Why Boris Johnson should be absolute monarch

i am heartened to hear that Boris Johnson has become Mayor of London. It may be true that he knows very little about politics, and has won purely because he is an old-fashioned English ‘character’; but compare him for a moment with the Blair or Brown – B & B, it seems to me, lack character of any kind, being in their different ways hollow men; they also, surely, know a great deal about politics. But would anyone seriously think that Johnson could make a worse mess of things than B & B? Could anyone?

On the contrary, Johnson seems to me eminently qualified to hold public office, for the following reasons:

1. He doesn’t have a slimy, populist name like, say, ‘Tony Blair’. His full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. That’s a good, sound name.

2. He looks like a character from a 70s children’s show like Bagpuss.

3. He has a genuine and seemingly uncontrollable sense of humour, which is i ween the best safeguard against the insanity & egomania that tends to afflict the powerful. For example, here’s Johnson on homophobia:

“I don’t understand homophobia myself,” he tells attitude, the gay magazine. “Mathematically, in the great race of life, homosexual people have ruled themselves out of women, so what’s not to like?”

 Or on cannabis:

Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It’s time for a rethink, and the Tory party – the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth – is where it’s happening.

On being sacked from the Tory front bench:

My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

During the 2005 election:

Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.

On his support for the Tory Blair, David Cameron:

I’m backing David Cameron’s campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest.

On drugs:

I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn’t go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.

 4. He comes from the correct background, i.e. he is properly educated, having taken Classics at Oxford. The advantage to aristocracy, it seems to me, is that the aristocrat – or just anyone born to privilege – will tend to support the established system, the established culture, because in that system he occupies a place near the top. With a bad system, this is a bad thing. But for those who hold that English culture (pre-Blair) was more good than bad, and in any case was greatly preferable to the post-Blair wasteland of Britney, Big Brother, uncontrolled violent crime, enforced Political Correctness, and a dehumanizing multiculturalism, then an old-school toff such as Johnson is obviously a better bet than a demagogue like Blair. This is, i think, a sound argument for institutions like Eton and Oxbridge (and one reason why Kim Philby’s treachery casts such a long shadow over le Carre’s novels) as the selecting ground for the political elite. While it obviously excludes anyone not born to privilege, this is an imperfect world and we have only to consider Nu Labour to see how disastrous is a policy of ‘inclusiveness’.

This may seem ridiculously old-fashioned, but i think anyone with some knowledge of the destruction of education under Nu Labour would have to prefer a Johnson to a Blair. Theodore Dalrymple writes of the Cool Britannica brought about by the Blair:

It is not unusual, for example, to find British youths who, after 11 years of compulsory education, do not know who Shakespeare was. Mere absentmindedness or inadvertence on the part of their teachers? It seems not: when the publisher of a collection of literary classics recently offered to donate a set of these works (including those of Dickens and Shakespeare) to every secondary school in the nation, our educational authorities turned down the offer on the grounds that it would be elitist to accept it, and the literature was not “relevant” to pupils’ lives. 

Can any educated man or woman read this and not wince? Or, from the same article:

When Prime Minister Blair came to power, he promised to “rebrand” Britain—as if the nation were a consumer product with sagging sales on the supermarket shelf. His election campaign slogan was “New Britain,” as if he found nothing worth preserving from the past—as if, until his most fortunate advent, British history were nothing but a catalog of crime, folly, and disaster, empty of achievement.

Mr. Blair promised to change Britain’s image, from stuffy, stifling formality to democratic, invigorating informality. Accordingly, he began his premiership by inviting pop stars to Downing Street, including the militantly coarse Noel Gallagher. He staged a conference of European leaders, not in any of the elegant locations that still exist in Britain, the land of Sheraton and Chippendale, but at the top of a tall, standard-issue office tower, so that the leaders might sit on new tubular steel chairs and contemplate the future. For a moment, the notion of Cool Britannia was all the rage, and British Airways dutifully removed the fuddy-duddy Union Jack from the tails of its aircraft, replacing it with a series of abstract designs that suggest that the company is run by LSD addicts—not perhaps an entirely happy thought for the passengers.

Far from being an old country, Britain would now present herself as a young, dynamic country, bursting with ideas and reaching fearlessly into the future: a future that would consist largely of fashion, soccer, and pop music, to judge from Mr. Blair’s selection of modern British achievements to bolster his case.

