Denzil McDaniel: Don’t blame clowns for acting like clowns, people should ask why we still go to the circus

Part of me thinks of the schadenfreude of the discomfit of the Tories for whom the penny has dropped that this charlatan is doing irreparable damage to his own party.

Happy days if there’s one party that Boris is succeeding in finishing off, eh?

And, of course, there is the entertainment value. The Turkish proverb says “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”

Shenanigans

And as the shenanigans at the palace of Westminster become more and more reminiscent of activity under the big top, we have to admit we all love a circus.

Such craic in watching verbal and moral gymnastics by the likes of Nadine Dorries who this week, among other things, suggested that Britain was at war with Ukraine. Where would you get satirical comedy like it?

Except war is nothing to laugh at.

The problem with all the enjoyment of taking pleasure at the misfortune of this bunch of entitled, narcissistic serial liars is that at the end of the day it will be the ordinary people who will suffer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The Great Gatsby’ about careless people who smashed up things and then retreated back into their money and let other people clean up the mess.

There comes a time, surely, when the British people need to realise that they can’t blame clowns for acting like clowns, the electorate needs to ask itself why it keeps going to the circus.

One of the many remarkable things I heard in interviews with people this week was that some ordinary people still supported Johnson because there’s nobody else.

Are we now in a time, though, when the truth doesn’t really matter. Indeed, where politics doesn’t really matter. In Northern Ireland, the last Assembly only sat for 40 per cent of its five-year term and long after the 2022 Stormont election with no Executive up and running, there are suggestions that having no Ministers isn’t really a problem at all.

Why bother then?

At Westminster, it would seem that dignity in public office is a thing of the past. I’m old enough to remember the real story featured in the television ‘Anatomy of a Scandal’ when Cabinet Minister John Profumo resigned in disgrace after admitting lying to parliament about his relationship with a call girl.

Miserable colleagues

Today, the British Prime Minister lies as easily as he breathes. And his miserable Cabinet colleagues rush out to defend him. Jacob Rees-Mogg said this week that passing a vote of confidence in Johnson by just one vote would be enough; and was promptly reminded that when 37 per cent of Tories voted against Theresa May in 2018, he had said it was a “terrible result” for her and she should resign.

Johnson fared worse this week, with 41 per cent voting against him; fine according to Rees Mogg who said he was wrong in 2018, without missing a beat. And the aforementioned Nadine Dorries warned her fellow Tory MPs not to get rid of Boris because donors of multi-million pounds to the party wanted him to stay in Downing Street.

No irony whatsoever in admitting the party was in hock to the rich money men.

Chief clown, of course, is BoJo who leads this chumocracy but is in a class of his own when it comes to lacking in character and his previous boss in journalism, Max Hastings once wrote: “Boris would not recognise the truth if confronted by it in an identity parade.”

Boris has long history as an oaf and liar. It has long been in the public domain that his arrogant and privileged behaviour at Eton was his hallmark, which lead to one young student Damien Furniss recalling being in a bar on his own when the young Boris mocked his speech impediment, his background, his father’s employment as a farm worker………all for the amusement of Johnson’s pals.

As a member of the Bullingdon Club, Johnson was well known for humiliating poor people publicly, treating them with disdain and calling them “plebs.”

His private life and his employment as a journalist and then politician is littered with sackings for lying and broken promises, disgusting references to gay men as “tank-topped bum boys” and black people as “black piccaninnies with watermelon smiles.” And so on, and so on.

Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, announces that Boris Johnson has survived an attempt by Tory MPs to oust him as party leader following a confidence vote in his leadership at the Houses of Parliament in London.

Enabled him

The thing is, most of this was all known when the Conservative party made him leader and the English people gave him a thumping minority. So in a sense they have enabled him and emboldened him to believe he can do what he likes. And he does, as partygate showed.

So despite 41 per cent of his own party, some 148 MPs expressing no confidence in him, Johnson is steamrollering through it with little regard for them and the public at large. As I write, he clings to his position and it would seem that it will take superhuman strength to prise his fingers off the handles of power.

This is no longer about policy, this is about the integrity of a British Government. Which is at its lowest ebb for many, many years with plenty of the acolytes he surrounds himself prepared to publicly humiliate themselves by defending him with tropes such as “he got the big calls right”.

Hundreds of years ago, the French philosopher Montaigne wrote: “Lying is an accursed vice. It’s only words which bind us together and make us human. If we realise the horror and weight of lying, we would see it’s more worthy of the stake than other crimes.”

We’ve all been guilty of telling porkies; but the acceptance in public life of industrial scale lying is alarming.

The repercussions for Northern Ireland are clear. Unionists have something of a cognitive dissonance in being continuously betrayed by a Conservative Government while feeling emotionally attached to Tories in the hope that they will do the honourable thing.

If there’s any progress on the Protocol on Unionist terms, it will be because it suits an internal agenda within the Conservative party who relish a battle a day with the EU.

If Unionists think the Tories will act with honour, they’re really lying to themselves and things won’t be resolved properly.

And so, the circus continues.