Have I Got Views For You
‘Johnson is a good-humoured, entertaining commentator, with an agreeably optimistic bent.’ Observer
‘In a class of his own. Irresistible’ Daily Mail
Synopsis
This book includes some of Lend Me Your Ears.
In his own inimitable style, Boris Johnson turns his attention to the culture, manners and morals of British society, giving us a humorous, at times furious, but always entertaining read. A witty anthology of pieces comprising Boris Johnson’s thoughts on everything from the presidency of Tony Blair to the idiosyncrasies of modern British culture. Focusing on Diana, the age of self-expression, the end of culture, the moment of the Yuppies, and liberty versus freedom, Johnson takes us on a rollercoaster ride through contemporary Britain. He has also interviewed many of the key figures in the political and cultural worlds over the last sixteen years and addresses what these personalities tell of our age. Boris Johnson’s writings have appeared in a variety of British and American magazines and newspapers. Vigorous, idiosyncratic, always intelligent and informed, with a very interesting perspective on our times, “Have I Got Views For You” is a pleasure to read.
You can buy it on Amazon
Prescott – The Dome Super-casino
Admit it, Blair: Britain is no better than Belize or Belarus
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. It was frankly a bit of a miracle, too. Yesterday a sweltering sun rose on Prescott’s Britain, and I suppose we should all be grateful that we woke up at all. Not only is Two Jags in charge of our roads: for the next two weeks – or for however long Blair is away – the former Cunard waiter is in charge of our Middle East policy, and, which I think you will agree is truly terrifying, Prescott’s porky thumb is poised over the British nuclear button.
Prescott is having his annual bash at supreme power and, in honour of his accession, I thought I would make a pilgrimage to the place that is at the heart of his troubles. Indeed, it is the one building that sums up all the pretensions and deceptions of this Government.
Hysteria about the Heat
Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines
Often is his gold complexion dimm’d
Livingstone and Lawrence – they could take a bit of heat
Hot? Call this hot? One warm day and the whole country flops down in a faint like a bunch of wilted pansies. I mean what’s got into us, eh?
After being AWOL for most of June, the British sun has put in a brief appearance, and at once our airwaves are jammed with portentous government doctors warning us to stay indoors, wear loose cotton clothing, turn off the central heating and above all to slather our skins with oceans of foul seal-blubberish suncream. We are warned of heatstroke, kidney failure, heart attack and – mystifyingly – cold sores.
Listen, my friends. Here is my own personal weather analysis. It is a lovely sunny July day. It is admittedly a trifle close on the Tube – but how on earth can that be an excuse for closing our schools?
On trains, passengers are continually interrupted by the guard warning them to drink water, bottles of which may conveniently be obtained from the buffet car at a mere two quid a pop. What next? Will they have to remind us to keep breathing? Have we lost all sense of proportion?
The Middle East is aflame. Our Prime Minister has been exposed in a posture of abject servility before the American President, summoned with a click of the fingers and the words “Yo, Blair”, as if he were Jeeves to Dubya’s Wooster.
I only refrain from calling Mr Blair a poodle because several correspondents have protested to me that this is an insult to poodles, who are, apparently, keen independent spirits.
The Labour Government is in a state of meltdown far more serious than any softening of the tarmac at Eastbourne, and in only a few days’ time we must endure the national agony of seeing John Prescott at the helm of the ship of state.
In spite of all this genuine global catastrophe it seems that the main news – the big, front-page news – concerns the efficacy or otherwise of sun gunk.
In order to terrify its poor benighted readers one newspaper has recruited two groups of warring scientists. The first lot says that you must baste yourself with two 5mm layers of sun gunk, being careful to leave it on the skin like war-paint, otherwise it will have no effect and you will get cancer. The second lot says that you must rub it in, otherwise it will soon wear off and you will get cancer.
Which is it? And isn’t the dreadful truth, frankly, that we would be just as well off using Mazola?
Let me remind you of one thing, all you local authorities which seize the chance to close the schools on a gorgeous sunny day. The parents of these kiddies save thousands of pounds to buy them holidays in the sun everywhere from Crete to Cancun.
Look up at the sky and every 60 seconds you will see another huge airborne cattle truck taking the British to be scorched in climates far fiercer than our own. We sit in our villas and our condos around the shores of the Mediterranean, like pale frogs about a pond, and when our own watery sun is so pretentious as to put on a Mediterranean performance, we go into a national spasm of alarm.
