Who remembers 2010?

It was a time before Danny Boyle had theatrically opened an Olympic games and London had welcomed the world with joy, open arms, and ludicrously highly priced holiday lets.

The financial crash was two years old, very few bankers had paid any kind of price for it, but public services were beginning to take the hit. Sensible commentators warned it would be many years before the true impact of the crisis would hit home.

In hindsight, the ones who could, back in 2010, were busy pulling up the drawbridge behind them.

The majority of us were left behind. In 2010 we, as a nation, were writhing, anxious, and tortured, over the prospect of a coalition government led by ham-faced Etonian David Cameron and his fellow businessmen. We were right to worry, but we couldn’t have imagined what was to come in the years that followed.

And what was to come is too much for me to explain in a flimsy blog post; but that’s fine, because you know, because you lived it, and have the debts/anxieties/cynical world view to show for it.

So, allow me to encapsulate it in one image. One person. One attitude to the world that was once played for laughs, but wasn’t funny then and certainly isn’t now.

Boris Johnson is a buffoon

Back in 2010, bad as things seemed, we could tolerate a Boris Johnson. Because buffoons, when they’ve been to Eton, can get so far up the ladder of power, but then the checks and balances kick in.

Boris Johnson’s don’t get their hands on the ultimate reins of power. They don’t get to embody a whole nation worth of people in their dealings with other countries, and they don’t get a platform large enough to sway the national conversation in any meaningful way.

People who do that are serious people doing serious jobs.

Untrustworthy and horribly swollen with their own self-interest, but serious.

So, in 2010, although “Mayor of London” seemed a step too far for a Boris Johnson, we had enough democratic common sense in the system to indulge him and those who described him as funny, harmless, a breath of fresh air, good fun, a character…

We (and by we, I mean they…) laughed at his semi-coherent ramblings, and what we were actually laughing at was the thought that the act might continue to propel him through the ranks. The laughter was nervous, at the prospect of this happening.

But underpinned, in 2010, with a deep knowledge that it would not happen.

It could not. Because these things don’t. This is Great Britain, for goodness sake, where things can go bad, but at some point the grown-ups regain control and sort it out.

Johnson would always be an amusing sideshow and a jester-like jab in the ribs for Cameron and Osborne, and he would play that role until such time as we, the public, stopped listening.

He would then head off for a life of after-dinner speeches and mischievous political contributions from the Pimms circuit.

Power, but in a limited way.

Influential, in the way that Russell Brand is influential; entertaining, listenable, good for a soundbite and livens the place up, but only because he’s no threat.

But then came Brexit, and Trump, and big data, and algorithms, and Russia, and fake news…

Ahhh, Trump

We made it over five-hundred words before he cropped up.

In some ways Boris Johnson is Trump-ian…Trump-esque…Trump-ed-up. Trump is and does and says many things, but where he and Johnson bisect each other (and, y’know what, I wish they would…) is in their disregard for truth, and for consequences beyond those which impact directly on their ambitions.

Boris Johnson for Brexit

Boris Johnson wasn’t a leave campaigner. Or a remainer. He was Boris Johnson. Eloquent enough to pen a convincing essay either way, as required.

And that’s not OK. It wasn’t then, and it still isn’t.

Whether you think Brexit is a monumentally misguided mistake, or whether you think it’s the dawn of a brave new EU free world, it’s a big decision. However it pans out, it’s going to define lives.

I can handle the lying during the Brexit campaigning – and by handle, I mean I’m desensitized to the idea that politicians lie, and horrible though it is, I find myself being able to live with it – but what I struggle with is such arrogance and careerism when what is up for grabs is the lives of sixty-million other people.

Boris Johnson for leader

Much as it amazes me, week after week, as I read the Sunday papers, Boris Johnson has implausibly nailed himself a proper public platform in this country. And when he presents his vision for a glorious British future post-Brexit in The Telegraph – a leadership-bid if ever there was one – he is doing a Trump.

Trump’s tactic is not to avoid screwing up, but to not care about it. To constantly screw up, day after day, so that one screw up becomes smeared across the next, leaving a giant skid-mark of bullshit across our pretty basic expectations of decency and civility.

Trump wouldn’t get on in the UK – too American – but Boris is our version.

Bumbling, eccentric, and dementedly ambitious.

Boris Johnson to resign

On the morning following the Brexit vote Boris Johnson appeared on our screens as a shambling, sorry, former politician. He’d been exposed – his every stuttering soundbite told us this – as the face of a Brexit that he didn’t know how to deliver.

Because he didn’t, like the rest of us, know what it was. He hadn’t thought that far, and assumed he wouldn’t have to.

It was to be the jolly jape of a leave campaign, before getting down to the serious business of a tilt at the top-job in an EU country. To any serious observer he was a man who’d gambled with us, for his own political gain, and now we would do our bit and make sure he was shown the door.

Because that’s what the truth does.

But this is post-truth

Not only did he re-gather himself, re-ruffle his blond mop, and bumble on into the next job as if the previous never happened, he is now repeating the trick – and the Brexit campaign claims, with “clear misuse of figures,” according to the UK statistics watchdog.

Just like first-time around.

Boring…tediuous…yadda, yadda…?

I couldn’t agree more, but that’s what Boris is banking on.

The old propagandist’s trick of saying it long enough, and loud enough, until it becomes the truth (at least in the eyes of those who matter).

That’s still us, the voters, don’t forget.

We shouldn’t be dignifying his ‘vision for Britain’ Prime Ministerial job application as a serious, genuine, statement of his views. As a plan of action for a post-Brexit future. As the words of a patriotic Brit who wants the best for all of us.

But we are.

The Telegraph publish it, the commentators commentate, and it acquires a momentum that it doesn’t deserve.

It’s straight from the Trump playbook. Be ballsy and face down the questions. Just give an answer, any answer. Deny, obfuscate, confuse, alarm, ignore, offend, and do it with the confidence of an Eton boy or a Big Apple billionaire.

And stick to your truth, regardless.

Until such time as you need to change it, of course.

Boris Johnson is not funny, and never has been. He’s a narcissist and a gambler and all the world’s a game. Unfortunately, as a symbol of our fading nation, he’s probably what we deserve.

Unless we can all agree on that, things ‘aint getting any better.

(Image: By Foreign and Commonwealth Office – https://www.flickr.com/photos/foreignoffice/28026353560/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50154332)