Masha Slonim
It’s been a month since the resignation of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary in protest against..

Masha Slonim: Boris Johnson. The beginning of a new career or the end of an old one

It’s been a month since the resignation of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary in protest against Theresa May’s soft approach to Brexit. Boris Johnson went silent and people started to forget him. But as soon as I thought I better hurry to write about him before he had been completely forgotten, he reminded of himself again. And with a vengeance!

In his Daily Telegraph column that he wrote before becoming a minister and to which he returned after his resignation Johnson compared a Muslim garment, burqa, to letterboxes. On top of that, he called this item of clothing «ridiculous» and said that women wearing it look like bank robbers. Big deal! I think it’s funny, especially the part about letterboxes. Is it insulting? I don’t know. Maybe somebody will find it offensive, but we know that many Muslim women feel foolish when they wear this dress, and some even fight for the right not to wear it. And once in Egypt I saw a woman putting a Marlboro cigarette into this «letterbox». In truth, it happened in the desert, where tourists were taken so that they could see how Bedouins live in tents, and one of the Bedouin women simply didn’t have time to hide her cigarette. Her garment actually helped her to conceal a bad habit.

OK, a joke is a joke, but Boris Johnson tried to express in his column an important thought that one can’t forbid people to wear what they want. It has to do with the fact that Denmark has recently banned burqas and niqabs and policemen in France sometimes literally force women in «burkinis» on the beach to remove them.

Unfortunately, a quite rational argument of Boris Johnson was completely overshadowed by the backlash caused by his joke about letterboxes. It caused a serious scandal. Prime-minister Theresa May said that in her opinion Boris Johnson should apologize for his words, some conservatives think that he must be stripped of the right to represent their party in Parliament, and one prominent Tory said that he would leave the party if Johnson becomes Conservative leader.

For many Tories it has become an excuse for once again kicking their presumptuous colleague who’s eyeing the leadership of the party. But a chorus of disapproval coming from all sides is of course a tribute to «political correctness» that has been recently flourishing in the West. Everybody (apart from Johnson) are hesitant to say out loud that it’s weird, to say the least, to see women in Western capitals wrapped up in black from head to toe.

Boris Johnson has never been afraid to break the established norms of political correctness. Many people think that he joked about letterboxes merely for shock value, in order to remind of himself. But I think that being provocative is simply his signature style. Sometimes it’s even a provocation for the sake of provocation and often to the detriment of himself and his own political future, not to mention the damage to his own country. Along with many Britons I still can’t forgive him the story with Brexit in which he played an important part.

It’s an open secret that Boris Johnson sees the removal of May and his own premiership as an endgame of his political career. Why not? Any ambitious politician thinks of becoming a leader of his party one day with Queen inviting him to form a new government. But the main thing is a price to pay. Johnson’s detractors think that the very things he stirred up were the price of his political ambitions.

Theresa May decided to appoint his as a Foreign Secretary in 2016 in order to quell a possible revolt among conservative backbenchers against her moderate stance on Brexit. It was a strange choice considering that Boris Johnson has never had diplomatic tact, a quality required for a country’s representative on the international stage. Ok, most of his offensive «jibes» had been made before he took office, but, nevertheless, everybody remember them very well to this day. For example, during London mayoral debate he called Commonwealth citizens «piccaninnies» with watermelon smiles. Later he apologized, but it will forever be in the annals of history. The infighting in his party Boris once described as «Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing», and people won’t forget this shrewd comparison either.

Johnson is a bright journalist who doesn’t spare daring metaphors and risky jibes. But, already being a Foreign Secretary, he said that Libya’s capital can become a new Dubai if the dead bodies are cleared away.

Boris Johnson’s resignation coincided with the death of Lord Carrington, one of the most prominent British foreign secretaries, and comparisons between the two of them were inevitable. And they were not to Johnson’s advantage.

Like Boris Johnson, Lord Carrington resigned from his post in the cabinet headed by Margaret Thatcher at the time. But unlike Johnson he did this not because of the political differences with a Prime Minister, but out of dissatisfaction with oneself. He blamed himself for missing the beginning of the Falkland War although nobody else blamed him for that.

Looking at these two ministers, one realizes what a significant statesman Lord Carrington was compared to a minor egocentric Boris Johnson turned out to be.

He’s often called a clown and a narcissist and it seems that he doesn’t have a problem with this image. And not only him. Londoners too didn’t have a problem with his eccentricity and unconventionality while he was a mayor of London – he served two terms. He turned out to be quite a good mayor, winning people over with his down-to-earthness. The whole world has possibly remembered this touching scene – a mayor of London with his flying mane of hair rides to work on a bike.

According to one of the polls conducted in 2014, the mayor of London Johnson became the most popular British politician, but the role of foreign secretary didn’t do him any favors. His popularity has recently plunged by 10 per cent, and this July he polled only 11 % among Tory members when they were asked to make up a list of prospective candidates for the leadership of their party.

But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have fans among the members of his party and British people in general.

Some observers think that the last Johnson’s gaffe wasn’t just a gaffe, but a well-thought-out political move with the premiership in view. Supposedly by saying a reasonably liberal thing that nobody can make a woman wear what she doesn’t like and joking about letterboxes he seems to wink at the members of his party and voters who are unhappy with a large number of women in veils, burqas and niqabs on British streets.

Boris Johnson isn’t Islamophobic or racist himself. At least I think a person who once described himself as «a one-man melting pot», being a mix of so many ethnicities – Turkish, English, Jewish – can’t be a racist. But Johnson is a populist. For the sake of witty remarks that we hear from him quite often, and in order to achieve his goal, he’s willing to go to great lengths. Boris was caught in a lie during the Brexit referendum campaign when he and his associates played on anti-immigration sentiments, spread rumors that Turkey was about to become a member of the EU, promised to impose strict control over immigration, vastly exaggerated the amount of spending sent to the EU and promised a land of milk and honey if Britain leaves it.

By the way, Johnson was also caught in a lie at the beginning of his career in journalism when he worked in The Times from which he was eventually fired for distorting facts in an article. Will Boris be someday driven away from big politics as well? It’s hard to tell. Nowadays, as we know, populists of this kind are very popular. And although Boris Johnson isn’t Donald Trump, being a well-educated graduate of Eton and Oxford, a journalist and a historian, they have a lot in common, including the desire to push Britain out of the European Union.

Apparently, Johnson will quench his political ambitions until March, allowing May to do all the dirty work on Brexit. Only after that, he’ll be able to unfurl his campaign to overthrow her as a leader of the party. That’s when we’ll possibly witness «Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing», initiated by Boris Johnson himself. If of course he isn’t banished from politics before that. But I seriously doubt that. People like him don’t drown.

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