WHO IS THE WORST?

I’m not saying that Boris Johnson is the worst person in the world, or even the worst person to be prime minister. He may not even be the worst Prime Minister we’ve had this decade. Not because of any particular qualities or abilities he brings to the role, it’s just that given all the evidence, I would plump for David Cameron being the worst. I know it’s a close run thing and given the time that Johnson’s extraordinary lack of self awareness and ability to lie about everything and anything, has provided him the power to wreak whatever chaos his lazy incompetence and narcissistic entitlement can deliver, I’m sure Johnson will come pretty close.
He and Cameron have a number of things in common, not just that sense of entitlement taught so effectively at Eton. They both have an incredibly limited understanding of a world wider than their minuscule interaction with it. Both appear to have wanted to be leaders not because they have vision, ideas, a drive to improve the country or any of that idealogical guff, but because ultimately they just wanted to. Cameron said, when asked why he wanted to become prime minister: “Because I think I’d be rather good at it.” Hardly the words of someone with a driving vision for the country. Likewise, recently when asked why he wanted to become Prime Minister, Boris Johnson waffled on about being a journalist “abusing people or attacking people” so he apparently wanted to “put yourself in the place of the person you’re criticising …. So I thought I’d give it a go”. Thereby demeaning both his apparent first choice of career, that of journalist, which in his view seems to be only about attacking people rather than informing and educating the public; and his second choice of politician, not to actually do anything positive for the public you are purporting to serve.
These Eton educated Tories never stop giving of themselves do they?
Of course it is worth remembering that Boris Johnson’s journalism career was hardly covered in glory. Johnson’s first foray into journalism was in 1987 when he acquired a job at The Times through a family connection. He was fired shortly thereafter for making up a quote in a story about Edward II. He bounced back quickly, though, using another one of his connections to land a job at The Daily Telegraph, a publication with which he has been associated ever since. As the newspaper’s Brussels correspondent, he established himself as one of the key eurosceptic journalists. He was regularly criticised for fabrications and untruths, but Johnson was never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story. He finally ended up having convincing the Telegraph to pay him 200K a year to write a barely readable column prattling on about whatever he could be bothered to string together on a weekly basis. This mostly involved opening his curtains and allowing a string of barely connected ideas waft out like the first fart of the morning.
Another similarity between these two tiny intellects is the ease they have in clothing themselves in whatever faux liberal idea of the moment necessary to acquire some cod credibility, only to drop like (you imagine) they would a Greggs Steakbake, as soon as it proves convenient. With Cameron it was Hug a Husky when trying to get elected to dropping all that green shit when he had won. With Johnson, his coterie of admirers and supporters never stop telling the world that he was a liberal mayor of London, and he himself kept yapping on about being a One Nation Tory during the 2019 election. Trouble is of course, as always with Johnson, his ego and complete lack of self awareness gets in the way, especially in terms of his previous writings. Having written copious columns that verge on outright racism, sexism, homophobia and nasty little Englander-ism (pickinninies, flag waving natives with watermelon smiles, comparing Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’, referring to gay men as bum boys etc etc etc), he then tries to escape any responsibility for those statements by saying they were taken out of context, or that these statements were in actual fact supportive of the liberality he claims to represent. Now he has adopted the “I never meant them things, it was just bants!”defence saying that he would not say those things now he’s prime minister. Yet again the man who has zero empathy, proves himself to be lacking in any sense of self awareness or shame.
So what is the difference between Cameron and Johnson?
I would argue that Cameron’s place in history will be dictated by 3 things all of which were driven not by any desire to drive the country to any better place, but merely to deliver party advantage and essentially diminish the effectiveness of opposition. The first of these was the totally unnecessary and cruel implementation of austerity. Essentially putting the blame for the banks squandering the national wealth on the already poor, famously stating that benefit claimants were making a “lifestyle choice” before reducing benefits for most claimants.
The second thing was the scottish independence referendum. It was clear that there did need to be something to address the growing support for Scottish independence in Scotland itself, and a referendum was not necessarily a bad way of addressing it. But the terms of the referendum itself, and especially the way the unionist side was established and campaigned for, was structured around the idea that the benefits of union were exclusively economic, and this helped cement that idea that poorer or working class Scots who were appalled by the dominance over their lives of the English and especially Tory governments despite how they voted, were really forced into the independence camp as the only real alternative. This lead inevitably to the wiping out of the Labour party in Scotland and the near hegemony of the Scots Nats. A situation that, far from resolving the independence debate for a generation as the tories thought, merely keeps the pot boiling even more. I can’t help but think that this was Camerons plan all along, as it drives a majority anti-sottish independence view in England which in effect helps keep the Tories in the position of being the party of Great Britain (actually greater England) in the minds of the English electorate, at war with the wilful rebellious Scots. Could the Labour Party have managed that referendum any differently, I’m not sure they could. As long as the Tories held onto the levers of the union campaign there was very little room for the Labour Party to articulate anything coherently pro Union, anti Tory.
