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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Rachael Bletchly

'Boris more Johnny English than James Bond as hypocrisy turns Cop26 moment into farce'

I bet the PM was thrilled when he hit on the James Bond theme for his big Cop26 speech.

It probably came to him while watching No Time to Die last month, at the special screening in the fancy new press briefing room we taxpayers coughed up £2.6m for.

Climate change…doomsday clock ticking…the world is hot enough. Bingo!

Give ‘em a bit of 007 - classic Johnstonian populism.

So the man with the golden hair reminded fellow world leaders in Glasgow how Bond usually ends up “strapped to a doomsday device desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off, while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.”

Do you agree? Have your say in the comment section

COP out: Boris is more hapless than hero says our columnist (AFP via Getty Images)

But, he went on, we are in Bond’s predicament today ”except this is not a movie, the doomsday device is real and the clock is ticking.”

So it’s time to defuse the bomb. Time to stop “quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2.”

And then Boris looked at his ticking wrist watch and realised it was time to scarper.

He’d got dinner with chums in a posh London club, so he leapt on a private jet and flew home, belching out 1,000kg of CO2, when the train would have emitted just 20kg.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot with a Walther PPK!

Boris’s staggering and shameless hypocrisy turned his 007 moment into a farce…more Johnny English than James Bond.

And then his arrogant bid to rip up Commons sleaze rules to help a Tory pal also backfired spectacularly.

Boris thinks he’s a maverick with a licence to act in any way he sees fit.

Boris Johnson is no James Bond (Bettmann Archive)

But, as he’s watched Daniel Craig’s final outing already, he knows that even 007 is replaceable.

And with Mr Moneysavvy Sunak waiting in the wings he could find himself scrabbling for the circuit breaker on his own political time bomb..

I wonder what the Queen makes of her Prime Minister’s actions this week?

She was so disappointed not to be at Cop, seeing it as a rare opportunity to help save the world for future generations.

Her Majesty has met all the great world leaders of the past 70 years, as she reminded the current lot in her speech.

And she told them “what leaders do for their people today is government and politics. But what they do for the people of tomorrow - that is statesmanship.”

Boris doesn’t think of today or tomorrow, he only thinks of himself.

But now he’s in a right old state - and the clock is surely ticking.

I wonder if his speech reminded the Queen of her own meeting with 007.

He shoved her out of a helicopter above the London Olympic stadium in 2012.

But now it’s bungling James Blond who’s heading for a fall.

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