It is perhaps not very surprising that at university he became president of the Oxford Union, and even less so that he joined the Bullingdon Club, described by Wikipedia as "a private all-male dining club for Oxford University students. It is known for its wealthy members, grand banquets, boisterous rituals, and occasionally bad behaviour, including vandalism of restaurants and students' rooms." They always got away with trashing restaurants because their rich daddies reached for their cheque books; less privileged young men would undoubtedly have ended up in court.
By the time he left Oxford, he was clearly of the view that what was most important to him was obtaining what he wanted, irrespective of the cost or consequences, a pattern of behaviour that persists today.
Like Trump, he is a serial liar, but there's a difference: Trump cannot tell the difference between the truth and his own thought processes, while Johnson regards the truth as acceptable collateral damage in order to achieve whatever end he has set his sights upon. He was sacked from The Times in 1988 for making up a quote in an article, and he lost his job in 2004 as shadow arts minister of the Tory Party for allegedly lying about an extra-marital affair.
Johnson has the sense of entitlement of a rich, spoilt brat who expects to receive what he desires without any need to earn it. His personal life has been a series of self-indulgent affairs that has left an unknown number of children - six at least - in its wake. He is a philanderer with a sociopathically under-developed sense of self-restraint. Like most such males, he would probably assert that he loves women, but in reality such behaviour is closer to exploitation than affection - he wants it, he takes it, and then flees.
It is signally unfortunate that, at a time of a national crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Britons, seriously damaging the economy and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, we are led by an immature, vain liar with an overweening sense of entitlement and the mindset of a spoilt, lazy, public schoolboy who has been granted far too much of his own way.
Like Trump, he is a serial liar, but there's a difference: Trump cannot tell the difference between the truth and his own thought processes, while Johnson regards the truth as acceptable collateral damage in order to achieve whatever end he has set his sights upon. He was sacked from The Times in 1988 for making up a quote in an article, and he lost his job in 2004 as shadow arts minister of the Tory Party for allegedly lying about an extra-marital affair.
As Kirsty Major wrote in The Independent in 2016:
"As Mayor of London he promised to totally eradicate rough sleeping by 2012; it doubled under his leadership. His 2008 manifesto promised there would be manned ticket offices at every station; he closed all of London's ticket offices. He aimed to reduce transport fares; they increased by 4.2 per cent."
It's obvious that he was prepared to say absolutely anything to be elected, and having won, he made little effort to keep his promises. On the contrary, he was more interested in his pet vanity projects, cutting what he saw as unnecessary public sector costs, and helping his rich friends in business. He automatically upheld all appeals to him against refusals by local authorities to grant planning permission for developments. He was so irritated by a London Assembly member demanding an explanation how fire safety could be improved while fire brigade staffing levels were being cut and fire stations closed that he dismissively blurted out: "Get stuffed!" While this was before the Grenfell disaster, it was nonetheless a wholly unacceptable response, and it typifies his impatience with any questioning of his decisions, which is surely what the Assembly is for. This aversion to accountability has been a defining characteristic of his political career.
His notorious Garden Bridge project cost £53 million, including £43 million of public money, despite never even being started. To date, I have't heard a word of apology for such a waste of public money. As a trade union rep, I represented one of my members who had been wrongly accused of deliberately misspending public money, a matter of little more than £100; if I'd lost the case, he would have been sacked. Johnson's squandering of millions of pounds hasn't earned him so much as a slap on the wrist.
His notorious Garden Bridge project cost £53 million, including £43 million of public money, despite never even being started. To date, I have't heard a word of apology for such a waste of public money. As a trade union rep, I represented one of my members who had been wrongly accused of deliberately misspending public money, a matter of little more than £100; if I'd lost the case, he would have been sacked. Johnson's squandering of millions of pounds hasn't earned him so much as a slap on the wrist.
He bought two water cannons, even though it is illegal to use them in the UK; presumably he either didn't know they couldn't be used because of his habitual inattention to detail, or in his breezy and ill-informed self-confidence he believed he could obtain permission to use them. Either way, his successor was unable to sell them and they were scrapped at a loss of more than £300,000. Who pays? The taxpayer, obviously.
As PM, during the worst pandemic to hit the UK for a century, he considered it important to spend nearly a million pounds repainting an aeroplane in patriotic livery so show Britain is ... well, I'm not actually sure what!
These projects derive from Johnson's self image as the man whose destiny post-EU is to recreate an image of UK greatness in the eyes of the world - not unlike Trump's mantra 'Make America Great Again'. That he fails time and again doesn't seem to dent this self-belief.
A fine example is when he managed to get himself infected with COVID19 by deliberately shaking hands with everyone, including patients suffering from the virus, that he'd met during a tour of a hospital, a foolish activity that he boasted about on television. My view is that he felt it showed him as a fearless leader and a man of decisive action during a crisis, but the reality is that, as well as making himself ill, he probably spread the disease further, both in the hospital and elsewhere. It is not impossible that his stupidity caused deaths. He was acting with the same sense of personal invincibility as reckless teenage youths performing stupid and dangerous stunts.
The breezy and jokey persona that he has applied to his progression down the path to prime minister, the post he feels he was born to hold, has proved wholly unsuited to dealing with a dangerous pandemic. Faced with this disaster, he decided to exploit it to show that, unshackled from the EU, Britain could now be 'world-beating', leading the world in pandemic reduction.
Instead of simply purchasing effective ventilators, he set British industrialists the task of devising a superior, British, 'world-beating' version. Some of them were disgusted when he joked that it could be called 'Operation Last Gasp'. There's a time and place for humour, but a cheap gag about people dying when you're ostensibly in charge of overseeing a pandemic is extremely difficult to excuse.
