Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
The news story that really made me believe that the bumbling fool shtick is real and not just an act was when he went to a buddhist temple in Myanmar and started reciting a colonial-era Kipling poem about a British soldier reminiscing about a Burmese girl that he kissed - until the ambassador intervened and told him it wasn't appropriate.
If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background.
So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
Precisely. The Boris Johnson who is acting off the cuff - reciting the myanmar poem or acting like a moron in portugal - is the real Boris Johnson. The Boris Johnson who uses "SEO tactics" has been programmed by advisors.
> If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem.
That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
I'm not saying he's not racist/colonialist. You only have to read his article about 'flag-waving piccaninnies... tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief...' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If.... Or his argument that Obama hated the UK because he was Kenyan and had an 'ancestral dislike of the British empire'. Or any of the other dozens examples.
I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem.
I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
I have a weird sort of in on this, in that my grandparents are exactly the kind of people who love The Road to Mandalay. I think the clever thing about reciting a poem like that is it appeals to a broad spectrum of conservative voters: the low-end, who will enjoy the thumb in the eye of 'political correctness', the mid-level, who feel like the british empire was good, then the 'intellectuals' (like my grandparents), who are very fond of poetry and Kipling, and like to think of themselves as more intelligent and refined than their proletariat opposition.
The nice thing about it, is it's a spectrum. If you're in the conservative-intellectual bracket, you still probably enjoy the provocation of the politically correct, and the imperial nostalgia stuff. If you're in the conservative-middle-brow bracket, you still feel good about the fact that your racism is being associated with Great British poetry.
I don't think he's a genius, or that he's playing fifth-dimensional chess, or something. I think it's just an advantage of this whole bumbling persona - that he can go to events like this and basically do what he wants. So when he thinks up some kind of stunt - like reciting a colonialist poem, or getting stuck on a rope, or whatever - he can go ahead with it, because it fits with his image. That gives him a whole range of communicative strategies most politicians don't have. What he actually communicates (the blend of dogwhistle racism and attention-seeking) is actually pretty normal.
Isn't it much the same thing as Trump saying something racist that he can kind of get away with?
Johnson can say it, incite some anger in people who won't vote for him anyway, get his name on the news again and appeal to his base. Many of his supporters are the kinds of people that want to "Make Britain Great Again".
There isn't a vast constituency in Britain who love the poem, but there is a vast constituency who are mildly racist and look back to the "good old days".
Yes, Churchill said plenty of stuff that was racist/misogamist even back in those days. Bojo models himself after him. Btw I'm a big Churchill fan in spite of all that. The flawed hero.
For centuries a posh accent and certainty was enough for the class that ruled the UK.
One thing Brexit has successfully done is illustrate to all sides just how mediocre our leadership actually is.
Mediocre leaders are fine when the ship is sailing in calm waters to a known destination.
At the moment it feels like half of them want to steer into the iceberg and the other half want to abandon ship, with a few lone voices pointing out we could have just turned to port and swerved it.
It'll take an existential threat (war?) to sort the wheat from the chaff. Typically the best and brightest of a country trickle to the top when duty finally calls.
Though, there are opportunists. Like Mao. Or Hitler.
But offending the locals doesn't matter to him. He's playing to the British right-wing audience, who then get to complain about "political correctness".
> British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
"You can't rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately-constructed veneer of a blithering idiot there lurks a blithering idiot" - Boris Johnson
He got a scholarship to Eton and then one to Oxford. They don’t give those out with the papers, even to rich kids. We can say he is very bright without any qualification.
We can say he leveraged his privilege well, and I think that's different than offering someone blanket praise of being "bright".
And again, I'm not necessarily making judgement on his academic credentials - I made the point about his jobs. Of which a classical education is evidently rather worthless. With the exception of being a player of politics and narratives.
Being a gifted student as a kid doesn't necessarily translate into being an intelligent or wise adult. If you don't cultivate it properly then it either goes to waste or gets spent on stupid or petty nonsense, like the attention whoring Boris Johnson seems addicted to.
I'm not even getting into Brexit, if you look at the comments made by senior diplomats when he worked at the Foreign Office (along with the very obvious gaffs including getting a British woman an extended sentence in Iran...) which has a reasonably clear remit.
His front-bench roles even before becoming PM, and his previous roles, where he was fired from being a journalist for lying, for example, show he's just bad at anything other than playing the political game. And even then, you look at the advisers he has around him in order to be adept at even that.
