Try, if you might, to remember a day in which Boris Johnson wasn’t on every newspaper cover, every day, as our prime minister. I know, I know, it seems like another lifetime, but humour me, would you?
I’m asking you to cast your mind to June. Now, I wouldn’t say we’re harking back to halcyon days – Trump had long called the White House home, Brexit negotiations were stalling and the world’s kids, the only ones with any real eye on the prize, had seen their climate action met with ridicule from those who like to use fossil fuels to burn their excess piles of cash– but it was a time when we could still pretend a man best known for buffoonery and veiled racism (pun intended) was unlikely to ever hold the keys to number 10.
Back in June, Boris attracted a certain amount of derision for declaring himself a feminist. At the time, he was one of seven (nope, me either) candidates for the Tory leadership who proclaimed their love of equality to The Guardian, prompting Labour MP Jess Phillips to rage: ‘If Boris Johnson is a feminist, then I went to Eton.’
Now, of course, Jess, God love her, didn’t go to Eton. Boris did, and those of us who still question whether a love of imaginary bridges really qualifies a man for national leadership have listened to many a cry of class warship in his defence since he graduated and left at least his tailcoat behind. But in light of the events of the last week, BoJo’s schooling is once again looking pretty relevant to me, and here’s why – I don’t think he’s moved on from it any more than we have.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is not only the absolute pinnacle of white male privilege, he is also, let’s be honest, the dictionary definition of a man-child, and a huffy one at that. His overgrown schoolboy schtick was a selling point in some quarters when he originally came to prominence – ‘Gosh, look at Boris hanging from that zipline, isn’t he a lark, fnar fnar’ – but it is no longer enough to sustain him. Now, he doesn’t just look like he’s been playing with the bigger boys on a muddy field and emerged, bedraggled and rosy cheeked, following a friendly hair-ruffle. Oh no. In his dealings with the EU, and more recently in his reaction to the Supreme Court’s judgement of him as a lawbreaker of some uniqueness, every inch of his crumpled being reeks of his being governed by an inner over-indulged schoolboy who lost the match, snatched his jumper up from its place as a goalpost and stomped off, huffing, in search of nanny.
Now, I’m no class warrior, and it isn’t their inherited wealth that makes me lump Boris, his lovely lounge-lizard pal Jacob Rees-Mogg and the original architect of our doom, David Buy-My-Book Cameron, into one homogenous gang, the collective noun for which would doubtless be a Bullingdon. For me, the clear common thread is the overbearing, extraordinarily misplaced confidence that comes from a life in which one has never been told no.
There’s a certain brand of arrogance that comes of living in a world where all doors are open, and while I don’t want to rail against every male of the species (hell, I kind of like some of them), it is an arrogance that almost singularly applies to men. Boris may be among our most extreme examples of white male privilege, but it is rife across the country he currently helms and, from manspreaders on public transport to mansplainers in the boardroom, we all of us deal with its toxicity in small ways daily.
Now, I may have never met Boris, but I’ve seen plenty of less dramatic examples of the privilege of penis ownership writ large.
Now, I may have never met Boris, but I’ve seen plenty of less dramatic examples of the privilege of penis ownership writ large. As, I’ll bet, have you. I have sat, gobsmacked, as a date told me the patriarchy is nothing but a fiction invented by feminazis to give them something to feel sorry for themselves about. I’ve watched, helpless, as a less qualified, and less experienced, man leapfrogged me for promotion, and then watched again as a few more, hyped on entitlement as a birth right, jumped over my slow-moving mum bod as I ‘took some time off’ to grow and birth a small human. Hell, I even walked past building sites as a teenager in the 90s – the men there had rarely gone to Eton, but they seemed able to exert their dominance pretty noisily nonetheless.
I assume Boris’ many and varied conquests could recall similar tales of woe, though I’m not sure he would have much sympathy for that type of victimy piffle. We’re talking about a man who has reached the highest office in the land in possession of such self-awareness, compassion and attention to detail that for months, perhaps years, his Wikipedia entry has listed his children, simply, namelessly, as ‘five or six’.
Boris’s confidence is the kind that allows him to respond to the damning judgement of the Supreme Court, delivered in razor-sharp style by Lady Brenda Hale, by branding it “wrong” – a whine of such nuance it makes fellow overachiever Donald Trump look thoughtfully verbose. It is the confidence of a man who reportedly made his decision on which way to go on Brexit based solely on what his choice could do for his career arc. Of a man who thinks it is acceptable to call Muslim women in modest clothing “pillar boxes”, presumably peeved at the fact it makes them harder to ogle, and to drunkenly shout and swear at his younger partner before handing her the canine equivalent of a Band Aid baby and asking her to parade it in front of a throng of cameras in a bid to distract us all. And it is the confidence of a man who, when all else fails, stomps his feet and prorogues proceedings, withdrawing the whip and sending everyone home seemingly the adult equivalent of bursting the ball halfway through a difficult game. At least Dilyn the dog must be happy – with all those toys his master is chucking out of his pram, he won’t be short of things to chew.
Today, the game is back on, and Boris is blustering from the front bench once again. But a mere two months after having bulldozed his way to the top in a manner only a man of his breeding could, it looks as though his day of reckoning is nigh. He might insist, desperately, that he’ll carry on regardless. But the nation knows this relationship is an abusive one, and the only thing now separating the PM from any common or garden male narcissist is that he didn’t lie to his girlfriend, he lied to the Queen. How fitting, then, that the verdict seemingly signaling his downfall was delivered by a woman clad in a passive aggressive brooch…
