Meet two peas in a pod:
Firstly, Ken Livingstone on George W. Bush, 2003
I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president.
This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.
Secondly, Boris Johnson on George W. Bush, 2003
The President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy.
Oddly enough, Livingstone got roundly attacked by one Steve Norris for his remarks, which were ‘irresponsible’:
The red mist comes down and his judgement flies out of the window. He has no right whatever to insult President Bush,” he said.
He has every right to his own view but not to express it when he is mayor of this city.
We now have an opportunity to see whether Steve’s new boss follows his advice. George W. is coming to our fair city next week (just when I’m off to Greece for a fortnight, as it happens, which is good timing). Obviously, Livingstone shunned him on his previous visits (staging an alternative peace party in 2003, for instance) and given his long-standing views as stated above I expect nothing less of the new boy, however it might upset Conservative Home or Policy Exchange.
[via Chicken Yoghurt. Check out the Beau Bo D'or cartoon]
Tags: 6 Comments
6 responses so far ↓
That was back in the days when Boris was being paid to insult people. Now he’s just being paid to patronise them.
I’d like to see him patronise Dubya - ‘Do you invade places often, Mr. Bush. How fascinating’.
Sadly, it’s a misquote (or, at least, it’s taken out of context). It was used as a description of protesters’ views which BoJo didn’t agree with.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/archive/the-week/11811/infantile-resentment.thtml
To be honest, my post is not entirely lacking in mischievousness (I’ve still got the Spectator article open in the browser here, but forgot to put the link in, so I was reading from source). Boris has a nasty habit of writing long articles expressing other people’s opinions in detail and then stating baldly at the end that he disagrees with them and this is intellectually shoddy and need exposing.
However, Boris has been on record in more recent times as being quite stridently opposed to some American activities (those affecting his friends, mainly, like the Extradition Act 2003), plus Guantanamo Bay, and he’s changed his mind on the Iraq War. He’s not the cheering let’s-start-bombing-now Dubya-lover some would make him out to be, although he started out much that way (supported him in 2004 apparently solely because of Iraq) and a lot of his new friends definitely are.
The key point here is that he’s in a quandary - he can ignore Bush, which will piss off Godson and his mates in Policy Exchange, he can greet him, which will piss off most of London and give Livingstone a free hit, or he can announce that he’s not available to meet him, which will enrage Godson and his mates at Policy Exchange, but probably be quite popular and severely wrongfoot Livingstone.
He could cancel at the last minute, of course, in true Boris fashion.
Dan, this is true - however…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/11/04/do0403.xml
Bush owes Blair – and must deliver
By Boris Johnson
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/11/2004
In a hotly contested field, the most dismal awakening of my life took place yesterday morning, alone, hungover, in a hotel bedroom in Tel Aviv, when I found that the television was still burbling from the night before and that Don King, the infamous boxing promoter with the conviction for assault and the Van der Graaf Generator hair was on screen announcing to an appalled planet that the American people had awarded a second term of office to the cross-eyed Texan warmonger George Dubya Bush.
If ever there was a moment for burying your head in the many superfluous hotel pillows, and issuing a groan of self-pity, this was it.
Not four more years of a man so serially incompetent that he only narrowly escaped selfassassination by pretzel, and also managed to introduce American torturers to Iraqi jails. Who on earth, I moaned, can conceivably have supported this maniac with his monochrome Manichaean rhetoric that has done so much to encourage the nasty strain of anti-Americanism that now afflicts so much of the world?
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Who did it? Who were the idiots who backed him, I whimpered, in that weak pre-breakfast state.
And then I remembered. I backed him, come to think of it. In fact, not only did I want Bush to win, but we threw the entire weight of The Spectator behind him.
[Boris also loses points for confusing Van Der Graaf Generator, a British progressive rock band, with the van de Graaf generator, a perennial fallback of the Royal Society Christmas lectures in my youth... - J]
Not surprising Boris couldn’t spot a progressive when he saw one.
Why was prog rock called progressive, anyway? Most of the fans of it I know are reactionary Tory bastards, and I mean that in a nice way. Rick Wakeman, anyone?
It’s pretty clear that Boris is in two minds over Dubya, he *wants* to support him, because supporting tax-cutting Republicans who boldly smite foreign despots is in the blood, but there’s a stubborn core of British decency in the chap that pops up at inopportune moments. On the whole I prefer Livingstone’s hard-as-iron certainty, and I think history will too. After all, if you can’t make up your mind about whether George W Bush is a good president or not it doesn’t bode well for the nuanced decision making required on a day-to-day basis.
It’s an instructive case for Boris watchers everywhere trying to get a handle on the man’s character, though.