No. 66 - More Porkies from Boris

Dear James, 

Your new leader can’t help it. He spouts whatever comes into his mind and doesn’t care a jot about consequences. That is the secret of the populists – fluency. Boris is a prime example. David Davis suffers from it, as of course, do Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. You must talk and keep talking with easy familiarity and fundamental confidence of your own self worth. Never hesitate. Doubt has no place in populism. All you need is a stream of consciousness anchored in a series of attitudes that would not bear the scrutiny of a first-year undergraduate class. Fluency, with its attendant flippancy builds momentum that carries you over the impertinent interruptions of interrogators. This is what Boris has fundamentally in common with Donald Trump.  They both emote from wells of self worth, the origins of which are lost in genetics and social conditioning. It has been the story of Boris’s life and why should he stop now? And if they do need to speak with political authority they spout lines from the autocue. Trump reads the script and everyone knows he is inauthentic. Boris talks out lines thought out by Dominic Cummings. They are donkey heads manipulated by people behind the scenes. 

Humour, of course, is the super-lubricant of verbal fluency. Boris has the boyish smile and ready quip. Davis has the continuous, underlying chuckle and Farage has the permanent, barroom, know-it-all smirk. In each case we are asked to believe that such humour indicates a certain superior knowledge of the ways of the world. They do not. They indicate the opposite. They show the basic insecurities of the speakers who have learned to cover the deepest fears of their own inadequacies. 

The latest example of Boris’s verbal flatulence is the story of the Melton Mowbray pork pies. On Sunday, in Biarritz, in calling for a reduction in US red tape on UK exports to that country, he announced that these British-made pies could be exported to Iceland, Thailand, Singapore and the Caribbean but not the USA. On Monday that claim was quashed by the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association. A small number of pies were sent to Iceland and Thailand as part of a trial in 2015, but the producer has not exported pies to either country for at least a couple of years. If you can’t believe this little porky, why should anyone believe anything that comes from this man’s lips?

Until now Europe and the world have been largely thinking politics. Thinking requires looking at evidence and plotting a course forwards. With the rise of populism this has largely ended. Populism tells the audience what it wants to hear regardless of the consequences. It also propounds policy as a reflection of that promise. There is no thought beyond the immediate consequence. Populists are not chess players. They are one trick ponies who are currently fragmenting the world that has served us so well for the last seventy years. 

The current world is fragmenting into individual states lead by individual personalities – like Boris and Trump. We’ve seen it before. The 1930s saw similar descent into personaility politics at the expense of multilateralism. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin trapped their nations into the verbal attractions of single individuals. Today it is Trump, Putin, Duterte, Xi Xinping and now Boris. Their personalities become policy.  

But why do people listen to them? Why are they taken in? I am afraid the answer is because they seem to be closer to the people than our current elites. In the long run these elites must start to understand the people.  Inequality is at the centre of this. Elites must serve the greatest number of people and not just the top 1%. At the moment key members of that 1% realise this and pretend that they are on the side of the people. And they are motivated because they are themselves not part of the elite.  They are rich and powerful but are shunned by the elites because they do not think about the complexities of the modern world. They want the simple answers to huge questions. 

So James, I would humbly ask you to consider your new leader very carefully. Next week you return to the parliamentary fray. Your party has been hijacked by the ERG. Are you going to allow your new leader to tell the biggest porky of all? That a no-deal scenario, so damaging to our national interest, will scare the EU into making concessions? 

Isn’t it time that you, like many of your parliamentary colleagues, called the ERG's bluff? 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent