Prime Ministers and Presidents: Drunken PM or weak President fine but no Communist please

Nick Hopkins of The Guardian and BBC’s Newsnight had written some years ago a graphic account of Boris Johnson, rolling like a drunk sailor at San Francesco’s d’Assisi airport. He was returning from the castle of newspaper owner Evgeny Lebedev, renowned for hosting uproarious parties. Hopkins quoted eye witnesses saying “Boris looked like he had slept in his clothes, and was struggling to walk in a straight line.”

He was Foreign Secretary in those days and had apparently evaded the 24/7 security detail and travelled without a suitcase. He must have slept in pyjamas borrowed from Lebedev. Little wonder, then, Labedev has been a member of the House of Lords since 2020, that is, during Johnson’s Prime Ministership.

The belief that in democracies people vote a government to power is increasingly a delusion. The electoral process provided legitimacy but even that is now evaporating. Remember, 70% of the Republican voters believe that the 2019 US Presidential election was stolen.

Why would the British establishment have settled on Johnson when his reputation for being flippant, unreliable, a liar was all over the British media atleast since 2017? Because the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was too far Left to be acceptable.

The British media reported with horror that Corbyn was a friend of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan communist; he was anti-Semitic; liberal values would be threatened should he ever become Prime Minister and so on. The alternative may be an unreliable drunk but he is atleast not a “Communist”.

You had to be in London to see the hatchet jobs on Corbyn. Even a biography was published-- ‘Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power’. Written by Tom Bower, the book paints Corbyn in lurid colours – “a ruthless Marxist” hell bent on destroying liberal values. What Peter Oborne of the Daily Mail calls a “spurious” document soon found itself on the second slot in The Sunday Times best seller list. Oborne’s research revealed the biography was “replete with falsehoods.”

This is the new McCarthyism amplified a hundred times by the media. The malaise is on both sides of the Atlantic. The establishment in UK dug its heels in against Corbyn and ended up with the embarrassment called Johnson. The ‘system’ in the US would not allow Bernie Sanders, with his socialist ideas, as a possible candidate for the White House.

An anti-establishment mood had been diagnosed for months before the 2016 US elections. But the Democratic Party machine had set its heart on Hillary Clinton who, ironically, was at the very core of that establishment. She got the nomination but lost the election to Donald Trump. Any data analysis will tell you that Sanders would have won.

Despite the outcome in 2016, the Democratic Party shackled Sanders once again. The media was in action. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote two columns on “Why I like Mike”. The “Mike” of his adoration, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, way to the right of the John Birch Society, tossed his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination, spent billions on the campaign and muddied the water. Everyone scrambled to produce a compromise candidate, Joe Biden. In the popularity stakes Biden is so low that Trump is only one percentage point behind him.

Contemporary democracy has gifted us a US President so weak as to be a virtual invitation for Trump to return. The process also produced a serial binge boozer as British PM.

Irish poet Brendan Behan, known for his drinking bouts was once asked: “Wouldn’t you be a much greater poet if you didn’t drink so much.”

Behan had replied: “I am basically a drinker with a writing problem.”

Asked the same question what would Johnson say?

To save his job he would probably fall back on blasphemy: “Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, it’s just God when he is drunk.”

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday)