A Buffon Named Boris Johnson…

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

Whither should I admire? In a democracy we should always be able to call into question our leaders and their qualities, and as Sidney Poitier was to depart his final scene, the issue became for me quite poignant. Now there was a man you could admire, trust and believe in his integrity.

Whither is there another such icon in whom to believe?

I am minded of this as the United Kingdom has fallen into disgrace. It is not unusual for British people from the four corners of the Kingdom – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – to feel aggrieved that the people in charge are hardly worthy of the trust in which we placed in them. It is healthy that people can question and be quite skeptical of the role anyone who wants power should ever be given it.

We are at sea because two of the great institutions of the British state are currently being placed under intense pressure and found wanting.

Those are the office of Prime Minister and the Monarchy.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a buffoon. He is a character from the past who blunders from one crisis to another with a cheeky grin and the ability to suggest he might well have been a naughty boy, but he was never bad. It is an image which he has cultivated well and has allowed people to put their faith in someone who may just be as flawed as they are but never as bad as they fear. He is just a guy who tries and often gets it a bit wrong.

Except he has turned out to be a little worse than that.

Boris Johnson has been the Prime Minister during the COVID crisis and has told us all to play by the rules. He has then privately broken them and has defended those who broke them with him and then has thrown junior people in his government and civil servants under a bus because he was unwilling to take the consequences of his own hypocrisy.

What is worse is that he is the leader of the Conservative Party.

As the name suggests, the Conservative Party likes to see itself as a conserver of the past, the traditions, the epitome of the stiff upper lip mentality that says we are the politicians you can really trust because we are built upon honesty, decency and the British way of life. There are party grandees, elder statesmen and women who completely believe that people within the party should almost always be above suspicion. Johnson has ensured that suspicion is never far away from the office of Prime Minister in 2021 and certainly more so in 2022.

It’s a crisis of identity and if Johnson is the leader of the Conservative Party, or the Prime Minister in the summer it shall be a tremendous shock to everyone who follows politics in the UK.

But the crisis extends beyond the greatest political office in the land. We are having the biggest crisis for decades in the Monarchy.

In 2021, Queen Elizabeth lost her husband, Prince Phillip. His funeral was one of the saddest affairs as the Queen of the United Kingdom, sat alone in her grief, in the church to bury the man with whom she had shared her life. COVID restrictions were adhered to without any question. The princes were in attendance but there was little pomp and ceremony from world leaders and it led to a vast number of photographs showing the monarchy at its best – leading the way by example. It showed how we should behave in the face of our own tragedy. Our monarch was seen to suffer as we had suffered, and she was better loved for it.

It was a moment of personal mourning that epitomized national loss.

The night before the Prime Minister’s office had held a leaving do for someone where alcohol was smuggled in, in a suitcase. That revelation led to an unprecedented apology from the Government being issued to the Monarchy for insensitivity.

But, it pales into insignificance over the issues around the Queen’s second son and allegedly her favorite– Andrew.

Andrew has now been stripped of his titles and military honors as his accuser in a US court stands to see him face trial. Over in the UK we do not care whether this is a civil or a criminal trial or whatever it may be, there is a collective sigh of regret that this man, who has often been the source of much angst within the Royal Family, has once again got himself into trouble.

He made a play on national television to give his account of what happened and that he had never met this young lady never mind slept with her. The defense hinges upon two things – one that he cannot remember meeting her and the date given for the liaison he was at a Pizza restaurant. The second being that he cannot sweat and one account she gave was when he was sweating profusely in a night club with her.

For anyone else this would be a simple case of here is the evidence and go whistle but it has become one of the longest running sagas we have ever witnessed as the Royal Family and the institutions we hold dearly – irrespective of my own beliefs – are dragged through the mud.

Between twin buffoons of Boris and Andrew, there is little to be gained from either of these sorry tales being settled.

I do not like the monarchy and am a firm believer in a republic. The image of the queen alone in her grief, did however, touch me – how could it fail to? She has my utmost respect.

I am not a member of the Conservative Party, nor a supporter, though many of my friends are, and I once was. Boris Johnson no more represents them than he does me.

Monarchy and Prime Minister are the epitome of the institutions which are the guardians of our country. Institutions which, when you swear allegiance to the country, should be of the utmost probity and security; they should more than exist but exude the values and be an example to the people of the people.

Nether do now.

And so the iconic nature of the position they hold in comparison to a man who never sought office and never asked for a vote, who was not born into the position he held but became a symbol of his struggle to become noticed which brought many others with him sits as a beacon whilst the institutions supposedly created to exemplify such high ideals are fallen and ignorant.
These institutions are in danger.

But perhaps that is the problem of them being institutions – they are all very well, but you should worry about being put in one. For Andrew at least, one wonders if that might suddenly become a possibility if his defense team don’t work some magic…

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…)

And today’s Scots word tae bamboozle ye…

Each time we see ye, we shall try tae leave ye wi a word o oors tae replace a word o thine. Jist fur the sake o learnin, ken!

Radge – To go “mental”; to lose it completely, sometimes with manifestations of violence.

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