Like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson is a narcissist. John Crace writes:
Like most narcissists, Boris Johnson is unable to conceive of other people having an independent existence. Rather, they are mere satellites orbiting his ego. Mere objects whose only function is to do his bidding. And to be fair, it’s a world view that has served him well enough up to now as he’s cruised his way, with a flamboyant mixture of broken promises, outright lies and back-stabbing, to his life’s goal of becoming prime minister. Family, friends and colleagues that have been trampled upon along the way are just collateral damage.
He's always been the star of his own show. But, as is the case with Trump, people are beginning to change the channel:
There are growing signs that many people are increasingly deciding that enough is enough. Tory backbenchers have got fed up with being left out in the cold from the government’s coronavirus legislation and the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, made no attempt to disguise his anger on Wednesday at the way parliament had been sidelined. But the person who most gets under Boris’s skin is Keir Starmer. Because more than six months in, he has yet to get the better of the Labour leader.
It must be driving Johnson mad. Prime minister’s questions was always meant to be the Boris Show. The half-hour in the week when the country laughed at his jokes and enjoyed his put-downs. Except it hasn’t worked out like that at all. Partly because the Labour leader is visibly better prepared, but mostly because he refuses to be cast in Johnson’s image. Keir is very much his own man: he keeps his questions short and direct and calls out Boris’s bluster for the bullshit it is.
Starmer is getting the best of Johnson:
Today, Johnson was wrongfooted from the start when Starmer wondered why Luton was the only town to have gone into extra lockdown restrictions and come out of them. Boris’s reply that Luton had “pulled together” won’t have gone down well with the 25% of the country who live in the other 47 regions that are still living under extra strict measures, as it rather implied they must have been taking the piss.
For the rest of the session Starmer walked rings round Johnson. He picked him up for not even knowing what restrictions he had put in place where. The best that Boris could come up with was that it was up to everyone in each area to find out the rules for themselves. Then Starmer tackled the prime minister on his definition of “viable businesses” and the level of support he was prepared to provide. “Putting an arm around the whole country” didn’t quite square with an angry email Starmer had received from a wedding planner in the chancellor’s Richmond constituency.
By the end, Boris was merely an infant “mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms” yet to advance beyond Jaques’s first stage of man. Unable to come up with any clever – or even not so clever – replies, he merely yapped out his distress that anyone should dare to question him on anything and to accuse the Labour leader of sniping from the sides.
There's a lot of mewling and puking going on these days.
