Why I despise war criminal Boris Johnson
The two parameters I set myself for this blog were that I would not descend into bad language, and would not indulge in the sort of polarised click-baity outrage that makes up so much internet content. So the title is a considered one, and one I stand by, and I will try and justify its vitriol, and I will try to explain why I consider Johnson to belong alongside the likes of Putin and 4×4 drivers as a horseman of the apolcalypse.
To be clear: I don’t despise, or even disagree with, all that the current Johnson government has done in terms of policy and action. True, there is much not to like as well, in fact, an awful lot, but this is not about that. This is about a deep aborrence of the man and a profound unease that he might have something to do with… us.
Johnson is a hedonsit, a bluffer, a fop with a raffish disregard for process or detail, a buffoon, a clown with the gift of the gab. All of this is known and hammed up as his USP. It was supposed to be endearing and the likely resultant mishaps ‘baked-in’ to his election, first to leadership and then to government. Predictably the passage of time has taken the edge off the fun: he’s not competent, he’s a chancer, he’s in it for himself, he’s a fool. But he’s not evil.
As I write this, two things come to mind. One is, and I’m never going to find it, so won’t reference it, but years ago, I’m sure it was Andy Hamilton on Have I Got News for You, probably back when Johnson was London Mayor, though it may even have been before that, who said something along the lines of: Boris Johnson is the kind of person who, if he were a dictator, would smile and kiss your baby and then herd you into a footbal stadium to be shot. It didn’t get much of a laugh, I guess because it doesn’t really work as a joke or even as a piece of observational humour. It was also off-beat in tone; how should we respond to this? But it stayed with me because here was someone – someone nsightful and intelligent – who could have made an easy joke about Johnson’s infidelities or phobia of hairbrushes or somesuch, but who was suggesting that Johnson was actually a really nasty piece of work.
The other thing that came to mind was Stewart Lee’s dismantling of Richard Hammond, which I can find, and which I can recommend. The focal point of Lee’s monologue concerns a press conference (in 2009! I’ve just checked) where Jeremy Clarkson, with Hammond in tow, refers to Gordon Brown as a ‘one-eyed Scotish idiot’. Lee’s ire is reserved, not for Clarkson, the obviously boorish front-man, but for Hammond, for laughing along with the bully’s jokes and not having the backbone to do otherwise. At one point, Lee describes Hammond as a licence-fee funded ‘cowardly man, trapped between two different forms of cowardice’, and that’s roughly where I’m headed with this.
Johnson is an easy target, and has been well skewered on this very blog no less. So, I won’t trawl over all his past misdemeanours, after all, these are paths and bedrooms well trodden. Moreover, his well-established character shortfalls did not prove to be impediments to, and may well have been positive factors in, his successful bid for party leadership, and who am I to quibble with that? And when it came to the general election, well, folks voted with their eyes open and the outcome was indisputible.
Then comes partygate – don’t worry it won’t detain me long, I just need to establish a point – the point being that Johnson’s craven lack of any integrity whatsoever was there for all to see. This was a man – a leader no less – unable to answer without evasion, prevarication, deflection, a question about whether he attended a party or not. Mainstream opinion on the subject expressed bewilderment that he had not simply ‘fessed up, put on that hang-dog look he keeps in reserve, and carried on as usual; after all, he could take the hit. But he didn’t. His refusal to answer a straight question with a straight answer was an embarrrassment hinting at some strange narcissistic vulnerability that he couldn’t, even despite all the evidence, quite acknowledge himself. That, or a child’s belief that if you repeat something often enough then it becomes true and always was true. Or maybe, what’s that thing that’s going round American celebrity circles? Not actualising – manifesting – which is pretty well the same thing. It was all rather dispiriting and faintly loathsome, but that’s the point: it was nothing worse than that, nothing even out of character, and the clamour for his resignation only added to what was a rather pitiful spectacle. So why the revilement?
By the way, the reasons I have come do despise the war criminal Boris Johnson has nothing to do with UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, or anything to do with Afghanistan. In fact, nothing directly to do with policy at all. It’s more personal than that.
