The Boris Factor: 3

In which we draw lessons about Boris Johnson from his book about Winston Churchill, The Boris Factor. It's a good read about a great man, but it's as interesting for what it says about what Boris sees and values, as for what it says about Churchill, that otherwise little-known figure from British history.

"They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of [his father] Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas - to take risks that no one else would take. In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous."

Yes, Boris. So we have discovered.

"But you can't win a war without taking risks, and you won't take risks unless you are brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers. His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue - the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others."

Right. So we're going to deduce from your little flurry of bungles over Brexit that you're fundamentally brave. And I suppose, unfettered by the consensus and nauseating community of the EU we might end up facing a war, or at least a dire threat against our lonely little nation - so perhaps these are the circumstances in which we will recall the strength of that brave old crackpot. Good old Boris. Yes, Theresa May's not good enough to get us through this crisis. We need Boris! Boris!

What was that about a primordial virtue?

"Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt."

Ah.

Boris, you may be pushing it a bit far, old boy.