11 Thoughts on Boris Johnson at the Liaison Committee

‘When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?’

Bob Dylan 1966

1. He really is poor at this. Two possibilities for Tory MPs to chew on. Either he (i) doesn’t realise how bad he is (ii) he doesn’t care. Both those possibilities bode ill.



2. The testing failure is very bad. It’s too vital, too everyday and too important to blather. This deeply serious and deeply worrying.





3. He denied the moonshot. Of course he did. You see, his inconsistency is a strength, not a weakness. His brazenness, like Berlusconi’s, sees him through.



4. I had six uses of ‘alas’ and one ‘doldrums’. There were at least two mentions of ‘pregnancy style testing’, one of which, my notes say, had the word ‘liberating’ somewhere in it.





5. Could someone FOI that ‘great list of trade deals’ Liz Truss presented to Cabinet?



6. Johnson wants to create a ‘Cat’s cradle of trade deals’. According to Wikipedia Cat’s cradle ‘ends when a player makes a mistake or creates a dead-end figure...which cannot be turned into anything else’.





7. 1…2…3…4…did the PM just threaten a tariff trade war? Isn’t that how The Phantom Menace started? Are we trapped in the Phantom Menace now?



8. He tried a ticket to ride joke there, somehow connected to having a flashing green light on your head. WTF, as they say. Interestingly, ‘Ticket To Ride' according to Paul McCartney, was about the Isle of Wight. According to John Lennon it was summat rather different.





9. According to the prime minister you can break the law if subject to ‘extreme suggestions’.



10. The new law to stop breaking up the UK, which will probably break up the UK, is needed to ensure a ‘belt and braces, ‘watertight bulkhead’ and a ‘safety net’. Are they all chapters for his memoirs?





11. He says he won’t trigger section 30 of the Scotland Act to allow a referendum [fleabag style turn to camera, with flash up of poll data from Scotland] yes he will. This fits my theory that Johnson is a sleeper agent for the SNP, recruited at Oxford and newly woken. Think about it. His every act has brought Scottish Independence closer. His mere presence adds several points to the Indy vote. The Daily Record claimed he ‘even erected his glamping tent without permission’. Think about it.