It is to do with Ukraine though. Here’s a potted timeline from the period immediately prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with US and domestic security agencies warning of its imminence.
Or you can skip the next ten pages and jump straight to the point
16th February 2022. Prince Andrew settles the Virginia Giuffre sexual assault case. Seems like an epoch ago, doesn’t it?
17th February 2022. Priti Patel, Home Secretary, announces an immediate end to the ‘golden visa’ system to help stop “corrupt elites who threaten our national security and push dirty money around our cities”.
Around 12000 such visas had been issued since 2008, that allowed people with over £2m to invest to apply for residency rights. Patel said she had “zero tolerance for abuse of our immigration system” and that the move was part of a “renewed crackdown on fraud and illicit finance”.
Now, I’m struggling with the logic of this doublespeak: does not the ending of a system because it somehow supports corruption and threatens national security, contain an admission that the system (in existence and much criticised since 2008 when it was introduced by the Brown governement in response to the 2008 financial crisis and previously suspended in 2018 for exactly the same sort of concerns) supports corruption and threatens national security? Does not the ending of that system (in existence and much criticised since 2008 etc) bacause you have a zero-tolerance for abuse of our immigration system, also contain an admission that it was being abused? and therefore that you previously did not have a zero-tolerance for abuse, despite being Home Secretary?
As Home Secretary, isn’t Priti Patel accountable for that abuse of the immigration system and the resulting threat to national security? It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can decisively act to address somehting that was your responsibility, without ever acknowledging it was your responsibilty, and therefore that you are therefore also culpable and part of that abuse and threat to national security? Or am I missing something?
(P.S. alshtough the golden visa scheme was axed, you can still buy residency; there’s a new scheme with some more hoops but…)
19th February 2022. Storm Eunice blows through the UK. Boris Johnson heads off to the annual Munich Security Conference where talk is dominated by the Ukraine situation and BJ is talking tough, saying ‘“If dialogue fails and if Russia chooses to use violence… it is in our collective interest that Russia should ultimately fail and be seen to fail.”
21st February 2022 BJ is still batting away partygate, being evasive about whether he will quit if fined by the Met, but it’s the last we’ll hear of it for a while.
22nd February 2022 Russian troops enter eastern Ukraine on ‘peacekeeping duties’ and Russia recognises Donetsk and Luhansk as countries. Johnson anounces that Covid restrictions will end, as will free testing.
This was the day of this piece of theatre:
23rd Feb 2022. It is revealed that some 15000 ghost flights have left UK since pandemic began. Johnson announces asset freezes on five Russian banks and three individuals. He claims the UK is ‘out in front’ globally and that no government could “conceivably be doing more”. It would, of course, have been a better situation if he were able to announce (with honesty) that no individuals would be sanctioned since one of the pre-condtions of diretctly or indirectly having money or property or business interests in the UK (or of being a Tory Part donor), was not being corrupt in the first place, but hey ho.
I mention this also because this seems to be the point at which the purpose of sanctions – whether they are intended primarily as a pre-emptive deterrant or a post-hoc punishment – is discussed and settled in favour of punishment. Sanctions, it is argued, should follow each transgression and be escalatory. They should therefore start small, so as to have something in reserve with which to respond to successive events. The alternative would be to lay all cards on the table at the start: to threaten maximum sanctions for the very slightest transgression. This, it is argued would nip things in the bud, but of course, would leave no further options should invasion take place. I can see the logic of both but, given that it was going to take some time for the West to agree what ‘maximum’ might look like, then incrementatal sanctions were always going to be the most likely. Throw in a government of a non-interventionalist persuasion, plus likely conflicts of interest, plus European reliance on Russian gas and oil, and it was a certainty.
24 February 2022. ‘Separatists’ in Donetsk apparantly ask Russia for mlitary help. Ukrainians are buying guns. UK students to pay back loans over 40, rather than 30, years.
