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Home » Boris Johnson…

Boris Johnson…

The New Neo Posted on by

…becomes the Tory Party’s head and will be the new prime minister, as expected.

Brexit to follow?

“We are going to get Brexit done on 31 October and take advantage of all the opportunities it will bring with a new spirit of can do.

“We are once again going to believe in ourselves, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self doubt and negativity.”

That’s a mixed metaphor, I think. Or maybe just a Gulliver reference.

But I get the message.

Comments

Boris Johnson… — 23 Comments

  1. I’m not sure what it is — something intangible and I can’t really describe it — but I really like this Boris fellow.

  3. Barry Meislin:

    His name is “Boris.” Obviously, a Russian puppet.

    Bring on the British version of Mueller!

  4. There’s a story to the name, Boris. His mother tells it:

    “When I was three months pregnant, we travelled to Mexico City by Greyhound bus. It was very uncomfortable, I was desperately sick. We stayed with a man called Boris Litwin, who drew me aside and said: ‘You can’t travel back like this, here are two first-class air tickets’.

    I was so grateful, I said: ‘Whatever the baby is, I shall call it Boris.'”

    In fact, she named her firstborn Alexander Boris de Pfeffel. “At Eton his friends discovered his foreign name and everyone started calling him Boris – even the beaks [teachers]. But everyone who’s known him since childhood calls him Alexander. If I were to call him Boris it would mean something was really serious.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/london-mayor-election/mayor-of-london/1976150/Boris-Johnson-by-his-mother-Charlotte-Johnson-Wahl.html

  5. His mother was wonderful and problematic. When he was ten, she had a nervous breakdown and had to go away for treatment. She somewhat recovered but was plagued by health problems thereafter.

    However, his mother was quite a talented artist. While she was away after the breakdown, she painted this about her family, titled “Hanged By Circumstances.” You can see Johnson unmistakably in the center of the painting:

    https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/exhibitions/why-minding-too-much-a-charlotte-johnson-wahl-retrospective-is-worth-minding-about-a2945351.html

    One could weep viewing it.

  6. Hope this guy is better than half dead May.

    If he could just accomplish the following–very difficult, and I realize a very tall order–these accomplishments would go a long way towards getting Britain back on the right path again–

    Withdraw from the EU without paying some sort of ransom.

    Clean out the police force, and have real cops start arresting people who commit real crimes.

    Diminish the influence of PC.

    Work on the courts/police so that you can actually defend yourself, your family, and your home again.

    Crack down on Muslim invaders–acid and knife attacks, grooming gangs, child marriages, FGM, etc.–and take back control over geographic areas that Muslims now have de facto control over.

    Then, things might start to turn around for Old Blighty.

  7. I’ve got a good feeling about Boris. I wish him the best and hope he can deliver.

    His big test comes soon enough — Brexit for real. If he pulls that off, it will be massive.

    And if one more country pulls out, I believe the EU unravels. That’s why I don’t think EU has ever been serious about allowing the UK to leave.

  8. I, too, wish him all the best. Britain deserves better than they have been receiving from fate. The EU is evil, and must die.

  9. I’m not sure what it is — something intangible and I can’t really describe it — but I really like this Boris fellow.

    I can echo your sentiments. I do not know quite why either. But once I saw this a couple of years ago, I recognized that this man, whatever his failings, was a classic of a kind not much seen in modern politics.

    With Neo’s permission and for probably the third time …

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/2k448JqQyj8?start=181&end=263

  10. Nigel Farage on that October 31st promise:

    “Theresa May told us 108 times we were leaving on March 29 and we didn’t, so just because Boris says we’re leaving on the 31 October doesn’t mean we’re going to.”

    “We would need to believe them and at the moment that’s not very easy,” he added.

    He also said that Johnson “would need to call an election if he wanted a no-deal Brexit, in order to ‘change the arithmetic’ in the Commons.”

  11. Great profile in Quillette.

    Here it is.

    To say I was impressed would be an understatement. A few years before arriving at Oxford I had watched the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford novel, and had been expecting to meet the modern-day equivalents of Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche: larger-than-life, devil-may-care aristocrats delivering bon mots in between sips of champagne and spoonfuls of caviar. But the reality was very different: warm beer, stale sandwiches and second-hand opinions. Lots of spotty students, all as gauche as me. Less like an Oscar Wilde play than a Mike Leigh film.