The final nail in Camerons unworthy coffin was of course Brexit. If the driving principle of all Tory policy is always what’s best for me (in this case upper middle class english men) then he somehow spectacularly messed this one up. Brexit was not a raging issue in 2010, when he came to power (less than 5% saying the EU was significant issue), it was not really a significant issue for the majority in 2015 (less than 20 percent) when he decided that for the sake of party management and the increase in visibility of the the UKIP party (bought on in no small measure by the weird obsession the BBC had with the failed politician Nigel Farage, more on that in a later blog maybe) decided to make it a thing. When the referendum came, he again decided that being a bear of very little brain, he’d already won 2 referendums (don’t forget the referendum on the reform of the electoral system, which he and the tories set up and ran as a battle between a known and clear approach to elections and a chaotic mess of strange and unclear methods, and surprise surprise, they won), so why not a third. So he set about it the same way. First he set up a principle of what he thought was the obvious for and against approach, focussing solely on the negatives of leaving the EU. This he and his coterie decided was purely and most tangibly economic, in that middle class people would have to pay more to do things they currently do (foreign holidays, drinking fancy foreign food etc etc.) and wealthy corporations would have to pay more to operate which would lead inevitably to redundancies and bankruptcies. In his usual cavalier and entitled way, he totally forgot the fact that after 6 years of unnecessary austerity, most people didn’t have any understanding of, or care for, the problems Brexit would cause rich people. They were already impoverished and the Leave side had a very clear reason for that and it was foreigners. Any foreigners really, but lets start with swarthy europeans, and their dictats about the shape of our fine British bananas etc. For Cameron to say before the referendum that he would stick by the outcome and then to flounce off after the results whistling a jolly tune told everyone who heard it everything they needed to know about this callous wannabe sophisticate and dilettante. He was only in it for the game and even when the worst thing that could happen does happen, he’ll still be a-OK, never having to feel the impact of his failure the way most ordinary people will have to. Subsequent actions where he has managed to trouser millions of unearned dosh just for being the most useless PM the country has ever seen just emphasises the point. Also, leaving such a pile of unreconcilable shit that was Brexit, like a dog owner who had forgotten to bring poo-bags leaving the steaming turds for someone else to deal with, opened the door to the conscientiousness vacuum that is Boris the liar, who simply lied about how easy it would be to implement Brexit and got massive support from the country to do it. It matters not that he has proven categorically how much his version of Brexit was not only not simple to implement, but was not in effect implemented at all. All he has had to do, thanks to Camerons moronic approach, is to show that economic armageddon has not actually happened yet to continue to get away with the lie that he has got Brexit done.
So, I would say that there is a thin line between socio- and psycho-pathology. You see, a sociopath typically has a conscience, even though it may be hard to detect. They may know that what they are doing is wrong, and they might feel some guilt or remorse, but that won’t stop their behaviour. Whereas, a psychopath doesn’t have a conscience. If he lies to you so he can steal your money, he won’t feel any moral qualms, though he may pretend to. He may observe others and then act the way they do so he’s not found out.
Both these men obviously pretend to care, but have no real problem with doing the complete opposite of what someone who really cared would do. Cameron may well be considered a functioning sociopath, in that he realises the things he does are truly appalling, but ultimately he just doesn’t care. Johnson on the other hand, shows every sign of being a dyed in the wool psychopath. Even when confronted with his appalling behaviour, he simply either shrugs it off, or even tries the Bart Simpson excuse (I wasn’t even there guv, I never did them things!). He seems genuinely to think that as long as he is not found out, and even if he is that he suffers no real consequences, then he can’t be accused of doing anything bad. In other words if he gets away with it then it can’t have been wrong to do it in the first place.
So in the great debate between which of these poor excuses for leaders comes out worse, I would say that Cameron’s long list of knowingly calculated activities designed to promote he himself and give the Tory’s a level of political advantage, even at the expense of the country and especially the people, is marginally worse that Johnsons psychopathic drive to diminish the country and the people by promoting the venal self serving grubby corruptions typical of his entire families approach to life. At least with Johnson, his lazy laissez faire approach belies the canard that his is actually an intellect and shows instead that he has not a Scooby as the likely outcome of his actions. He is truly the product of his background, a lazy, careless, faux intellectual, self serving, over entitled husk of a man.