Johnson says it is time to “squeeze Russia from the global economy, piece by piece”. This from the man who nominated Evgeny Lebedev for a life peerage…. But it is not the wisdom of excluding Russia from the global economy or the hypocricy of the statement that I want to challenge; what troubles me is that there is no acknoweldgement of a change of direction, or reflection that a previous position was naive or otherwise mistaken. I don’t necessarily have a problem with people being wrong, or changing their mind, but if you honestly want to extract yourself from the mire (as Johnson is saying he is doing, if we take him at his word), then it does require you to acknowledge that you were once in it. Why? Because the alternative is that every utterance becomes meaningless, a floater in the toilet of the twittersphere unanchored to any substance. It is the world of 1984:
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia Russian corruption. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia Russian corruption.”
This doesn’t make Johnson a war criminal, by the way. But it does show him surfing the wave of whatever opportunistic wave comes along.
25th February 2022 Russia invades Ukraine from north, east, and south. The UK is tries (successfully) to pursuade the EU to remove Russia from the Swift banking system. Unless I’m missing something, this seems wolly commendable.
After much previous prevarication, the UK government announces that presentation of the economic crime bill to parliament will now be brought forward. The bill proposes to establish a register identifying the ultimate owners of property or land in the UK bought by overseas individuals or companies. Naturally there is a grace period. Obviously it was completely fine before all this blew up (no pun intended), for the beneficiary of a company to be anonymous because, like, it didn’t matter if they were into organised crime or anything.
The wealth – actually that’s a euphimism – money concealment game was, and still is, facilitated by the ease with which one can set up fictitious companies using fictitious details in the UK. The current laws around falsifying company information were brought in in 2009, and it took until 2018 for the first prosecution to take place, that of Kevin Brewer who FIVE years beforehand set up John Vincent Cable Services Ltd, making the former Business Secretary Vince Cable MP a director and shareholder without his knowledge, and then, in 2016 set up Cleverly Clogs Ltd, making Baroness Neville-Rolfe – the Minister with responsibility for Companies House and James Cleverly MP directors and shareholders without their knowledge precisely in order to protest the laxity of Companies House in almost every respect.
In fairness to Companies House, it can’t do what is not in its remit and power; but who determines its remit and powers? You’ll have to wait another three days for the government white paper on just this!
26 February 2022. It’s ‘Kyiv’ now, not ‘Kiev’ now. In an ominous sign of non-compliance, Ukraine soldiers tell Russian naval officer to ‘go fuck yourself’ rather than surrender.
27 February 2022. Vlad puts Russia’s nuclear force on high alert. Trump calls Vlad’s fake-peacekeeping tactic ‘smart’.
Interestingly, and not immediately in the headlines, is that Boris Johnson has appoints election strategist David Canzini to restore his reputation ‘amid new claims that Downing Street lockdown parties regularly descended into “carnage”.’
28th February 2022. Boris Johnson’s Nationality and Borders Bill, ‘the cornerstone of the government’s New Plan for Immigration, delivering the most comprehensive reform in decades to fix the broken asylum system’ (it says here), is, for the fourth time, defeated by the House of Lords. This included the removal of an important clause that allowed for refugees to be divided into two classes, depending on how they had arrived (via official vs unofficial channels), with differing rights.
Fanfare! Publication of the Corporate transparency and register reform white paper. If passed, Companies Hose may do all sorts of things like, oh, asking for some ID for directors so that they’re not just completely made up. And also, not allowing companies to be company directors (unless the corporate director itself has real human directors, in which case that’s ok).
2nd March 2022. Johnson off on a trip Poland and Estonia to look statesmanlike and reiterate support. Disappointingly (for him) it’s all about refugees and not fighting talk. Fittingly, only yesterday Priti Patel had been booed into changing tack on her proposals for for visa requirements for Ukrainian refugees.
4th March 2022. Johnson’s in his element running around, sounding decisive and being important talking to Zenlenskyy and other leaders, but what is he actually doing? Still, everyone’s forgotten about partygate.
Monday 7 march 2022. What’s this though? Some froggy is usurping our Boris! Macron seems to have a hotline to Vlad!
