Imagine Boris Johnson with the populist appeal and none of the chaos? Now that would be worth voting for
THE tragedy of Boris Johnson is that he made it easy for his enemies to put his tousled head on a spike.
A few short years ago, an astonishing 14million votes propelled him to an 80-seat majority at the last General Election.
On Monday — Boris’s 59th birthday — MPs will vote on whether to endorse the Privileges Committee report on Partygate and remove his Parliamentary pass.
If Bojo was still an MP — he quit a week ago — then the Partygate report would be recommending a 90-day ban, a punishment so extreme it has only ever been exceeded by Keith Vaz, who tried to tempt rent boys with Bolivian marching powder.
Now that’s what I call a party!
Boris Johnson deserves better.
But there is a horrible inevitability about the verdict of the Commons’ Privileges Committee investigating Partygate.
That photograph of Boris raising a glass in 10 Downing Street during Covid restrictions in 2020 was always going to come back and bite him on his ample bottom.
Oh, Bojo — it should have been obvious.
The country was under the most restrictive rules and regulations ever experienced during peacetime.
Even the Queen sat heartbreakingly alone and masked at her husband’s funeral.
We obeyed the rules. The Prime Minister’s flunkies should have been doing the same in Downing Street.
But that does not mean the judgment of “Hanging” Harriet Harman’s show trial is not grotesquely over the top.
In the name of justice, how can it be left to Johnson’s political enemies to judge him?
It is hardly a fair trial when the judges already hate you.
Boris was kicked out of Downing Street by Tory MPs — many of whom owe him their livelihoods — and has now been eviscerated by an inquiry that wants to humiliate him.
Take away his Commons pass? Why not bulldoze his Oxfordshire pile?
How about putting Rachel and Stanley Johnson under house arrest? And pack Dylan the dog off to Battersea.
It is pathetic.
Frankly, I would be more inclined to listen to the findings of the Partygate inquiry if their verdict was not so extreme.
Roly-poly reprobate
Boris ran a slapdash regime. Too many lockdown rules were flagrantly broken on his watch.
Even Rishi Sunak got fined — and he doesn’t even drink!
Boris made it far too easy for his many foes — embittered Remainers, disappointed Brexiteers, Labour politicians who would never beat him in an election — to come after him.
The old roly-poly reprobate dug his own grave.
Downing Street should have been above reproach, not least because Covid almost killed Boris Johnson.
He needs no one to tell him how the pandemic devastated lives.
Boris was far too casual in office, but his enemies are laughably spiteful in their attempts to destroy him.
The Partygate inquisition makes me feel more sympathy for Bojo than I have felt in a long time.
Sorry, Harriet, but you go too far.
Could Boris come back? If he does, then it will not be — as has been suggested — as the goose-stepping leader of some right wing fringe group.
Because Boris is not remotely right wing.
Bojo is a metropolitan liberal to the core of his North London bicycle clips.
The idea that he is some mouth-foaming Oxford-educated Donald Trump is bonkers.
Even on his career-defining policy — Brexit — he was famously ambivalent, writing a column for his newspaper arguing why the UK should leave the EU, and another on why we should stay.
Rishi Sunak was always far more of a hardcore Brexiteer than Boris ever was.
But Harman’s punishment beating is so OTT it feels like it has given the kiss of life to the corpse of Bojo’s political career.
Yet if Boris ever came back, he would need to radically clean up his act.
Even his fans grew weary of the chaos Bojo trailed in his wake.
But Boris Johnson with the populist appeal and none of the chaos?
Now that would be worth voting for.
OUT OF LINE ON FLIGHTS
ARRIVING back at Heathrow, I was struck by how holders of EU passports are entitled to enter the UK in the same line as the locals.
Very generous.
And after all the hurt feelings surrounding Brexit, a good idea.
But why isn’t this kindness extended to travelling Brits?
For committing the unforgivable crime of leaving the European Union, we are now ushered into the dreaded All Other Passports line.
We try to make life as easy as possible for Europeans visiting Blighty while they spitefully make life as hard as possible for us.
