No. 103 - Is Boris's Deal 'Oven Ready' or Has He Already Cooked his Goose?

Dear James,

It’s typical of your leader. Come up with a memorable line and pursue it until the simile or metaphor crashes into its own contradictions. Boris’s current choice phrase is ‘oven ready’. His deal is ‘oven ready’. The future trade deals which he was famously unable to give a number to on LBC this week are almost ‘oven ready’. One is tempted to pursue his metaphor into his offers of his own relationships with members of the opposite sex but don’t let’s go down that particular avenue. 

Everyone knows that this is how Boris thinks – or does not think. He latches on to a metaphor, tests it in his inner ear, likes the sound and then launches it at the next opportunity.  And yet this is not just Boris. The trend was started eons ago in another distant era by Mrs May – remember Mrs May?  She who coined the phrase, ‘Brexit Means Brexit’.  She however, was a mere sous-chef compared with Boris. His metaphors come and go like squalls on a springtime south westerly. 

Metaphors are devices that help us all to explain and understand extremely complex and abstract things. They are quick, simple and usually carry an emotional charge to fix them in our imaginations. But one of the most complex and difficult subjects of today is how to extract ourselves from a 45 year old economic, political and social relationship with your largest business partner without simultaneously damaging the standard of living of your nation. To analyse and decide on such a vast subject would take a national commission of enquiry several years of complex work to come up with a conclusion. Yet today, on the basis of a whim and the manic persistence of the voices of die hard little Englanders, such a process can be reduced to being ‘oven ready’! When pressed by Nick Ferrari this week, to name four of the countries, Johnson identified "ample opportunities to do deals with India, China, Australia, New Zealand", but added: "I am not going to say they are 'oven-ready'." He is clearly fast approaching the sell-by date on this particular metaphor. Time, Boris, to start testing some new ones in that inner ear?

Trade Negotiations are notoriously complex and take many years to conclude. EU negotiations with Canada began in 2009 and did not conclude until 2017.  Boris’s ‘oven ready deal’ - if it goes through - will be only the very beginning of years of protracted and ever more painful wrangling. But Boris keeps going like his father Stanley who, on the BBC last Friday, showed the Johnson template of the sheer, unseeing bravado of the privileged by questioning whether the ordinary person would know how to spell Pinocchio. Despite objections by the interviewer, Stanley followed up by the running down the clock of each interview so he is always the one left ending it with the smile of assurance and aplomb as if to say nothing you can think or say will change my/our reality. On Thursday night, the prime minister told ITV News he has never told a lie in his political career. What about the five weeks that you needed to prorogue parliament, Pinocchio? Found out by the Supreme Court! But the Johnsons are a teflon family. The substance flows in their blood.

Boris’s, ‘oven ready deal’ is in fact a cooked up hors d’ouevre that has already exploded in the microwave, threatening to split Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Union and, as merely a starter, is one tiny dish before a much larger dish to come. The Withdrawal Agreement is the precursor to a final deal which will take years more of acrimony and vituperation and could end up in a no deal fiasco. But that is of no importance to Boris. In his constant scramble for metaphor in the stream of consciousness which purports to be a brain, he reveals himself as, basically, an entertainer. He avoids the grilling of experts, he waffles on about nothing and lands in the soup each time. Our language is full of culinary metaphor when you look. It’s quite fun when you try it!

But lets’ get real. Outside of that devil’s kitchen of a mind, lies reality. The best deal on offer is the one we’ve already got. It is not just oven ready, it is already cooked, already fully digested and has delivered huge advantages to our national well being for the last forty five years.

What bird are you having for Christmas, James? I would advise a turkey for Boris lost his credibility with the vast majority of serious, thinking people many months ago. With them, his goose is already cooked! 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent