Boris Johnson

[nekokate]

I'm just wondering what people's opinions are of Boris Johnson?

I think he's quite loveable, but I'm not so sure about his politics...

[faceless]

He's a bit of a buffoon, but I do like him in general. He seems to have a good sense of fair-play (notwithstanding his privilege!) and I reckon many tories must be either loving or hating the fact that he represents them. He's a like a funny puppet stuck on the end of a shitty stick basically... haha

[luke]

i quite like him, hes kinda like a eccentric blundering fool - but i think its part of clever and carefully crafted image, the way he messes his hair up before coming on stage, the whats going on and where am i persona, his self deprecating style - he was one of the eton toffs in that bullingdon club picture with cameron wearing their expensive dinning gear, i think he's very intelligent, very good at putting over a good image of himself, but like kate wouldn't trust him on his politics, i doubt i'd vote for him as mayor of london ( unless he had some amazing polices .... ) - but hes fun to watch on have i got news for you and question time etc

this is a guy who cheated on his wife, likes his alcohol, from a well privileged background, born into the elite, highly educated - politically, i don't think boris will be turning socialist anytime soon

[faceless]

Behold them, reader, and despair
Boris Johnson has turned his hand to poetry. His debut volume is all about family life. If a more cringe-making book has been published, Stuart Jeffries has yet to read it
Friday November 9, 2007
The Guardian

It's Ken Livingstone I feel sorry for. Remember that photograph in July of the mayor of London sitting on the tube glumly reading Andrew Gimson's Boris - The Rise of Boris Johnson? He was trying, you see, to get the dope on the dope the Tories consider to be a suitable candidate for next May's mayoral election. "The scariest thing I've read since Silence of the Lambs," said Livingstone of the biography afterwards.

Now comes something scarier to add to his dismal pre-poll reading list: Johnson's first book of verse, a sub-Hilaire Belloc cautionary tale entitled The Perils of the Pushy Parents. HarperCollins is asking £10 for the volume, published on Monday. It is a price in keeping with the looming season of festive bad judgment, when such is our panic about what to get Auntie Griselda for Christmas that we fall on Johnson's volume, hurl a tenner at the till and run into the street with wild eyes and a misplaced smile.

Livingstone will have to read the bloody thing in order to get a bead on Johnson's views on the politics of childrearing (of which more later), but you need not. This year, an estimated 170,000 books will be published and, if I suggest that this is only the 169,999th least worth reading, that is only because I am hedging my bets. A worse book might appear this year. It is a possibility.

The book concerns the Albacores, a family whose parents insist son and daughter should not watch telly. The dad, especially, is a crackpot who teaches his toddlers Zeno's paradox when they should be eating dirt and shanking each other with plastic cutlery. When Mr Albacore sees the pair watching TV, he takes action rendered thus by Johnson: "He'd zap the programme off and holler/ 'Go and read some Emile Zola.'"

As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition - just see if it isn't). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes.

Mrs Albacore is equally pushy, and as a result little Molly and Jim have a hard time of it. Johnson concludes book four of this eight-book volume with this kind of eloquence: "Though each alone was pretty tough/ When they got together - OOF!"

In Henry IV, part 1, Hotspur remarks: "I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers." If only Johnson were that kitten, his mewing would be more eloquent than this verse.

In Belloc's Cautionary Tales, from which Johnson has drawn so freely, there was wit. For example, Belloc drolly introduced his cautionary tale about Algernon, thus: "Who played with a Loaded Gun, and, on missing his Sister, was reprimanded by his Father."

Johnson's imaginings are similarly violent, but the quality of Boris is always strained. After mum and dad's plan for little Molly's birthday party go awry, dad in a rage decides to destroy the telly: "Like Hector in the Achaean ships/ A battle-cry escapes his lips," reports Johnson (way to put that classical education to work, Boris). Unfortunately, he gets so cross he hammers mummy, mummy (who has been trying to destroy the video game console) inadvertently hammers daddy and the pair at the outset of book seven wind up convalescing in Bournemouth, possibly brain damaged:

Behold them, reader, and despair:
their lolling eyes, their glassy stare,
this formerly dynamic pair
In a double-seat wheelchair.

Despair is the word. But enough about me. There is worse to come. The runaway wheelchair plunges over a cliff (as it will). But Molly and Jim (along with a taxi driver called Reg, who will be played by Ray Winstone - Johnson and his family will play the other leading roles) save their parents by forming a dangling human chain over the cliff - something they learned from watching Hollywood movies On The Telly. Do you see the moral? Do you see it yet? Do you? No? Let Johnson set it out for you:

Every child's a human being,
not a piece of Plasticine.
[There's not much more, stay with me]
Loving parents, learn from me.
If your children crave TV
Tell them, OK, what the hell
You can watch it for a spell ...
IF YOU READ A BOOK AS WELL.
(A proper book, you'll understand
Like the volume in your hand.)

Again, I find Hotspur provides a useful gloss: "I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd,/ Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree;/ And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,/ Nothing so much as mincing poetry:/ 'Tis like the forc'd gait of a shuffling nag."

There is hardly any point mentioning that Johnson posted the following rant against video games on his website last December: "Summon up all your strength, all your courage. Steel yourself for the screams and yank out that plug. And if they still kick up a fuss, then get out the sledgehammer and strike a blow for literacy." Consistency is not Johnson's virtue: he is the Red Queen of British politics.

You will notice that The Perils of the Pushy Parents is a corrective to the fate that befell Mike TeaVee in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There, Willy Wonka shrank the telly-obsessed youth for his sins of sloth and TV-induced wrath. And then the oompa loompas sang a song including the following:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set -
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.

Johnson is an oompa loompa, too, but sings a different song whose import is: "Telly's orrigh innit/but ver's a timenplace for it." He might argue the opposite tomorrow.

Some charge that Johnson (alleged MP, purported journo, father of four) spreads himself too thinly. That is not the problem. He spreads himself too thickly, larding his unworthy crust with things that make it even more indigestible. By which I mean, he not only writes duff verse, he illustrates it too with inept drawings. At least Dahl had the good sense to seek out Quentin Blake to draw Willy Wonka.

You might well think I am being unfair and that, like Gordon Brown's loathing for David Cameron, there is an element of class hatred behind my bile. You got the second part right. I refuse to be charmed by this gaffe-prone berk (he lost his wedding ring within an hour of getting married), this inventor of quotations (for which he was fired from the Times), this witless calumniser of scousers, witless calumniser of Papua New Guineans, this bad novelist, this brazenly buffoonish poetic dabbler. It is important, as Byron recognised when he wrote English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (now that was a vibrant piece of satirical verse), that we castigate rubbish: "Degenerate Britons! Are ye dead to shame,/ Or, kind to dulness, do you fear to blame?" We deserve better than Johnson, certainly better than Johnson the oompa loompa, pouring his chocolatey goo into our Christmas stockings.

[Axlsbabe]

he seems like a likeable enough rouge

[luke]