Why don’t MPs care?
I suspect it is because they all glide through airports in the diplomatic channel and consequently don’t give a toss if you and your family are ushered into the All Other Passports queue when you go on holiday.
I am all for getting on with the neighbours.
Our continental cousins should be let into the UK with as little friction as possible.
But the same courtesy should be extended to us.
GUTLESS OIL MOB COWARDS
FOLLOWING their courageous disruption of the Chelsea Flower Show, Just Stop Oil activists have interrupted an opera performance at Glyndebourne.
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites was disrupted by green loons chucking around a confetti bomb and sounding an air horn.
That will certainly save the planet.
And I can’t help feeling the blank-eyed pampered poshos of Just Stop Oil are playing it a bit safe these days.
They seem to care infinitely more about protecting their own skins than saving the planet.
The Chelsea Flower Show. Glyndebourne.
Whatever next? A meeting of the WI? A Sunday school class?
Why do they never attempt to disrupt a Millwall match?
FOR most of the late 20th Century, the idea of rock stars getting old was considered a bit unseemly.
Yet the ultimate rock star – Mick Jagger – turns 80 next month, and it feels like something of a triumph. Keith Richards is 80 later this year.
Rock music was once the essence of youthful rebellion. Then 60 years went by.
Once the Stones showed us how to be young. And then they showed us how to grow old.
All hail Berry, er, Bailey
HALLE BERRY (X-Men, Die Another Day, Catwoman) continues to take social media trolls to task for criticising her performance in The Little Mermaid.
Because she is not even in it! The lead is played by actress-singer Halle Bailey – and she is terrific.
Halle Berry, Halle Bailey – you can see the confusion. Even though Halle Berry is 56 and Halle Bailey 23.
But as I watched The Little Mermaid with my daughter – we came to sneer but were reduced to tears – I worked out the way to tell them apart.
Halle Bailey is clearly half fish.
IT beggars belief that Mr Whippy vendor Ejaz Azam initially did not recognise Man City ace Erling Haaland when he tried to buy ice cream in the early hours of Tuesday.
Exactly how many 6ft 4in giants wearing gold jim-jams with three medals around their neck can there be knocking around Manchester in the middle of the night?
POLITICS NEEDS A GLENDA
GLENDA JACKSON, who has died at the age of 87, was gloriously unique.
We are accustomed to former politicians desperately trying to fill their boots with as much fame as possible when their Westminster career hits the skids.
One thinks of Matt Hancock sucking on kangaroo testicles for the merriment of Ant and Dec.
Ann Widdecombe on Strictly, being dragged across the floor like a drunk being slung out of the Rat And Trumpet at closing time.
Ed Balls on Strictly, or sitting in Piers Morgan’s old chair on Good Morning Britain.
Michael Portillo catching trains for the BBC.
Glenda Jackson went in exactly the opposite direction.
More than 30 years ago, she gave up one of the most glittering careers in film, theatre and TV to be a Labour MP.
Despite that cut-glass accent, she was true working class – the daughter of a cleaner and builder from Birkenhead.
She knew real fame. Not clowning on Strictly or humiliating herself on I’m A Celebrity.
She won two Oscars.
She experienced major international stardom and she turned her back on it, all to make her country and her constituency – my Hampstead neck of the woods – a better place.
She was a politician driven by ideals, not personal ambition.
In this age of fame-hungry political pygmies, we could do with more of her kind today.
BRITNEY VETTED
THE highlight of Britney Spears’ career is clearly the 2003 video to Toxic.
Sample lyric, “A guy like you should wear a warning”. The one where Britney plays a flight attendant who lures a chubby businessman into the toilet only to discover that he is actually a floppy-haired hunk.
But now comes the unlikely revelation that Toxic could have been inspired by C4’s Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick, who dated the song’s writer Cathy Dennis until they parted ways in 2003 – the year Toxic was written.
Somehow this incredible news just makes me love Toxic even more than I did already.
A vet like you should wear a warning.