He wasted around £11 million on a 'world-beating' track & trace system which didn't work and was abandoned - more public money squandered on yet another failed, 'world-beating', vanity project. The pattern just keeps on repeating itself.
Referring to the possible introduction of local lockdowns, he used the analogy of an amusement arcade game, Whack-A-Mole. Such a frivolous comparison is scarcely appropriate to describe a method of tackling a virus that has so far killed close to 50,000 of his fellow British citizens, but is quite typical of his inability to treat a very serious situation with the gravity it deserves.
Extraordinarily, he has recently been boasting about his government's overall approach to CV19, even though the UK's rate of excess deaths is the highest, especially in England, which is particularly significant because it is the only UK nation without an elected assembly of its own and is therefore subject to direct rule by Johnson's government.
As PM, during the worst pandemic to hit the UK for a century, he considered it important to spend nearly a million pounds repainting an aeroplane in patriotic livery so show Britain is ... well, I'm not actually sure what!
These projects derive from Johnson's self image as the man whose destiny post-EU is to recreate an image of UK greatness in the eyes of the world - not unlike Trump's mantra 'Make America Great Again'. That he fails time and again doesn't seem to dent this self-belief.
A fine example is when he managed to get himself infected with COVID19 by deliberately shaking hands with everyone, including patients suffering from the virus, that he'd met during a tour of a hospital, a foolish activity that he boasted about on television. My view is that he felt it showed him as a fearless leader and a man of decisive action during a crisis, but the reality is that, as well as making himself ill, he probably spread the disease further, both in the hospital and elsewhere. It is not impossible that his stupidity caused deaths. He was acting with the same sense of personal invincibility as reckless teenage youths performing stupid and dangerous stunts.
The breezy and jokey persona that he has applied to his progression down the path to prime minister, the post he feels he was born to hold, has proved wholly unsuited to dealing with a dangerous pandemic. Faced with this disaster, he decided to exploit it to show that, unshackled from the EU, Britain could now be 'world-beating', leading the world in pandemic reduction.
Instead of simply purchasing effective ventilators, he set British industrialists the task of devising a superior, British, 'world-beating' version. Some of them were disgusted when he joked that it could be called 'Operation Last Gasp'. There's a time and place for humour, but a cheap gag about people dying when you're ostensibly in charge of overseeing a pandemic is extremely difficult to excuse.
He wasted around £11 million on a 'world-beating' track & trace system which didn't work and was abandoned - more public money squandered on yet another failed, 'world-beating', vanity project. The pattern just keeps on repeating itself.
Referring to the possible introduction of local lockdowns, he used the analogy of an amusement arcade game, Whack-A-Mole. Such a frivolous comparison is scarcely appropriate to describe a method of tackling a virus that has so far killed close to 50,000 of his fellow British citizens, but is quite typical of his inability to treat a very serious situation with the gravity it deserves.
Extraordinarily, he has recently been boasting about his government's overall approach to CV19, even though the UK's rate of excess deaths is the highest, especially in England, which is particularly significant because it is the only UK nation without an elected assembly of its own and is therefore subject to direct rule by Johnson's government.
Johnson has the sense of entitlement of a rich, spoilt brat who expects to receive what he desires without any need to earn it. His personal life has been a series of self-indulgent affairs that has left an unknown number of children - six at least - in its wake. He is a philanderer with a sociopathically under-developed sense of self-restraint. Like most such males, he would probably assert that he loves women, but in reality such behaviour is closer to exploitation than affection - he wants it, he takes it, and then flees.
It is signally unfortunate that, at a time of a national crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Britons, seriously damaging the economy and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, we are led by an immature, vain liar with an overweening sense of entitlement and the mindset of a spoilt, lazy, public schoolboy who has been granted far too much of his own way.
► P.S. Since writing this post earlier today, I have learned that Johnson has launched an - in the words of the official government website - "independent panel to look at judicial review. A panel of experts will examine if there is a need to reform the judicial review process after an independent review was launched by government today (31 July)".
This government has had a number of setbacks because of judicial reviews, most humiliatingly when it was ruled that Johnson had broken the law last year by advising the head of state to suspend Parliament, which he did to close down parliamentary scrutiny of his embarrassing performance during the Brexit crisis. This high-handed action was quite typical of his sense that he is entitled to get whatever he wants.
However, because the Supreme Court blocked this shabby tactic, he has predictably responded by trying to have the rules changed. I say 'predictably' because simply accepting the judgment and moving on could be interpreted as an admission that he was wrong, something his self-importance could never tolerate. I am certain that he intends to ensure that future legal challenges to any similar overbearing actions by his government will become much more difficult to win, if not downright impossible. I'd like to be wrong, but with Johnson's record, it seems unlikely I shall be.
This government has had a number of setbacks because of judicial reviews, most humiliatingly when it was ruled that Johnson had broken the law last year by advising the head of state to suspend Parliament, which he did to close down parliamentary scrutiny of his embarrassing performance during the Brexit crisis. This high-handed action was quite typical of his sense that he is entitled to get whatever he wants.
However, because the Supreme Court blocked this shabby tactic, he has predictably responded by trying to have the rules changed. I say 'predictably' because simply accepting the judgment and moving on could be interpreted as an admission that he was wrong, something his self-importance could never tolerate. I am certain that he intends to ensure that future legal challenges to any similar overbearing actions by his government will become much more difficult to win, if not downright impossible. I'd like to be wrong, but with Johnson's record, it seems unlikely I shall be.
