Initially, the feeling down here in the Mole townhouse was that Boris Johnson’s “Operation Juddering Climax” tweet wasn’t worth giving airtime to.
After all: it’s an attention-seeking device as old as the hills. Sex sells; unfortunately, so does the soon-to-be-former Mayor’s brand of weird bombast. So it’s not surprising some press officer realised if you can get the voters to imagine Johnson in gaudens (see, Boris, bit of Latin for you there!), they’ll get distracted. At the very least, it’ll rechannel their disgust so they’re not thinking about the fact he’s a man whose past achievements include such gems as calling black people “picanninies” and, recently, suggesting “part-Kenyan” Barack Obama may have an “ancestral dislike” of the British empire.
Like a dead cat, once the possibility of an active penis is on the table people tend to get distracted.
So yes, reading Johnson’s account yesterday did feel a little like supervising a class of fourth-formers who have just discovered euphemism and can’t stop slipping it into their answers in class, continuing long after it stops being funny, massive shit-eating grins on their faces all the time. The temptation is always to ignore it, in the hope they’ll get bored with their own supposed cleverness.
But it’s actually more sinister than that. Because when Boris pulls this sort of sniggering schoolboy rhetoric out about the “climax” of his mayoralty, what he’s actually doing is urging you to forget the stray pube of his water cannon, the crumpled tissue of his awful, boiling buses and the crusty sock which is his environmental legacy.
Well, here at the NS we believe a gentleman should always offer to sleep in the wet patch. So here, as a parting gift of sorts, is a short selection of some things you might remember Boris for:
The bus stock whose internal temperature “breaches legal limits for livestock”
Championing the contentious Garden Bridge
Installing a cable car that is used by fewer passengers than London’s, er, 400 busiest bus routes
Spending over £200,000 on two second hand water cannon from Germany – which he’s not allowed to use
That’s that done. This mole’s off for a cigarette.
Content from our partners
Related
