Goodbye, Boris Johnson, you vile clown

At last, the day has come. Boris Johnson has confirmed that he will resign as Prime Minister. The news comes as a whopping total of 59 (and counting) MPs resigned in protest following the news that Johnson had lied about the Chris Pincher scandal. Carrie Johnson is steaming off that ghastly wallpaper and downloading Raya as we speak.

As Johnson’s time in office comes to a close, pundits and commentators across the world will be asking: what did Johnson achieve? What will history say about him? What, essentially, is his legacy? (Multiple children aside.)

To put it plainly: Johnson’s time in No 10 has been defined by sleaze, shambles and, really, cruelty. He stands accused of mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic (and, on one occasion, allegedly said “let the bodies pile high”), his government has been mired in corruption and cronyism, and has pushed thousands into poverty.

There are literally countless troubling incidents that pre-date his premiership, too – like conspiring to beat up a journalist, a slew of unequivocally racist and homophobic comments (Islamophobic hate crimes increased by 400 per cent in the week after his comments comparing burqa-wearing Muslim women to “letterboxes”), and jeopardising Nazanin Zhagari-Ratcliffe’s safety. But in the interest of saving time, we’re going to focus on the worst moments from Johnson’s time as Tory leader.

Election campaign

Political commentators like to excuse Boris Johnson’s abject performance in the 2019 General Election Campaign by reaching for elaborate metaphors about how anyone would have beaten Jeremy Corbyn: even a goose wearing a rosary! They like to claim that they knew all along that Johnson was a blaggart, an oaf and a fool but were forced, with the heaviest of hearts, to vote for him all the same – the alternative of mild social democracy being so much worse. In truth, Johnson benefited from a wildly partisan media, which afforded him endless leniency while at the same time monstering his opponent. ‘Get Brexit Done’ was a strong message, too; by that stage, after years of torturous negotiations, even some Remainers were bored of having to think about it, or worse – discuss it in the pub. But, while it’s easy enough to understand why he won, Johnson’s game was shambolic throughout, and he lurched from one humiliation to another. 

There are too many blunders to mention. When an ITV news interviewer attempted to show him a picture of a young boy lying down on a pile of coats while waiting to be seen in Leeds infirmary, he refused to look, then grabbed the reporter’s phone and slipped it into his own pocket. He chickened out of a scheduled interview with Andrew Neil, despite the fact that Corbyn had already done one – so much for the English upper class’s sense of sportsmanship and fair play. He swerved a Channel 4 debate on the climate crisis, which prompted them to replace him with an ice sculpture, and later hid in a fridge to avoid having to speak to Piers Morgan (that one is admittedly a little more sympathetic.) He still won though, so even if he was the clown, the joke was very much on us.

LGBTQ+ rights 

Johnson’s ‘tanked-topped bum boys’ comment is well-known but personally I prefer the deep cuts, like the time he agreed with Robert Mugabe that Labour was composed of “gay gangsters”. Chance would be a fine thing! Obviously, people can change their opinions over time, but he’s yet to apologise for any of this. What’s more, his time as Prime Minister has proven that his hostility towards the LGBTQ+ community persists even if it’s mostly directed at more vulnerable targets. Under his watch, the Tories introduced a ban on conversion therapy which failed to include trans people, while Johnson himself has made a number of transphobic comments. The trans community aren’t the only marginalised group who have suffered under his leadership: the Tories continue to deport LGBTQ+ asylum seekers to countries where they face violence and even death, and are pressing ahead with their Rwanda asylum plan despite acknowledging that LGBTQ+ refugees risk being persecuted if sent there.

In terms of LGBTQ+ rights, his legacy is perhaps best defined by the time, earlier this year, when every single mainstream LGBTQ+ charity dropped out of the government’s ‘Safe to Be Me’ conference in protest at its transphobia. Hate crimes have soared during his tenure, and the UK has plummeted down the rankings of LGBTQ+ rights across Europe, from first place to fourteenth. However much blame we can lay at his door directly, he leaves the UK as a worse place for the LGBTQ+ community than it was when he took office.

COVID-19

First, there was the mismanagement: the lack of PPE, the delays to ordering the first lockdown, the negligence when it came to protecting the elderly in care homes. Then it came out that he’d missed five vital COBRA meetings in the early days of the pandemic. Then came the Barnard Castle scandal. Then it came out he’d (allegedly) said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” when he was urged to order a third national lockdown. Then partygate happened.

Sure, Matt Hancock was Health Secretary at the time – even if he was too busy finger-blasting his secretary to worry about a little pandemic – but as Prime Minister during a national crisis, the buck should have stopped with Bojo.

Sleaze

Johnson’s government has been steeped in sleaze and corruption. As aforementioned, there was that time Dominic Cummings was praised by the PM for “being a good father” after illegally driving across the country to Durham, while two women were fined £200 each for... going on a socially-distanced walk with coffee together.

He also spent £112,000 on refurbishing his official Downing Street flat before knowing how it would be paid for, according to a report by the ethics adviser Christopher Geidt. The unbelievably heinous wallpaper picked out by Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s future wife, was priced at £840 a roll. Johnson was also grilled for failing to “establish the full facts” about a free holiday to a luxury villa in Mustique, organised for him by Tory donor David Ross.

Then, perhaps most disturbingly, there were a wave of sexual assault allegations and charges levelled at Tory MPs. A number of Johnson’s government have been either accused or found guilty of sexual assault and rape. The latest story to come out concerns Chris Pincher, the Conservative deputy chief whip, who resigned after reports alleged he drunkenly groped two men at a private club. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, with the scoop triggering the Tory MP exodus.

Peppa Pig

Compared to some of the other things on this list – like turning a blind eye to sexual predators in his own party or engendering homophobia – Boris’ Peppa Pig gaffe is relatively harmless. But it stills warrants a mention because although the bar is on the floor for politicians at the moment, in normal circumstances it’s not unreasonable to want the leader of your country to be able to string a coherent sentence together and get through a speech without imitating a car.

“Yesterday I went, as we all must, to Peppa Pig World,” he spluttered, apropos of nothing, during an address the Confederation of British Industry. “Hands up if you’ve been to Peppa Pig World!”

“Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place. It has very safe streets, discipline in schools, heavy emphasis on new mass transit systems. Even if they’re a bit stereotypical about Daddy Pig.” He went on to say that the cartoon pig was “pure genius” and asserted that “no government in the world, no Whitehall civil servant, would conceivably have come up with Peppa.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, he went on make car noises which the official Downing Street release transcribed as “arum arum aaaaaaaaag”. Twat x