By Dr. William Mallinson
Athens, 28 April 2018
On 12 October 1017, I was interviewed live on RT international News about the British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson’s outburst in the House of Commons, when he advised people to demonstrate outside the Russian Embassy in London. I referred to his recent vain attempt to become Prime Minister, and to his having been exposed as a cheat: he had been sacked from The Times in 1987 for inventing a quote and attributing it to his godfather; but he was saved by his friend, the gung-ho editor of the Daily Telegraph Max Hastings, and was thus able to continue his chequered career. Herewith an extract of my interview by Russia Today, following Johnson’s plea for people to demonstrate outside the Russian Embassy in London:
This is highly hysterical. Boris Johnson, who let’s not forget, failed to become Prime Minister a few months ago is seeking even more publicity. He has chosen to jump onto the bandwagon of American electorate hysteria […] Also post-Brexit, let us remember that the UK is now becoming even more a subset of US foreign military policy. It is very unfortunate and sad that even Boris Johnson, who had criticized Hillary Clinton as a ‘sadistic nurse in a mental hospital’ not so long ago, is now jumping onto the Cold War hysteria bandwagon. He is coming across as a PR clown, not as a statesman, which is not funny for an old Etonian – Eton was once a fairly good school. He is a very clever wordsmith; he is showing great inconsistency in his previous views, with allegedly his current views. He is known to be against political correctness, but now he has jumped on the bandwagon of political correctness […] a clever wordsmith sacked from the times in 80s, for inventing a quote from a non-source […] a frustrated nearly man.
With a Foreign Secretary like Johnson, Britain needs no enemies: compared to the humorous yet serious Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, Johnson comes across as a silly lightweight, depending on a pseudo gung-ho version of humour, underpinned by semantic sophistry, to wriggle out of tricky situations.
His anti-Russian feeling is out of control: he has not only likened the football World Cup in Russia to Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, but has been caught lying over the alleged poisoning of the Skripals, when he said that a Porton Down scientist had told him that the Novichuk apparently used to poison the Skripals came from Russia. But the director of Porton Down then stated that he did not know from where it came. Johnson seems to enjoy lying.
The emotional Foreign Secretary’s anti-Russian emotions could well come from the fact that his great grandfather was a Circassian Turk: he will be well aware that Russia expelled many Circassians from the Caucasus in 1864, in a horrid little war. Thus he has a strong sense of atavistic nastiness. Like many British nationals of mixed blood, he likes to come across as more English than the English, helped by his contrivedly wild mop of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ blond hair.
He displays all the semantic power of the anti-English Irishman, William Joyce, infamous as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, who spent most of the last war in Germany, helping it with its propaganda by broadcasting lies to Britain with his ‘Germany calling, Germany calling’ trademark. He was hung after the war, for treachery. Although Johnson can hardly be equated to the Irish American Joyce, apart from his semantic skill, he should nevertheless also be punished for being a traitor to Britain, since he is doing an even better job than Joyce at giving Britain a bad name. His latest jingoistic outburst against Russia and President Putin is simply beyond the pale. By likening the next World Football Cup to Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, he has shown a studied ignorance of history. Is he blissfully unaware that Moscow lost almost thirty million souls in defeating the Nazis?
The question must arise: did his bevy of advisers and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office know what he was going to say? Did they advise him to say it? And what of the Secret Intelligence Service, for which, believe it or not, he is responsible? The very service that succumbed to Blair’s lies about Iraq?
Perhaps he does know something of history, in which case he has studiously ignored it, unable to control his exaggerated and poisonous sense of patriotism, which is beyond even extreme nationalism and jingoism. Frankly, his spoutings come across as pseudo-patriotic emotional diarrhoea.
His behaviour is that of an overgrown schoolboy who has somehow passed from infancy to senility, without going through a stage of maturity.
Boris is giving Britain a worse name than Lord Haw Haw ever did. If people like him stay in their positions, then I fear for Britain.
