“Left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain.” These are the words of acclaimed journalist, former Major of London, and so-called “national treasure” Boris Johnson. How this casually offensive toff was ever considered loveable, let alone respectable, will be the wonder of future historians.
Meanwhile, it appals another old Etonian, Heathcote Williams, who has devoted much of his life to undermining an establishment that he knows first-hand – and not as a bien pensant bourgeois, but with real action and anger. A poet, playwright, squatter, magician and more, he has now focused all his fury and wit in a lacerating take-down of supposedly loveable Bojo.
Why? Because, although many of Johnson’s exploits are widely known, Williams has a poet’s ear for the damning and often neglected specifics. By the end of the diatribe, you can’t avoid the conclusion that Johnson is a terrifying sociopath. As for Brexit, that’s not really the issue in this slim volume; nor, says Williams, does Johnson really care about its likelihood. Bojo’s intention, he says, is only to “bounce his 17-stone self into Number 10 Downing Street”.
Here, we read of Journalist Johnson’s carelessness with the truth: from falsifying quotes by his godfather Professor Colin Lucas to sexing up a story about an archeological discovery, to inventing an EU plot to ban dipping bread in olive oil. We encounter his fair-weather loyalties: passionately supporting then-President George W Bush until it suited him to recast Dubya as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy".
Here we’re reminded of his cruelty towards women and the violence in his personal life. We observe his love of the super-rich, whom he once described as “a put-upon minority like Irish travellers and the homeless”. And let’s not forget his friendship with the fraudster Darius Guppy. Would Boris get the address of a prying journalist, so that Guppy could have him beaten up? Sure, said Johnson.
None of which may have much bearing on the future of our pensions or the straightness of bananas. But then, the book’s title – or its first half, at least – is just a peg, conveniently provided by West End, his German publisher. Four years ago, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to Berlin, it published in translation his last major essay, an anti-monarchist polemic called Royal Babylon. “And for that,” Williams says down the phone from Oxford, “I felt a certain obligation to do something specifically for them. But then they asked me to write about the referendum! The idea of writing anything about Europe and Brexit filled me with an earthquake of a yawn.”
Williams’s speech is littered with dramatic turns of phrase, his (now raspy) voice precise in its pronunciation, as he describes how he managed to make the political personal. “The poet Niall McDevitt turned me on to an impending attack”, signed off by Johnson while he was still mayor – namely, the desecration of Bunhill Fields in the City of London; now a public garden, once a burial ground and still the resting place of the visionary William Blake, the patron saint of the English mystic tradition.
“He essentially wants to surround them with these venal tower blocks filled with City slickers, casting a shadow on the anti-materialistic Blake. That really got my goat. It was a step too far,” says Williams. “There’s a German word for people like Johnson: Backpfeifengesicht. It means ‘a face that needs to be punched’.”
