09/03/2016
Despite his recent (and general) high profile, I've been playing the Boris Johnson soap opera fairly low key, not least because I can barely bring myself to be dispassionate about a man whom I loathe and who, in my opinion, is entirely unsuitable to be a representative of the "leave" campaign.
However, I am by no means alone. Getting somewhere close to my position is Nick Cohen in the
Spectator, who says of the man that everything about him is "phoney".
That this man should have been "appointed", effectively by media acclamation as the lead representative for our campaign is bad enough but what I find just as depressing is the approval and support he's been getting from leave campaigners. Yet this a man who, until recently, had been declaring himself not to be an "outer", set against his history as a soft Europhile.
We are reminded of this man that, as Brussels correspondent for
The Times, he was fired for making up stories, only for him then to join the
Telegraph. There he quite obviously found his intellectual home, writing about "bent bananas" and "undersize condoms", exploiting the Eurosceptic readership of the paper, producing exactly the sort of low-grade tosh which has so damaged the credibility of reporting on EU issues.
Never as a correspondent having shown any evidence of mastering EU politics or related issues, he now combines his profound ignorance with ineffable frivolity to produce a degree of shallowness that not even a lobotomy would enable me to reproduce.
Fortunately, if we are to believe Suzanne Moore -
another commentator less than enamoured with Mr Johnson â the "control freak with the out of control hair" now looks decidedly snippy.
After what he freely admits was a "
cock-up" over the attempted gagging of his staff, Moore observes that, if with Johnson what you see is what you get, then "a politician famed for his ability to connect has lost his power. It's ebbing away".
Alarmingly, though, this vacuous man is being lined up to from a debate for the "leave" campaign in front of an audience of 12,000 against George Osborne, days before the referendum. One can only hope that, long before that, his shallowness and the lack of content of his pitch will cause even those who support him to think again.
Failing that, we are going to have to find a way of conveying to a mass audience the simple fact that, when Mr Johnson speaks, he does so "not in our name". The very idea that he should even be considered for this task is utterly bizarre, in a referendum campaign that already has far too much perversity.
