Boris Johnson has become the tall poppy that his own party is gleefully hacking down
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Version 0 of 1. Now that they’re operating at full middle-fingered tilt, glowing and pulsating like Skeletor at the end of that bad 1980s He-Man film, the Conservatives have finally got around to revealing their grand masterplan. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the main aim of their watch is the total destruction of all things simultaneously bloated and beloved. Things that are cherished by their supporters as national treasures, but derided by their opponents as smug and wasteful. Things like the NHS. Things like the BBC. Things like Boris Johnson. Boris is not having an especially good time of it at the moment. Transitioning from the comfort of the London mayor’s office to the bear pit of national government has been harder than anyone could have imagined. In London, he is loved – largely thanks to his ability to bumble around like a third-hand teddy bear that’s been flushed down the toilet immediately before being packed off for a job interview – because London at this point is solely inhabited by millions of braying, espadrilled berks who communicate exclusively in emojis and haven’t had a single sincere thought since they momentarily got a bit sad about Darfur in 2003. But within the House of Commons, it’s a different story. There, Boris has become the tall poppy that his own party is gleefully hacking down. Judging by their recent actions, the Conservatives could dismantle the entire welfare state by 2020 and still only claim that they’d had a moderately successful time in power. But if they took down Boris Johnson’s political future in the process? There’d be conga lines in the corridors for months. Little by little, one by one, all the berserk vanity projects that Boris built his mayorship upon are coming apart at the seams. First, Theresa May told him that he wouldn’t be able to blast the faces off dissenters with those second-hand water cannon he bought. Yesterday it was revealed that his electric Routemaster buses – the ones already maniacally determined to boil passengers in their own skins – mainly run on diesel now because the batteries are all duds. And today it’s the turn of his London Rental Standard – the scheme he created to improve rented accommodation in London 14 months ago – to be pilloried, thanks to its measly 0.2% take-up rate. Next, it’s been claimed, George Osborne will plunge his dagger in even further by announcing a new third runway at Heathrow. It’s a plan bitterly opposed by Johnson who, as we all know, spent years of his life chucking his weight behind the construction of a brand new island airport in the shape of his own face that would wink at planes on the way in and bellow “Tally-Ho!” at them on the way out. What must make this sting more than anything else is that it’s George Osborne who’s benefiting from this attack on Johnson’s mayoral legacy. Osborne. The anti-Boris. The awkward Brown to Johnson’s populist Blair. There isn’t a single loveable atom in the man’s body. He’s socially ungainly. He’s beady and reptilian, like a clay Jeremy Kyle that’s been baked by an idiot. He’s booed wherever he treads. Strand him on a zip wire and, instead of turning it into an impromptu stand-up set as Boris did, he’d wail and howl like the Wicked Witch of the West in the middle of her death throes. The public sees George Osborne as Blackadder. First-series Blackadder, too. Not even the good Blackadder. And this is the man who keeps outwitting Boris Johnson. This is the man who supposedly triggered the flurry of articles this weekend, claiming that Boris feels politically neutered by all these moves to undermine his leadership bid before it’s even begun. That has to hurt. It must feel like having your shoelaces tied together by a Junior Apprentice contestant. But this is where Boris Johnson finds himself, hamstrung at every turn by his own peers. And it’s only going to continue. Maybe next Osborne will put the skids on the garden bridge, or hack down the abandoned cable-car that goes from nowhere to nowhere, or melt down that giant twist of metal next to the Olympic stadium and turn it into something more attractive, like a slurry pit or a giant sculpture of an ovarian cyst. Admittedly he’d be right to do it, because they’re all horrible eyesores. But he’d do it at his own risk. Because the danger of this strategy is that he’ll turn Boris into an underdog. His appeal has always been that he doesn’t seem like other politicians (even though he’s exactly like other politicians). He says it like it is, even though “it” tends to be a barrage of mock-flustered obfuscation about his professional ambitions. And by taking all his toys away from him, the Tories are just reinforcing his outsider status. “All I wanted to do was knock a load of students flat on their backs with a gussied-up tank,” he’ll say, “and those faceless automaton government bullies wouldn’t let me,” and before you know it, he’d be everyone’s favourite again. That’s the difference between Boris Johnson and George Osborne – they’re both copper-bottomed establishment figures, but only one of them has got the wherewithal to pretend that he’s not. And Osborne had better figure out a better way of straitjacketing Boris, or else it won’t be him answering the telephone to President Trump at 3am five years from now. |