In 2014, the comedy website Funny Or Die published a patriarchy-lampooning video called “10 hours of walking around New York City as a man”. The white male subject of said video walks around city streets, being complimented, high-fived and offered everything from jobs to Starbucks gift cards. By the end, he is being carried around on a makeshift throne by adoring passersby, dressed in a crown and sceptre, while his new subjects chant: “King! King! King!”
Do you think that’s what Boris Johnson’s life is like? I ask because it emerged yesterday that our former foreign secretary was given a £10,000 donation by JCB before delivering a speech at the company’s headquarters – a speech that contained four mentions of the company, was given in front of a large JCB vehicle and was plastered across the news.
What exactly does he have to do to stop people giving him money? Perhaps his intermittent offensive comments and idiotic actions are attempts to dial down his level of celebrity, so that he may steal away to a rural European town, adopt the simple life and fix shoes for a living.
He tried to put people off him by using a Spectator article to argue that “If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain,” and was awarded with a Telegraph column. He wrote a poem about Turkey’s prime minister having sex with a goat, only to be made foreign secretary. Poor Boris. When will we start taking these unsubtle hints he keeps dropping that he no longer wants a place in public life, and stop showering him with prestigious titles and speaking fees? Leave Boris alone!
The injustices against Johnson don’t stop there, though. It turns out Anthony Bamford, the chairman of JCB, is an outspoken Brexiter, and that JCB was fined in excess of £35m by the European commission in 2000 for antitrust breaches. Bamford is joined by the likes of James Dyson, the Brexiter billionaire who is moving his headquarters to Singapore (a decision he says is “nothing to do with Brexit”), and Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man, who is reportedly moving to Monaco for tax purposes.
Johnson, whose speech on the eve of the referendum result argued that Brexit “is about the people, the right of people in this country to settle their own destiny”, must be mortified. His democratic project has become associated with the decision of a few wealthy members of the elite to up sticks and leave the country – without anyone, not even their own workers, having a say in it. This wasn’t what he campaigned for at all!
But what’s an Old Etonian to do? Boris is just an honest guy striving for fairness in an unfair world. He’s not in it for high-status engagements or exorbitant sums of money, and it’s certainly not his fault that people keep throwing them at him. For him, Brexit is about the people, and it always has been. The question now is how we cut through all the noise and communicate that fact to the public. Perhaps we could write it on the side of a bus or something.
• Ellie Mae O’Hagan is a regular contributor to the Guardian
