People were now, not just roaring with laughter, but listening. He continued.
Which is why my political hero is the Mayor from JAWS.
Laughter.
Yes. Because he KEPT THE BEACHES OPEN.
More guffawing around me. He spoke as if every sentence had only just occurred to him, and each new thought came as a surprise.
Yes, he REPUDIATED, he FORESWORE and he ABROGATED all these silly regulations on health and safety and declared that the people should SWIM! SWIM!
More uproar.
Now, I accept
, he went on in an uncertain tone, that as a result some small children were eaten by a shark. But how much more pleasure did the MAJORITY get from those beaches as a result of the boldness of the Mayor in Jaws?
Brilliant. The whole room is hooting and cheering. It no longer matters that Boris has no script, no plan, no idea of what event he is attending, and that he seems to be taking the whole thing off the top of his head.
I realise that I am in the presence of genius.
Jeremy VineThis story popped up in my Twitter feed along with the news that Boris Johnson was forced to step down by his party. I must agree that it reflects his character and leadership style perfectly. ‘Keeping the beaches open’ while Covid was (and still is) sweeping over Great Britain is precisely what Boris did, leaving a trail of death and suffering behind. But hey, he got to party all through lockdowns, so all good right? Be sure to read it until the end for the real punchline of the piece.
Along similar lines, an article from more than a year ago was describing Boris as ‘The clown king’ – a very apt analogy. Unfortunately for the UK, the damage his politics of lies wrought may prove hard to undo, and his potential successors from the Conservative party manage to somehow look worse than him…
We need our clever fools, of course. Too much solemnity is sickly. We need the carnival. We need reminders of our absurdity. The culture should be subverted. The sacred should be disparaged. Institutions should be derided when they become sclerotic. We live in an age of posturing and zealotry and never needed our satirists and our clowns more.
But the transgressor is licensed precisely because they are not in power. The satirist ridicules the government – fairly, unfairly – and we smile because (ordinarily) they are not in charge of the hospitals, the schools, our livelihoods or the borders. We laugh and clap at the circus, the theatre and the cinema because we can go home at the end of the evening, confident that the performers are not in charge of the reality in which we must live.
The difficulty for the clown is that once truth and seriousness have been merrily shattered, they cannot be put back together and served up anew. Or, to put it another way, the buffoon who has just entertained the audience by smashing all the plates cannot now say that he proposes to use them to serve up a banquet in honour of himself becoming a wise and honest king. Everyone can see: the plates are all in pieces on the floor.
Edward Docx
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