Still, Johnson is keeping his end up: meeting Justin Trudeau today he pronounces,
We stand shoulder to shoulder in supporting Ukraine against Putin’s tyranny and brutal aggression. With the rest of the world, we stand in awe of the valour, courage and tenacity of the Ukrainian people, their military forces, and their public officials. We reiterate our unwavering support to Ukraine in this time of need, and our resolute commitment to upholding Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and right to self-determination.
Yada yada yada. It’s surely pretty easy to spout this guff but a Guardian article nevertheless notes that Tory MPs who previously privately briefed against Johnson now rally to his defence. ‘One declared him “a true hero in a crisis”. Another said: “Anyone making a move against him would not be in the spirit of the times.” ‘ Quite: such a true hero that, at the same time he’s pontificating about Putin’s tyranny Johnson is also having to deny that he had anything to do with Evgeny Lebedev getting a peerage despite security concerns.
8th March 2022. Talking of peers, Conservative peer Greg Barker resigns as chairman of EN+, the mining company part-owned by the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. As chairman, he oversaw a plan to help the firm respond to US government sanctions levelled against the company and Deripaska in 2018. But that was OK. Oh, he was an energy minister in David Cameron’s government.
Wednesday 9th March 2022. Zelenskiyy addresses the House of Commons. Shell says it will stop buying Russian oil and gas and Unilever says it will stop sales in Russia.
10th March 2022: Anger and exhaustion as Ukrainians turned away by UK in Calais, unable to get visas
11th march 2022: UK imposes sanctions on Roman Abramovich over ‘clear’ links to Putin. Uproar! An owner of a football club! Dodgy political links! Who’da thunk it eh?
12th march 2022: Petrol prices are soaring.
13th March 2022. Yesterday the NY Times noted that ‘Russia’s war in Ukraine has finally led the British government to go after ultrawealthy Russians in London.’ Today, Stewart Lee quips;
Britain shamefully allowed Russian oligarchs to pay their way into the upper echelons of society, and is internationally despised for it. It is probably the only area of the current conflict in which we do genuinely “lead the world”
I’m sure it’s some sort of colonial-era hangover that the British utterly fail to recognise how much we are disliked, and, to a fair degree always have been. There’s a particularly good episode of the podcast Doomsday Watch with Arthur Snell that comes to mind (Why Can’t the West Win it’s Wars Any More?) where the news has to be brioken to Frank Ledwidge that the Afghans hate the British. We’re so used to telling ourselves that we’re the good guys, but why would anyone not hate a proudly belligerent corrupt state?
14th March 2022. Not to be outdone by Zelenskyy’s phone-a-thons, our Boris is hosting Nordic and Baltic leaders for talks on the Ukraine invasion. The prime minister said resilience to Putin’s threats must “go beyond our military footing”. “Together … we must ensure we are insulated from Russia’s interference and impact on our energy supplies, economy and values.” It genuinely beggers beleif.
BJ planning trip to Saudi Arabia after they execute 81on sat 12th March
15 march 2022. Marina Ovsyannikova runs on to the set of the Channel One transmission shouting: ‘Stop the war. No to war“
16th march 2022. Johnson pops off to Dubai to meet leaders from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite the Saudis executing 81 people on 12th March. Still, needs must: I can see the necessity of this, but why pretend it’s anything other than desperate times needing desperate measures? I assume the Saudi executions are a statement of impunity intended to ram home just how powerless and compromised the west is. ‘Genius’ I guess Trump would call it.
17 march 2022. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosh Ashoori head back to UK imprisonment in Iran.
Four activists are released after occupying of oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s UK mansion. Remeber him? From 8th March? Company chairman is (was) a current Tory peer?
Marina Hyde’s Guardian article on this is so wonderfully acerbic that you really should just go and read it, and I’ll limit myself to one quote. Ouch.
They unfurled some banners inviting Vladimir Putin to fuck himself and so on, before being removed by the largest Met police presence you’ll see outside of a women’s vigil for someone murdered by a Met police officer.
