It was billed as the great Vote Leave reunion tour. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Gisela Stuart back on stage together. A chance to forget the chaos of the last three years and hark back to simpler, more joyous times when all you had to do was promise the Earth in front of a bus with a £350m lie on its side. The untruth would set us free. All we had to do was believe hard enough.
Flashback to the last time Gove and Johnson shared an election platform together: it was the morning after the referendum and the pair were due to give what most imagined was to be a celebratory press conference. Except both men looked as if they had been up all night on a bad acid trip and had just come down to find out they had murdered a close friend. Both men looked washed out and shell-shocked. They had never expected to win. They had never intended to win. It had all just been a big game. Now they were expected to deliver Brexit. And it was clear to everyone, they didn’t have a clue how.
Flashback to the week after the election and Gove has a momentary display of conscience and realises he can’t inflict Boris on the country as prime minister and decides to stand against him. Flashback to this summer when Theresa May resigned and the Govester has another rare lapse of amorality and realises he still can’t inflict Johnson on the country and chooses to stand against him a second time. He doesn’t win but his feelings are clear. These are the real optics of the current reunion. Ones we are being invited to remember and then immediately forget.
Fresh from his disappointment at not being allowed on to the Channel 4 Leaders’ Climate Debate – part of him clearly still can’t quite accept that he isn’t actually the prime minister – Gove did a brief, shrill introduction. It was time to get Brexit done. And only Boris Johnson could be trusted to deliver it. Said the man who has clearly never trusted Johnson to do anything. Then former Labour MP Stuart did a short middle eight. She too wanted Brexit done even though she didn’t quite know what that meant. Except it was definitely a new golden era of broken chords and broken promises.
Finally the frontman spoke. Johnson looked totally done in. His face ash-grey, his pinprick eyes bloodshot. As if he’d had another hard night and had just had his stomach pumped. He clearly doesn’t have Mikey’s tolerance levels. As so often these days, he also rambled to the point of incoherence. By the time he gets to the end of a sentence he has no memory of where he started it. He just gets by on word association and random babbled grunts. It’s possible Dilyn the Downing Street dog might understand him, but sadly he’s not available as an interpreter.
“Let’s make the UK the best place to see your grandchildren grow up,” he mumbled. Not the best choice of words from a man who has seldom shown much interest in watching his own children grow up. Or can even say for sure just how many children he even has. One can only assume he isn’t entirely sure. Let’s say at least six to be on the safe side. That could mean a lot of grandchildren he will also be able to ignore.
There were the usual lies about 50,000 nurses, his disappointment that MPs like him had done so much to thwart Brexit, and his skill in negotiating a deal he had previously rejected, before he got on to his new offer. He was going to come up with a completely new immigration system within a few months – good luck with that – and he was going to offer state aid to failing British industries. It almost sounded like part nationalisation.
As so often, it was the questions from the media that were by far the most illuminating. It didn’t appear to have occurred to him that his new proposals would effectively harden a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland or that the EU was unlikely to sign up to such an arrangement within a year. But then these were only casual election promises being tossed out to buy a few Labour voters who might be dim enough to take him at his word.
Johnson bumbled along, desperately trying to fire a connecting spark between his synapses. With no success. Words still tumbled out, but in no recognisable order. He would definitely conclude a deal by the end of next year but would carry on spending billions on a no-deal regardless.
He was amazed that journalists had managed to find articles that were readily available online in which he had insulted just about everyone. He was totally inclusive in his abuse, which meant he was basically tolerant. In fact he was so full-on woke that despite writing off hopeless unmarried mothers he had played his part in adding to their number. As for social care, he had just been having a laugh when he said he had a fully costed plan. Surely everyone had understood that.
“I’ve never set out to mislead anyone,” he said plaintively, just before he was whisked out of harm’s way. It was just a complete coincidence that it kept happening over and over again.
John Crace’s new book, Decline and Fail: Read in Case of Political Apocalypse, is published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
