The world watched in bemused horror as Boris Johnson, Prime Minster of the United Kingdom, completely lost the plot during his speech to the CBI. In the course of a rambling performance, one especially bizarre high point was when BoJo decided to impersonate the sounds of a Ferrari: “I can tell you as a former motoring correspondent, EVS may not burble like sucking doves and they may not have that arum arum araaaaaagh that you love” and at another point compared himself to Moses.
As a child BoJo famously declared that his ambition was to be “World King,” but on discovering that position does not exist decided to settle for being the mere PM of Britain. Now it appears that he also aspires to be one of God’s prophets!
READ MORE: Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Prime Minister Boris Johnson?
BoJo’s electric car crash of a speech then performed like “the first Tesla for sale in this country”, which he test drove years ago for GQ Magazine and “expired in the fast lane of the M40”. BoJo simply ran out of intellectual battery power and spent 20 long seconds muttering “forgive me” three times at his bemused audience of business people, as he shuffled the printed pages of his speech in increasing confusion. To lose a place in a speech is misfortune that can befall any inexperienced speaker, but this is BoJo the “great communicator”! It was like seeing Ronaldo miss the ball when taking a penalty kick. BoJo is a man who has enjoyed the most expensive English education that money can buy at Eton and then at Oxford. He was president of the Oxford Union, the debating society said to be the best in the world (but when I has a student that honour definitely belonged to the Glasgow University Union!)
When BoJo was picked to replace the hard-working but irredeemably dull Theresa May, his selling point was his supposedly outstanding abilities as a speaker. His backers in the Tory Party already knew that he was lazy and unreliable and generally unfitted to doing the hard graft of being a prime minister. But they chose him because he was the “Heineken politician” - capable of reaching the parts of the English electorate that others cannot reach. But now the great communicator seems to be is losing his main, indeed only, political skill. One wonders how much longer Tory MPs will continue to back a BoJo that cannot bark boosterish soundbites to distract the people from his catalogue of broken promises and the ongoing economic self-harm of Brexit?
At the end of his chaotic speech BoJo’s thoughts took one of those flights of fancy which the great Oxford debater doubtless considers inspired, but which ordinary folk think just plain daft, when he launched into a paeon of praise of the children’s cartoon series Peppa Pig: “I went as we all must to Peppa Pig world – hands up if you’ve been to Peppa Pig world – [not enough] I was a bit hazy about what I would find at Peppa Pig world, but I loved it. Peppa pig world is very much my kind of place – it had very safe streets discipline in schools heavy emphasis on new mass transit systems I noticed.” So, at long last, we all know where the fabled “sunlit uplands” of BoJo’s pre Brexit speeches are to be found: Peppa Pig World!
READ MORE: Where is Peppa Pig world? Is it a real place and why did Boris Johnson talk about it?
More seriously, BoJo’s “Peppa Pig Peroration”, as we might call it, is actually an unwittingly profound self-revelatory insight into the mind of the current British Prime Minister. It is no real surprise that BoJo loves Peppa Pig World, because it is aimed at pre-school age children and that is essentially what BoJo is: an overgrown toddler in a suit demanding he get his own way.
BoJo has both the virtues and weakness of a small child. Small children are usually full of energy and fun to be with, however they are also often wilful and have a disregard of rules unless firmly guided by their parents and teachers. Small children are self-obsessed and if they don’t get their own way will often throw tantrums. Obviously, small children often hold magical beliefs rather than scientific one about the world around them and they are easily bored. This is the reality BoJo regime in a nutshell. A Prime Minster who finds the actual reading of paper and decision making decision boring, so he governs by whim.
Neither do election promises to fix social care and hold down taxes bind him, nor do international treaties such as the Northern Irish Protocol which he himself signed. Toddlers live in the moment and so does BoJo. Interestingly, in Peppa Pig World the character of Daddy Pig is of a jolly, greedy, bumbling self-important incompetent who constantly ignores advice from experts and so causes causing havoc wherever he goes. The perfect description of BoJo.
BoJo concludes the Peppa Pig passage with these inspirational words to British business: “The real lesson for me about going to Peppa Pig world was about the power of UK creativity. Who would have believed that a pig that looks like a hairdryer or possibly a sort of Picasso-like hairdryer, a pig that was rejected by the BBC would now be exported to 180 countries with theme parks both in America and in China as well as in the New Forest and a business that is worth at least £6bn to this country £6bn and counting. I think that it is pure genius – don’t you? No government in the world, no Whitehall civil servant in the world could conceivably have come up with Peppa.”
To which one might reply that the “real lesson” of this speech is no other government in the world is led by a leader as incompetent as the British one and no political novelist could have come up with a prime minister as useless as BoJo. The UK is now Peppa Pig World, BoJo is the Daddy Pig PM, and the sooner Scotland can escape this madhouse the better.
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