Until his car passed through the gates of Buckingham Palace en route to the kissing of hands, I didn’t quite believe Boris Johnson would actually make it to the premiership. That’s partly because many years ago he arrived late at a Spectator lunch, told us he’d just realized he was going to be prime minister, and we all laughed. Yet, a quarter-century later, here he is. As his sister Rachel points out, only fifty-five people have ever become UK PM, and, even if one has difficulty recalling the names of any of the recent occupants, that’s still fewer than have gone into space.
Back in those Speccie days, he was one of those writers you read not because of what he had to say but because of the way he said it. Here he is on the saskatoon – not the town, but an innocent Canadian berry that had fallen afoul of some control-freak Blairite regulatory agency (from which abyss it was rescued by the EU – a reminder that not everything that’s hellish about modern Britain is the fault of Brussels). At any rate, Boris turned in what is undoubtedly the best ever column written about the saskatoon:
You may not have been aware that the saskatoon is to berries as the Cohiba is to cigars. It is the king of the bush. It is used all over Canada to make jams, syrups, salad dressings and even crème brulée. According to some bumf I have from the Canadian High Commission, it is standard practice, at all Canadian state banquets, to sprinkle every course with saskatoons. When one contemplates the volcanic energy of this century’s great Canadians, from Mark Steyn to Conrad Black to Margaret Trudeau, one can only ascribe it to the saskatoon-based national diet.
That’s beautifully constructed. It’s just the ticket if you want to be a minor media celebrity and get invited on to BBC current affairs shows to be amusing about the day’s headlines. But it’s a tricky thing to parlay into a big-time political career: The cracks permitted about Canadians are more perilous when done about “tank-topped bum-boys”, or burqaed Muslimas looking like “letter boxes”, or “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. But, to modify Stalin, one gaffe is a tragedy, a million is just static. In 2016 Boris won a literary competition in The Spectator for a poem about Turkish strongman Erdoğan fornicating with goats. It began:
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See Also:
(1) Like Churchill before him, dynamic Boris Johnson has lifted the gloom
(2) Boris Johnson and Ruth Davidson have ‘incredibly constructive’ meeting
(3) What a bunch of snowflakes! Police say millennial recruits ‘wrapped in cotton wool’
(4) Brexit triumph: Tory Remainers in meltdown – secret plot to thwart Boris’ no deal UNRAVELS
