Giggling our way to having Boris Johnson as prime minister

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I fear his evisceration of Johnson won’t matter. Men like him thrive because they know that hardly anyone cares about the detail enough to go to the Treasury select committee website and watch its members expose him. 

Johnson understands that in the 21st century a pat joke and a cheap stunt can take you a long way, maybe all the way to Downing Street. Lies take time to unpick, and by the time your accusers have finished unpicking them, the bored audience has clicked on to another screen.

Nick Cohen writes in tomorrow's Observer about Boris Johnson's encounter with Andrew Tyrie, but he could just as well be writing about Matthew Parris's slaying of him in The Times this morning.

The whole thing is lodged behind The Times paywall (you may find samizdat copies on Twitter), but a Guardian article has some of the more damaging charges:

“Incompetence is not funny. Policy vacuum is not funny. A careless disregard for the truth is not funny. Advising old mates planning to beat someone up is not funny. Abortions and gagging orders are not funny. Creeping ambition in a jester’s cap is not funny. Vacuity posing as merriment, cynicism posing as savviness, a wink and a smile covering for betrayal … these things are not funny.”

And:

“But there’s a pattern to Boris’s life, and it isn’t the lust for office, or for applause, or for susceptible women, that mark out this pattern in red warning ink. It’s the casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal; and, beneath the betrayal, the emptiness of real ambition: the ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained.”

I sense Matthew Parris felt it was his duty to write like that in an attempt to save the Conservative Party from Boris Johnson.

Is he already too late? Nick Cohen thinks so.

Cohen's analysis reminds me of an article by the novelist Jonathan Coe in the London Review of Books.

He is critical of the ubiquity of satire in modern Britain and suggests that Boris Johnson has seen where this has taken us:

Boris Johnson ... has nothing to fear from public laughter at all. These days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly. 

Johnson seems to know this: he seems to know that the laughter that surrounds him is a substitute for thought rather than its conduit, and that puts him at a wonderful advantage. If we are chuckling at him, we are not likely to be thinking too hard about his doggedly neoliberal and pro-City agenda, let alone doing anything to counter it.

Maybe it is not too late. I sense that his leadership of the Leave campaign is exposing Johnson to proper scrutiny for the first time and that he is not enjoying the experience.

If we stop laughing at him and treat him like any other politician, we may yet be spared having Johnson and his shabby act as our prime minister.

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Dame Janet Smith on Jimmy Savile and the BBC

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If the subject matter of Dame Janet Smith's report into Jimmy Savile and the BBC were not so serious, he conclusions would be funny.

Exaro, which has a leaked draft copy of her report, tells us:

In this second package of pieces, Exaro today reveals how Smith's report:

• reveals that Savile carried out far more sexual assaults on BBC premises than previously realised; 

• says that the BBC continued to use Savile to present Jim'll Fix It, a BBC1 programme aimed at children, despite "danger signals" about him; 

• exposes a failure by BBC bosses to notice even public warning signs about Savile's dark side; 

• recounts the damning private views of Savile from several well-known BBC colleagues; 

• shows how a BBC programme by Louis Theroux in 2000 exposed Savile as "deeply unattractive" and even raised the issue of his paedophilia. 

We also publish the key extracts from the Smith report's chapters of perceptions of Savile in the BBC, his sexual activities linked to the broadcaster, awareness within Jim'll Fix It of Savile's predatory behaviour, and the public warning signs that went unheeded.

And what does Dame Janet conclude?

Over to the Guardian:

In her final afterword, Smith insists no senior staff could have been made aware of Savile’s misconduct. 

“There is no evidence that any report of physical sexual misconduct or inappropriate behaviour ever reached the ears or the desk of a senior producer or an executive producer let alone a head of department or other senior executive.”

Many will find that inpossible to believe. But if this is true, it reinforces something I blogged about in October 2012.

Large organsations are too complex and too centralised for the people at the top of the hierarchy to have any idea what is really going on.

And it all those highly paid managers at the BBC have no idea what is going, how much would they be missed?

Do not, incidentally, fall for the argument that Savile was a long time ago and things have changed since then.

Nick Cohen reminds us of what happened to the people who exposed finally Savile on Panorama:

Liz MacKean: Resigned. ‘When the Savile scandal broke,’ she told me, ‘the BBC tried to smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn’t there. I went because I knew I was never going to appear on screen again.’ 

Meirion Jones: Took redundancy after his job on Newsnight mysteriously vanished. ‘People said they won’t sack you after Savile but they will make your life hell,’ he told Press Gazette. ‘Everyone involved on the right side of the Savile argument has been forced out of the BBC.’ 

Panorama: After its admirably rigorous documentary on the BBC’s failings, which did so much to restore the BBC’s reputation, BBC managers shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, resigned to ‘find new challenges’. Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. 

As for Peter Rippon and all the other managers who parroted the corporate line, well, naturally, not one of them has suffered.

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The real enemy of the Corbynistas

Nick Cohen gets it right in the Observer tomorrow:

The Corbynites’ real enemies are not Tories, whom they rather respect for standing up for the interests of their class, but Labour MPs who fail to show the required radical virtue and betray the leftwing cause. 

They don’t mutter darkly that there will be “no hiding place” for Tory MPs who voted in favour of bombing Isis. They don’t scream that Conservative women are “witches” and “cows”. They don’t deliver death threats to David Cameron. 

Their virtuous hatred is righteously reserved for their own side and its ugliness will destroy the myth of leftwing decency more thoroughly than the right ever could.

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