    In Boris, though, it was as if I’d finally encountered the ‘real’ Oxford, the Platonic ideal. While the rest of us were works-in-progress, vainly trying on different personae, Boris was the finished article. He was an instantly recognizable character from the comic tradition in English letters: a pantomime toff. He was Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night demanding more cakes and ale, Bertie Wooster trying to pass himself off as Eustace H. Plimsoll when appearing in court after overdoing it on Boat Race night. Yet at the same time fizzing with vim and vinegar—“bursting with spunk,” as he once put it, explaining why he needs so many different female partners. He was a cross between Hugh Grant and a silverback gorilla.

  13. Huxley: I think the EU is very serious about keeping Britain from leaving. They seem to be pretending, hoping the British give up in frustration. Of, being leftist, the management of the EU is humorless, so they are annoyingly serious about everything.

  14. From the sidebar on a Google search:

    Quotes
    My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.

    My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

    The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.

    I have read his full Wikipedia entry, which, while being quite entertaining and informative, never answered my most pressing question: why in the world did his parents include “de Pfeffel” as one of his middle names?

    The Beeb comes through:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/whodoyouthinkyouare/new-stories/boris-johnson/how-we-did-it_2.shtml

    Boris grew up with stories about his Granny Butter’s posh ancestry and the significance of the name de Pfeffel, which forms part of Boris’ own name. She claimed that the name derived from an ancient line of French nobility. Boris and his siblings had always thought her stories were hilariously far-fetched. However, they did have a distinct childhood memory of a large wooden chest containing ‘the de Pfeffel silver’.

    The name turned out to be Bavarian instead.

    the de Pfeffels were actually only ‘nobilitated’ in 1828. So rather than being long-established aristocrats with roots in the Middle Ages, as Granny Butter had suggested, we were discovering that the de Pfeffels were in fact relatively recent, minor members of the nobility.
    …
    But further research soon unearthed a whole new investigation, this time into the lineage of Charles de Pfeffel’s wife Caroline, Boris’s great-great-great-grandmother.
    …
    Dr Naimer went back to the original record book (as opposed to the microfilm) to double check the details for the wedding of Charles and Caroline. Where possible it is always helpful to go back to original hard copy records to check whether additional information about someone has been added at a later date.
    In Boris’s case, by checking the original hard copy, Dr Naimer discovered that someone had added a simple comment in pencil. It stated that Caroline was the natural (illegitimate) daughter of Prince Paul von Wurttemberg!
    …
    With the help of Dr Keyler from the Archive, we found surprisingly detailed files that explicitly connected Caroline to her father, Prince Paul. One file revealed that Caroline had actually lived with Prince Paul. Another showed that Prince Paul’s brother, the King of Wurttemberg, was a supportive and loving uncle.
    Amongst the papers, Boris also came across details of a gift that the King gave to Caroline: a collection of silver. When we compared the inventory of silver in the file to a photograph of the Granny Butter’s ‘de Pfeffel silver’, we realised that it matched. So Granny Butter was the proud owner of aristocratic silver, but German rather than French. (The silver was sold by Boris’ grandparents many years ago).”

  15. https://quillette.com/2019/07/23/cometh-the-hour-cometh-the-man-a-profile-of-boris-johnson/

    He was without doubt the biggest man on campus—the person most likely to succeed. He made no secret of his desire to be Prime Minister one day, and not just a run-of-the-mill, common-or-garden PM, but up there with Gladstone and Disraeli. And this was a scaling back of his ambitions—as a boy he’d told his younger sister Rachel that he wanted to be “world king.” (There was an intermediate stage during his teenage years when he harboured fantasies of becoming President of the United States—something that’s technically possible, given that he was born in New York.)

    It was possible then, but not now: he gave up his US citizenship in 2016.
    Interesting timing.

  16. DNW – in re your YouTube link — also from Quillette, a delightful article BTW.

    My uncle had described him as a “genius” and as a boy he’d been regarded as something of a wunderkind. There was the occasion when he was holidaying with his family in Greece, aged 10, and asked a group of Classics professors if he could join their game of Scrabble. They indulged the precocious, blond-haired moppet, only to be beaten by him. Thinking it was a one-off, they asked him to play another round and, again, he won. On and on it went, game after game. At the prep school he attended before going to Eton, Britain’s grandest private school, he was seen as a prodigy. A schoolmaster who taught him back then told his biographer, Andrew Gimson, that he was the quickest-learner he’d ever encountered. In the staff room, the teachers would compare notes about the “fantastically able boy.”

    The moral of the post, somewhat between the lines, is that there is more to BoJo than the public persona suggests — also very much like our own VSG Trump.

  17. “…turns out to be…”

    Reminds one of another noble German family (replete, no doubt, with a wooden chest of silver, perhaps several) that transplanted to the “green and pleasant land”….

  23. One day on the job and Boris already looks to be an outstanding improvement at PM. Congrats to the choosers then. Good on ya.

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