Well, he didn’t say “ You won’t have Boris Johnson around to kick any more!” but he did get in a few digs. Like when he talked about “the herd”, and how it had moved on. And when he reminded the viewers that he was the guy that won so amazingly well in that general election just a few years ago.
But no tears. Theresa May could go all quivery at the end of her resignation speech, but not B Johnson. In fact, it seems hard to think that British politics will be the same as long as he’s alive. Because he’ll be out there somewhere, shambling about, muttering insults and swear words in Latin Latin about the bunch of second and third-raters who somehow contrived to push him off the cliff.
And let me be honest – in a way I’ll miss him. A bit like the way you miss D Trump. You know he’s bad news, but all that menace from Trump and all that bottled-up ambition in Bojo – you feel it should somehow be given a place to strut its stuff, ideally surrounded by a high-voltage wire around in so he can do no further harm.
He told us of how well he had rolled out the vaccine but didn’t mention that over 180,000 people in the UK died of the virus, much more than in France or Germany or Italy. He kept his promise, in a way, that he’d get Brexit done, but he didn’t mention that (i) Brexit was an appalling blunder, fuelled by lies ; and (ii) that it isn’t ‘done’ – its economic consequences will continue to blight Britain’s economy for generations.
So what will he do, apart from give after-dinner speeches or write books? Maybe he’ll do something similar to Tony Blair – set up an institute of some kind, where he can interfere indirectly with what’s going on in British politics. Or maybe he’ll become a stand-up comic. Or maybe he’ll attack the members of his Cabinet one by one, using a samauri sword and leaving a note reading “Boris wuz here”.
Whatever he does, he’ll show the same energy, good humour and thick-headed stupidity he showed during his term of office. To quote a few people in the debating chamber of the House of Commons yesterday: “Bye, Boris!”
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