Me and Boris Johnson? Well, it’s a bit – and I stress, a bit – like Androcles and the lion. Picture us, squaring up to one another on the blood-soaked sand of the arena. There he is, the white-blond barbarian, mouthing the sickening platitudes of his nauseating credo; and there am I, wild of mane and acuminate of claw. “Kill him! Kill him!” the crowd bays, and really I would oblige, because nothing gets my gastronomic juices flowing better than the prospect of munching down on a shamelessly opportunistic, crony-capitalistic, ego-ballistic, posturing popinjay who appears wholly deluded about the inverse correlation that exists between his ambition and his ability. But I can’t, because many years ago Boris Johnson removed a thorn from the highly sensitive velvety pad of my paw, and a lion – even one who’s spent the balance of his majority penned up in the blood-soaked arena of the British mediasphere – never forgets.
A couple of years ago, reviewing a brace of books about Johnson for the London Review of Books, Jonathan Coe advanced a devastating analysis of a phenomenon best described as an enigma wrapped inside a whoopee cushion. Johnson, Coe contended, was the first truly self-satirising politician; he comes already spread with greasy opprobrium. That we all saw him applying the goo is besides the point, since he slips from our grasp every time we try to grab hold of him. But Coe’s analysis goes further than Johnson – he sees the phenomenon not as a condemnation of politics, but as a failure of satire. The whole tendency of postwar British satire, he argues, has been a retreat from the real responsibility of supplying an alternative, while firing volley after volley of arrows that, although they may well look beautiful in flight, often tickle their quarries rather than despatching them to the underworld, where Bob Crow reigns for ever over a Hades of inflexible rostering and collective bargaining.
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