It’s time critics saw Boris for the Churchillian figure he is Tim Stanley
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/10/20/time-critics-saw-boris-churchillian-figure/
Boris Johnson was fantastic yesterday. I’m not going to bother to be objective about it. No one else does, so why should I?
Ever since the blond magnificence threw his hat into the leadership ring, we’ve been told he’s incompetent and far-Right. Well, an idiot doesn’t do “the impossible” and renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement, and as for far-Right, his words in the Commons were so temperate and liberal they could teach the world to sing.
Let us “bring together the two halves of our hearts”, he told the Commons, meaning Leave and Remain. It was a strategic appeal, of course: the deal can only pass if enough Labour MPs back it, so he has to soften his language. But this also happens to be what the PM believes. He sits in the One Nation tradition and his Euroscepticism has always been nuanced by a love of the continent. He is anti-EU but pro-European.
That’s the sense in which he’s truly Churchillian. I can hear teeth itching when I write that. No, I’m not saying he’s a reincarnation of one of the greatest Britons who ever lived: BoJo has never won a war or the Nobel Prize for literature. But the comparison is there in the rhetoric.
“Now is the time to get this thing done, and I say to all Members, let us come together as democrats to end this debilitating feud.” One can imagine Winston growling out those words, not only because they sound so familiar but because the meaning travels the centuries, in its appeal to national unity and attempt to reconcile being 100 per cent British with being constructively European.
Mr Johnson pivoted from the struggle to implement the referendum to the chance to build what could be a more harmonious relationship with Europe, because it will be free of the resentment that both sides felt about our membership. Boris, like Churchill, is patriotic yet drawn to the wider world, and he invokes the national past to sell the global future. That is what Brexit could have been all about – if only we’d had this man with this strategy in charge since 2016.
Instead we got Theresa May. The establishment told us we needed a watered down, customs union Brexit because it was the only Brexit the EU would swallow. What happened? Our departure was delayed. The country grew apart.
So maybe it’s time the critics gave Mr Johnson and his Bright Side Brexit a chance. I know there are Tories who personally can’t stand him – he probably forgot their name at a cocktail party – and socialists who will never tolerate him because he knows a bit of Greek. But they might at least engage with Mr Johnson on the basis of who he really is, what he really says and what he really believes, rather than the caricature of a bumbling fool.
Take his tone when barmy old Letwin’s ridiculous motion won and Parliament voted to drive a nation round the twist. There was no bitterness, just resolve. The Government will try again on another day. The PM encourages his opponents to think he’s an amateur because it leads them to underestimate him – but it is they who looked inept and extreme yesterday, not Boris.
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