18th march 2022. MPs condemn P&O Ferries for the mass sacking of 800 staff. Not the fact of the sacking, of course, but doing it in such a way that they drew attention to themselves. That’s not how we do things here.
Its the conservative party spring conference. Johnson claims;
He’s [Putin] been preparing for this moment, by pushing hydrocarbons on the west like a back street pusher, feeding our addiction, creating a dependency. And now he wants to weaken the collective will to resist by pushing up the cost of living, hitting us at the pumps, and in our fuel bills.
Ah, Putin made us buy all that gas and oil, and made us offer golden visas to his mates and made us take their money. Glad that’s straight.
In summary…
Britain’s response to the invasion of Ukraine doesn’t seem too shameful to me (the refugee visa scheme being a notable exception), but then Britain had an aweful lot of ground to make up. It is particularly galling that those talking tough are unable to admit that they were at fault in facilitating Russian money laundering in the UK and that benefitting from the arrangements makes them culpable too. It is irritating that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has afforded Johnson the opportunity to rehabilitate himself, but thus far I did not actually despise him with a deep visceral dislike, until I read this and the penny dropped.
Boris Johnson ‘desperate’ to visit Ukraine, says Tory party chair. Oliver Dowden says PM has a ‘real emotional connection’ with the Ukrainian people but No 10 sources say a trip is unlikely.
The Guardian 23 March 2022.
What purpose would it serve for Johnson to go to Ukraine? What could possibly be accomplished by going in-person, that couldn’t be achieved by staying on London? Of course! The entirety of the above timeline was never anything to do with a war or human suffering at all, it was all about Johnson! All along, it was all about Johnson being special!
Look! here he is waving his arms about! Here he is talking to world leaders, doing leadership and sounding decisive! And resolute! Yes, Johnson, I’m sure you have a ‘real emotional connection’ with the Ukrainian people because…. er… because… er….. Or do you just want to go there so that you can be at the centre of things, waving your arms about, sounding decisive, bringing nothing?
Why so desperate, Johnson? Because you have someththing to offer that Zelenskeyy doesn’t? Because you have particular military skills or experience perhaps? Or are you desperate to go there because of what a besieged nation under rubble can do for you? Perhaps you can can be like Churchill, touring the East End, being popular, only becasue London isn’t rubble and is, as point of fact, paved with Russian gold that you and your ilk were only too happy to accept, you’ll have to make do with touring someone else’s ruined home /city / country instead.
So, Johnson, what would you hope to gain from visiting Ukraine? Do you want to experience it for yourself? I emphasise ‘for yourself’, because I’m guessing that people there have experience plenty for themselves. Do you want to experience it because somehow experiencing it would mean better-informed policy decisions by the UK perhaps? Do you need to experience war first hand to grasp what should be done? What is there not to understand? Wasn’t it Sassoon who lambasted politicians for their lack of imagination? Or are you wanting to fulfill another Churchillian fantasy, that of being a war correspondent? Here’s me, somewhere dangerous! Look at me, I’m authentic! Me! Me! Me! I’m just soooooo connected to the people of Ukraine because I understand what it is to be bombed out of a small flat and thay all just totally get Eton. I utterly despise the man.
Remember: this man who ‘feels a real emotional connection to the Ukrainian people’ is the same man who lacked the courage and integrity to admit that he ran a party-house during lockdown. But now he wants’ to go to war.
Does that make Johnson a war criminal? What else do you call someone who relishes a war for the opportunities it offers for himself? What else do you call someone who seeks to profit from war? Let alone a war they could have done an awful lot more to avert in the first place? What else do you call someone for whom war is just moment to be seized on his journey to his greatness, a moment that will allow all the world to behold that barely-suppressed, deluded showboating that passes for his ‘leadership’. What else do you call someone so fearful of being upstaged by something bigger and more consequential than themselves that they just have to crash that party?
Post script
I’m not going to claim Sassoon as an ally for myself in my tirade against Johnson, but having looked up A Soldier’s Declaration, read to parliament in 1917, it does bear quoting at greater length:
I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those as home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficienct imagination to realise.
