Is this the last act of a very British Caligula?

I’m sure the classicist Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will appreciate the comparison with Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

In fairness, the shitshow wasn’t a surprise to those who knew Boris before he finally became Prime Minister.

In 2019 Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian that a Johnson Premiership

“…will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability.”

The featured image is a now famous observation by a perceptive housemaster at Eton who saw some very major character flaws in the young Boris.

In many ways from this side of the Irish Sea, he appeared to be the embodiment of Perfidious Albion.

He betrayed the Unionists in the Six Counties over the promise of no sea border post-Brexit.

Then he decided to break international law by going back on the Withdrawal Agreement.

The reputational damage to UK Plc on the world stage is hard to overestimate.

Here Tony Connelly of RTE covers the Boris Brexit story with his usual forensic precision.

For a moment yesterday, as broadcasters looked down at their phones to see who had resigned from the British government, it looked as if the incumbent in Number Ten would somehow come up with some Trumpian wheeze to sidestep the parliamentary arithmetic.

Given the unwritten shambles that it the British Constitution, no one was quite sure whether or not he could get away with it.

By this morning, it was clear that he was a goner.

Looking back, it is a plot twist worthy of Armando Iannucci that Johnson was felled by a sex scandal in which he had no hand, act, or part.

All he did was lie about what he knew, and in Boris World, that is no biggie.

I smiled at the irony that Christopher John Pincher MP is the Honourable Member for Tamworth.

The Staffordshire town could be seen as the birthplace of the modern British Conservative Party.

In 1834 it was in that Staffordshire town where that Sir Robert Peel finally admitted defeat on the issues around the Great Reform Act of 1832.

The ability of the Tories to manoeuvre themselves onto much more favourable political ground has made them arguably the most successful electoral machine in democratic politics over the last two centuries.

They’re also ruthless at getting rid of leaders who they think cannot deliver at the ballot box.

That’s why Boris got the elbow today.

It is worth noting that his erstwhile éminence grise does not think that his old boss believes that the Johnson presidency is over.

Yes, I know he’s the Prime Minister in a parliamentary democracy, but Boris thinks he’s the president.

The words of that schoolmaster at Eton do now seem eerily prescient today.

4 thoughts on “Is this the last act of a very British Caligula?”

  1. My analogy for many years was ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Amazed that it took some people so long to wise up to him. I just wish it had been the electorate rather than Tory MPs who ended his political career.

    Reply
  2. Oh dear.
    Looks like Boris didn’t really absorb his Classical Studies after all.
    Hubris, as ever, gets you in the end! 🙂

    Reply

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