Inspired
Who is that fascinating man?
Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US, has said Boris Johnson is fascinated and inspired by Donald Trump, and is intrigued by the US president’s patchy relationship “with the facts and the truth”.
Well, “patchy” – more like non-existent. Trump’s relationship with the facts and the truth is like Trump’s relationship with Tiffany: it doesn’t exist. Trump wouldn’t even recognize facts and the truth if they came up to him at a party and sat on his lap.
Darroch wrote that Johnson had been “fascinated” by Trump on his visits to Washington as foreign secretary before he became prime minister, with particular focus on the president’s use of language.
This includes “the limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth”, the former diplomat wrote.
In other words Johnson was fascinated by the fact that Trump has the intellect of a very young and bad-tempered child and yet he is the head of state of an all-too-powerful country.
After Darroch left the diplomatic corps following a 42-year career, Trump fired back with a range of epithets, calling him “the wacky ambassador”, “pompous”, and “a very stupid guy”.
As I say – the intellect of a very young and bad-tempered child.
Boris Johnson is just jealous; he’s almost as stupid, incompetent and malevolent as Trump, but somehow “almost” isn’t enough.
It really is a disappointment. A proper Eton-and-Oxford English posho should regard Trump as an absurd American vulgarian, only to be imitated in mocking parody. The way that cad and bounder Johnson reacted to that brash real estate developer only confirms that he is not really top drawer.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that BJ (and, I suspect, his eminence grise, the Dom) show an interest in Trump’s tactics, which are basically to stay in the public eye all the time, some way, any way. BJ is trying to govern not like a prime minister but like a president, and prefers photo-ops to being in Parliament, particularly when Keir Starmer is asking him questions. He also prefers, or preferred at one time, to hold press conferences at which he or ministers would speak, and for his government to communicate to the proles on-the-spur decisions and U-turns via Twitter or perhaps Facebook, I can’t remember which. Neither am I surprised by his (and the Dom’s) interest in Trump’s “limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth”. It is, unfortunately, effective.
BJ is, like Trump, a thoroughly nasty and dangerous piece of work.