Is this the nation that built the Empire? When Lawrence was cantering his camels through the sands, was he pursued by health warnings about exposing the tips of his ears and nose to the desert glare?
When Livingstone toiled through the sweltering jungles of central Africa, did he have coolies toting bottles of Evian and government officials warning him of dehydration?
This is a nation whose imperial greatness transformed the world, and which disseminated ideas of freedom, parliamentary democracy and above all the English language, the language of the globe, polar, tropical and temperate.
We pulled it off because we were equipped with colonial servants who didn’t care whether it was as hot as a chilli on the back streets of Bangalore. They were pink of cheek and rheumy of eye, and when their French and German rivals were having a siesta, they were out in the noonday sun claiming the planet for the Crown.
How fallen, how changed we are from that magnificent ethic. Even since the 1970s, when we last had a heatwave and, interestingly, movies about Superman and the Poseidon Adventure, we seem to have softened like a strawberry mivvi in the sun.
Our footballers blub when they lose a match. The nanny state won’t let us take our T-shirts off in public lest we get sunburn, and from November all children under the age of 11 will have to be equipped with an expensive plastic booster seat banquette before you can take them in the back of the car.
We have become so wet that the Government has tried to intrude in the housing market and abolish the ancient principle of caveat emptor, and while I am on the subject there is one final point I want to make before I fire this piece off to the Telegraph and go for a well-deserved pint of beer with dewy condensation running down its cold, golden flanks.
No matter how great the hysteria about the heat, no matter how many scientists warn us about the risks of either applying or failing to apply sunscreen, we should not allow anyone to convert the current panic into legislation.
We don’t want any more of those directives that make employers criminally liable for failing to see that their employees are covered with gloop factor 15.
Let us in conclusion remember the words of the poet. Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines, he pointed out, and for some weeds out there that is the case this week.
But the key point, as he went on to say, is that Often is his gold complexion dimm’d. That is the way of the British sun, and that, if I read the forecast correctly, is what is going to happen this weekend.
My heatwave health advice is to jump in the delicious river Thames, upstream of Henley. And if you really can’t stand the heat, move to Scotland, where it seems to be raining already.
Lord Levy and Cash for Honours
…the swoop on Levy perfectly illustrates the decay of the Government and the putrefaction of the honours system
It is as though we don’t do white-collar fraud, except when it involves peerages, and we contract the big stuff to our American overlords
Arrest Lord Levy! Arrest Blair! Arrest the lot of them
Let me begin by saying that I have no objection at all to the decision to arrest Lord Levy. I am sure I speak for millions when I say that it is high time that the fuzz moved in on the Blairite high command, and they might as well start with his tennis partner. As far as I am concerned, the whole lot of them deserve to have their collars felt. If the cops decide to launch dawn raids on all the other arch-toadies of the regime, they will find many of us prepared to hold their coats.
Winkle Mandy from his lair! Arrest Alastair Campbell and haul him out from under whatever stone now conceals him. Let’s nick them all, sarge! Go, boys, go! And if Sir Ian Blair decides to haul his namesake in, I am not going to stand in his way.
What joy it must be for the cops – and yet what an amazing spectacle we must present to the world outside. Here is the Prime Minister’s chief financial fixer being hauled in for questioning about a suspected crime that is quintessentially British, and unknown to any other jurisdiction on earth – the sale of peerages. Huge numbers of detectives are involved. Expensive new software is being installed to track down any deleted e-mails.
I would not dream of pretending that the matter is unimportant, since the swoop on Levy perfectly illustrates the decay of the Government and the putrefaction of the honours system. I merely ask you to contrast this frenzied activity by the police and their total indifference to the case that was discussed in Parliament yesterday.
As the minister did not hesitate to remind the House, the allegations against the NatWest Three are very grave indeed. They relate to the biggest financial scandal of the past few decades, in which a company worth billions was destroyed and thousands lost their jobs, and in which a British bank was (allegedly) defrauded of millions of pounds. The NatWest Three, like Lord Levy, are to be found in Britain. Like the noble lord, they are British citizens. It is suggested that their alleged offence was against British interests.
The tennis partner-in-chief is being questioned about an outrage to the British constitution, namely Labour’s suspected cash-for-coronets scheme. The NatWest Three are accused of what amounts to theft from a British bank – a matter that you might have thought was of equal interest to our criminal justice system. But it is the silver-quiffed Lord Levy who has the exquisite shame and embarrassment of being arrested, and who is forced to issue a statement alleging that this is a gross abuse of police powers.