 Aside from my personal taste, that i can neither understand nor appreciate football, that most pop music offends me either by its blandness or coarseness, i am appalled at the way, to quote a friend of mine “the culture has really taken a nose dive in the last ten years”. Everywhere i see the triumph of mendacity, of the base, the servile, the exalting of the talentless & docile over the gifted and the spirited, and this all traceable to Nu Labour policy, this indeed is Nu Labour policy.

i have no hope of David Cameron doing anything about this. The man looks and acts like Blair already. He is too slick. He looks like the apple polishing golden boys i recall from school, the docile high achievers. We don’t want Cameron. We want Johnson. And we don’t want him as Prime Minister – we want him as absolute monarch. In these dark and foul days we need a man with wild strange hair and a good Classics degree, a man who can write of Nu Labour’s attempts to abolish A-level Ancient History:

When a new Dark Age falls, it is not always to the sound of Viking battle-cries and the tinkling of church windows. Sometimes it is the very governments themselves that go mad, and start disembowelling their own culture. If you inquire whimperingly how they can do it, how the ‘department for education and science’ could have allowed this mutilation even to be proposed, the answer is not just that they are barbarians, though that is certainly part of the problem.

The real trouble is that our rulers are Puritans — especially Gordon Brown, the man who has set the tone of government for the last ten years; and what I mean by Puritans is that they cannot see the beauty and point of an academic discipline unless it adds, in some crashingly obvious way, to the Gross Domestic Product of UK PLC. They are Puritans in the sense that they exalt WORK with all the mania of 1930s Soviet agitprop extolling the virtues of TRUD, with meaty-forearmed hammer-wielding women rolling up their sleeves and preparing to join the men at the lathe.

It is an axiom of Gordon Brown’s speeches, a point to which he endlessly returns, that work and work alone is the means by which people can raise their self-esteem and the esteem in which they are held by others; and though he is obviously right that unemployment is wasteful and cruel, Gordon continually forgets the objective of work. His trouble is that he is stuffed with Maxton and Marx, and shows no sign of having read Aristotle, and if he would only stop devising new taxes, and take down the Nicomachean Ethics, he would see from the first five pages that the objective of every human economic and political activity is not work; it is not money.

We do what we do because we hope to achieve happiness. Every skill and every pursuit and every practical effort or undertaking seems to aim at some good, says old Aristotle, my all-time hero, and that goal is happiness — not Gordon’s wretched TRUD. In his worship of work, and his Marxist obsession with money, Gordon Brown continually mistakes the means for the end. He does not understand that an educational system can be a eudaemonic triumph even if it encourages disciplines that add not a penny to national output.

It seems to be beyond him, and beyond Labour ministers, that the advantage of study can consist in the happiness engendered by knowledge itself; and though you can certainly argue, as I do, that we are likely to have a much stronger economy if young people have the intellectual and emotional satisfaction of understanding their civilisation, and how it evolved, that is not the point. The point is that these subjects are a joy and an end in themselves, and Gordon is presiding over a gradually more brutal Treasury-driven system of pseudo-utilitarianism in which the point is being lost.

That is essentially because he and his Brownites are Puritans, posers who turn up in suits when the dress is white tie. They dislike ornament, or anything that looks as though it might be lovely in itself and for no other purpose. They hate anything that looks like frivolity and pleasure, and that is why they have spent such huge sums, over the last ten years, trying to trammel and constrain the rest of the population. The Puritan mind likes control, and conformity, and rigid adherence to codes, and it likes wherever possible to substitute its own discretion for the judgment of individuals.

Of course Johnson is probably a reprobate and quite possibly a Flashman-style bounder. But i’d take a Flashman over a Blair any day, a human being over a robot. It is sad that it takes a product of the English upper classes to spell it out, that money is not happiness, and that being happy is a desirable goal. i intend to memorise the following paragraph, and to gravely recite it to chavs on the bus, in order to spread the word:

They just do not understand that the point of work is not to add to Gordon Brown’s tithe barn, but to have the time and freedom to bunk off, read a book, play with the children, do a picture (no matter how useless), write a poem (no matter how bad), draw up plans for your expedition to the Mato Grosso or just sit and get sozzled in the sun. They do not understand the point of economics or the point of life. They have no concept of the limits of government, and in their narrow GDP-obsessed way they are a threat to the transmission of the glories of our culture from one generation to the next. In the words of Hesiod, who will be rarely off the lips of the coming Conservative government, they are fools who know not how much the half is greater than the whole, nor what blessedness there is in mallow-grass and asphodel. In fact, I doubt these Puritans would even know what an asphodel was, and the real scandal is that they are not giving the rest of us the time and the chance to find out.