misunderstood Gramps49’s post @Gamma Gamaliel, but even if not the question whether he could vote in a UK election is a tangent which has nothing to do with the subject of this thread.
BroJames, Purgatory Host
One can argue that Boris is a character he puts on, Alex (his real first name) os apparently a different character.
@Gramps49 - apologies.
Much though this may be the studied impression he'd like to give, none of those are things that just happen to fall into your hands while you're out on an afternoon's stroll. He wasn't found hiding behind a curtain. He hungered desperately for those roles especially the PM. I strongly suspect he still does.
He fell because his actions revealed that he had neither the integrity nor the ability to do the latter job. Nothing excuses that. Never forget it.
I think the question of whether or not he is 'serious' is rather besides the point, and his success is a reflection of that side of the national character that sees sincerity and earnestness as rather gauche. Johnson is his own satirist and too many people fear being unable to appreciate a joke.
I don't speak to his spell as PM but the entire period of his rise in politics.
A fair summing-up, I think.
I took three things from this surreal moment. Firstly, that his prime skill is to be able to riff off the top of his head on any topic; one immediately wondered if the rest of the responses in the interview were as silly as that on cardboard busses.
Secondly, the truth of what he says is for him secondary to the way it fills the silence.
And thirdly, Johnson as a man has no discernible inner life ('hinterland' is the fashionable word).
For a split second, as a railway modeller, part of me warmed to him as someone afflicted with an even odder hobby than the one I waste my time on. Its niche status evinced by the otherwise unaccountable lack of a cardboard box bus modelling thread in Heaven.
Or maybe he has put it beyond the pale now unto the seventh generation!
I took three things from this surreal moment. Firstly, that his prime skill is to be able to riff off the top of his head on any topic so long as it wasnt personal; one immediately doubted all his other responses.
Secondly, the truth of what he says is for him secondary to the way the words conveniently fills in a silence.
And thirdly, Johnson as a man has no discernible inner life.
His after politics career as a (very) highly paid after-dinner speaker suits him fine. Jokes are compulsory. Lack of seriousness is permissable. Structured thoughts—or the lack of them—wont be a hindrance, since by the time he stands up his audience is half pickled and flatulent anyway. Johnson has at last found his vocation.
https://www.model-bus-federation.org.uk/
There are lots of lovely diecast models available these days, so perhaps using cardboard to scratch-build is less common than it used to be.
However, to return to the subject, I got the impression when Johnson made his throwaway comment about cardboard models of buses that he simply stuck large cardboard boxes one on top of the other, more like the way small children might play with them. I didn't get the impression that somewhere under the bluff, he's a serious modeller in disguise. It would be reassuring to discover that he is. It might just mitigate the impression that I and others on this thread have already got, that there is no inner Johnson, or if there ever was, it has got lost.
Nice, though to see this forgotten thread reappear from the ashes.
YMMV, but, personally, I'm happy to leave Johnson in the Ditch of History, though he may well emerge (dripping with noxious slime), in some ill-starred future year, to vex the world again...
Right it seemed like a bit of whimsy, or rather, it seemed like it was intended to come across as whimsical.