And what do the police do to the NatWest Three, for all the terrible accusations against them? They do diddly squat. They move not a muscle. They go into spasms of excitement about the corruption of the ermine and, in the face of the NatWest allegations, they turn into monuments of marmoreal motionlessness. No emanation of the British criminal justice system has taken the slightest interest in prosecuting these three, and yet we are happily sending them for trial in America.
It is bizarre. It makes us look like a banana republic, or some backward and unselfconfident province of the Roman empire.
It is as though we don’t do white-collar fraud, except when it involves peerages, and we contract the big stuff to our American overlords.
I don’t know whether David Bermingham and the other members of the NatWest trio are guilty or not, but I do know that when he boards the 9.30am flight from Gatwick today, the British Government will be conniving in a serious injustice.
It is a measure of this Government’s panic over the 2003 Extradition Treaty with America that Tony Blair has simultaneously dispatched Baroness Scotland to plead with the American authorities. She is to scurry around Washington, reminding people how staunch we were in the war on Iraq and inquiring whether they might see their way round to ratifying this treaty. She will point out that we have been good boys, as usual, and put it into our law. She will ask whether they might consider doing the same. She will be given the bum’s rush. She will then join the Prime Minister in begging the Americans to use what clout they have with the courts in Texas to give the men bail, and allow them to return to England, so that they don’t spend the next two years in Guantanamo conditions while preparing their cases.
What a truly incredible state of affairs, and what a devastating comment on the workability of this treaty, that senior Labour ministers should be obliged to rush around Washington begging the American authorities not to use the powers we have given the Americans, and which the Americans refuse to give us.
As I have said before, the first problem with this Extradition Treaty is that it is unbalanced. Contrary to the rubbish peddled by the Prime Minister, it gives the Americans the right to demand suspects from Britain with virtually no evidence, while American suspects wanted by Britain have the protection of a hearing in which the evidence against them can be tested and contested, in court, by the defence.
That asymmetry would apply even if the treaty were ratified and would be reason enough to drop it. What makes it even worse is that the 2003 treaty takes away the right of any British authority to decide in which country the case should be heard.
As I never tire of saying, the natural forum for this case is obviously Britain: the evidence is all here, the men involved are Brits, and the allegedly defrauded entity was NatWest. The Americans are scooping them up because American telegraphic equipment was involved. Well, you might as well ask the Americans to try Lord Levy on the grounds that he used American Microsoft programmes to send his e-mails.
The best thing would be to renegotiate this treaty, not just for the sake of British justice but for the sake of America, whose reputation is suffering terribly as a result of the scandal. I have faith in the fundamental goodness of America. I hope relations will improve. We must have faith, hope and parity – and the greatest of these is parity.
Boris Johnson MP: Extradition Treaty should be renegotiated or scrapped
More local news and campaigns on the local Oxfordshire website
Commenting during yesterday’s emergency debate on the UK-US Extradition Treaty, Boris Johnson MP said:
Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley) (Con): I begin by saying how much I share the views of the hon. Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan) and by reminding him of the many times we have shared platforms in defence of our respective constituents.
Mr. Khan: I exclude completely from previous remarks the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) who has become a friend–with a small f–and who has been consistent in his concern about the issue before us.
Mr. Johnson: I am grateful. I think all of us agree, on both sides, that this issue has nothing to do with what kind of person may be involved or what kind of constituent presents himself or herself before us. It is an issue of justice and reciprocity, and that is why it is arousing such strong passions across the country. We are all starting to see those feelings expressed in our e-mail in-boxes, and the Minister should be aware of them, as I am sure he increasingly is.
The feeling prompting the rage and fury that surrounds this issue, and which has actuated many comments in the debate, is, I am afraid to say, a certain anti-Americanism. On that, I agree with the Government: anti-American points are sometimes scored in this debate, and that is a great shame. It is sad and regrettable, and it is all the more reason why the best and kindest thing we could do for the special relationship, for which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) has laboured so long and on which he has spoken so eloquently, is to remove injustice and asymmetry and to restore confidence in the British people that their extradition arrangements with America are fair to them.
David T.C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): I thoroughly agree, but does my hon. Friend not also agree that the Americans could send an even more positive message about the importance of the special relationship not only by offering reciprocity but by returning to Britain some of the IRA murderers who live freely in the United States at the moment?
Mr. Johnson: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point; that is the very reason why the Senate has, as has repeatedly been said, been so tardy in ratifying the treaty, and why, indeed, I think it highly unlikely that it will ratify it.
