No.223 - The Peppa Pig Fiasco: Boris’s Slow Motion Rail crash is coming to its Inevitable, Catastrophic End.

Dear James,

Last week we watched Boris cancel the eastern spur of HS2. This week the train crash which is your government, continues its inevitable rendezvous with political catastrophe. Yesterday Mr Johnson delivered a speech to the CBI in which he stumbled, deviated and lost control of both his subject and his own personal behavior. Rail crashes can happen in many different ways, James. I would characterize this one as a high-speed derailment. In deliciously slow motion.

Speaking to the CBI conference of senior executives, the PM had already quoted Lenin and performed an impression of a car when he lost his notes. An awkward 21 seconds of apologies and paper shuffling embarrassment followed. He asked for forgiveness three times and then went on a long, rambling retrospective of a visit to a children’s amusement park. "Yesterday I went, as we all must, to Peppa Pig World." “Put up your hands, those who’ve been to Peppa Pig World!”. Looking around the bemused audience of business types, he stated, ‘Not enough’ and then went on to say why he loved this Hampshire attraction. "Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place.”, he explained. Straining within his scrambled mind for further elucidation, he suggested, ‘It has very safe streets, discipline in schools, and heavy emphasis on new mass transit systems. Even if they’re a bit stereotypical about Daddy Pig.” Boris was clearly scrabbling desperately to extricate himself from the mire of porcine manure into which he had so readily thrown himself. It failed to impress. It was the sound of a mind and a career coming off the rails.

If a doomed train is running fast it has momentum that can carry on way past the initial derailment. Boris’s wheels began to come off the rails nearly two years ago. Carried by the momentum of his 2019 polling victory, he crashed into the pandemic and the wheels began to slip and slide in a kaleidoscope of mixed metaphors and ill-advised, ad hoc and corrupt responses to the deadly virus. Ever since then those wheels of have been running in the gravel, exploding wheel nuts and spitting out political stones at an ever increasing rate with carriages swerving and twisting behind him.  The list of gaffes, U-turns and poor judgments is endless. Yesterday the carriages were swerving across the rails behind him threatening to break their couplings and to finish the job in a massive calamity. Metaphor, pun and simile swirled from that tangled mop of blond improvisation. “Sucking doves’, ‘hairdryers, talk of torque were followed by ‘'vrrrom vrrrom raaah raaah' as an impression of a Ferrari revving at traffic lights left his audience  looking around for men in white coats. These were the chaotic sounds that comes from a train (and a mind) leaving the rails.

But Boris didn’t stop there. Propelled by blind momentum, he kept digging deeper into the mire. He compared his 10-point plan for the economy to the 10 commandments of Moses calling it a “new Decalogue that I produced exactly a year ago when I came down from Sinai” and “the new 10 commandments are ‘thou shalt develop industries like offshore wind, hydrogen, nuclear power and carbon capture.” Really? Boris as a religious icon? Wasn’t Churchill enough for you Boris? Surely, it’s only a matter of time before the whole train wreck grinds into one final, tangled and steaming heap of broken meaning and twisted metaphor?

It can’t have been comfortable to have been a whip yesterday, James. Last night in the vote on the new Care Act you faced a real rebellion. 19 of your own MPs voted against the government and dozens of others abstained.

I’m sorry, but Boris has now proved, once and for all, that he’s a buffoon. The Daily Telegraph may seek to find the last shreds of plausibility in his behaviour but it fails to convince. Boris is a clown, a poor entertainer and a man way out of his depth as a serious politician. 

 James, once this sorry saga is over, the Tory Party will have a lot of recovery work to do.  And when those carriages finally come to a rest as a twisted and mangled wreck, I’m afraid that you, James, may be one of the first casualties to be pulled from the debris.

 BH – Your Concerned Constituent.