Yes, he does terribly when he doesn't get to define his own job responsibilities. At those, he frequently needed to fall back on his blueblood heritage.
Where he is now, his job (as he or his backers define it) appears to be to distract the voting public from unpleasant facts. He has proven very, very good at changing the public subject.
He has the complicity of the UK news media, much as W had in the US. The long-term takeover of the media by a tiny handful of right-wing extremists is proceeding smoothly worldwide, with concomittent benefits for their chosen spokesmouths.
This means he's also meta-smart. He focuses his limited mental energy on the things that lead to success in the areas he wants (he's been elected PM, that's the peak of success by any measure). The fact that he has gotten away with being "dumb" on some details is a fault of the system.
Same goes for the USA POTUS. At some point you have to say "don't hate the player, hate the game."
When a coworker chooses to negatively gossip to the media about somebody, and the media finds it click-worthy, do you think this is going to be a characteristic and unsampled bias of that person or other's perception of them?
True, if that were a one-off occurrence done under the guise of an anonymous or worthless tip-off from someone with an axe to grind.
When it's dozens of former colleagues, all calling someone out on their BS over the course of years, regarding unrelated incidents, and where a number of those incidents actually occurred in the public eye?
Maybe, but he's always been lazy and unwilling to do much actual work, apparently [1] his headmaster wrote
to his father in 1982:
Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies...
Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of
responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School
for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard
him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.
No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work, never mind Prime Minster of the UK. Being unwilling to do work purely on other people’s say so is a separate trait from being lazy. He also has a much better command of Ancient Greek than anyone unwilling to apply themselves could acquire however wonderful the teachers the were exposed to.
This is quite apart from the question of whether he’s a buffoon. If anyone but Corbyn was in charge of Labour the Conservatives would be cruising to a large electoral defeat soon but we don’t live in that world.
> No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work
I can't speak for the 90s but watching the Daily Telegraph in the last years my impression is that the chief qualifications of their journalists and especially their columnists seems to be how much they mirror the weird political stances of the Barclay brothers, the owners of the DT.
No, but some people get to be Telegraph columnists and into positions of power without having to do as much work and face as much scrutiny as others because of their skin colour, their familial wealth and connections, and because they went an elite school.
They help less than you'd think. In reality the parents of the boys and girls on the inside of the existing networks steer them into in group friendships.
(They help more than nothing but less than you'd hope as a parent - even money can't buy your children entry to the upper classes.)
I think that depends on how you define work/graft.
He has great energy and clearly finds writing and speaking easy, especially if he not constrained by effort required to check the facts ( opinion based columns ).
I suspect he is also very competitive under the bonhomie.
> ancient greek
He didn't get a first at Oxford, while Cameron did - he recently called Cameron a 'girly swot'. Suggests he didn't work as hard as he could have and still hasn't quite got over it.
I suspect for the stuff he doesn't want to do, or doesn't find comes naturally, the real hard graft, he isn't so great.
He has often had multiple jobs, as well as multiple private lives - so great energy, but that's not the same as being able to really graft.
So I'd agree he is not lazy, by any means.
However, would you trust him with a really important task, a task that needed someones undivided attention to succeed?
Like Brexit or being Primer Minister? - I'm not sure he will do the job to his best ability - never quite the focus to be first class.
A Telegraph deputy editor was on the BBC news channel a few days ago reviewing the newspaper headlines, she could barely string sentences together but her accent suggested that she had been to a very good school.
If his aim is to come across as a lovable bumbling fool then he's failing, he comes across as a malicious pompous ass who will happily wreck his country for minimal personal gain.
Boris Johnson is a man of average intelligence pretending that he is an idiot, so in case when something goes wrong and he really looks like an idiot, people wouldn't be able to blame him, since obviously, from the start, he was an idiot!
Perhaps not, but I don’t think that’s going to help people who, say, live along the Irish border or who will be impacted by drug shortages. This isn’t just some kind of game.
If the problems of the working class are “hypothetical” (as they are to the elite ruling class basically everywhere) then it literally is a game. They see things like this as edge cases to be sort of muddled through later, because they’ve never known anyone who uses the public health system.
Hopefully anyone that completed a degree in that focused on Ancient Greece/Classics could muster a reasonable performance in a debate like this, even if they couldn't manage a first ;)
If anything his public speaking is above average, and the inflated ego and confidence that goes with attending Eton certainly helps with that.
Nothing here shows any great intelligence, maybe marginally more than he likes to let on though.
