IN A bar where I once worked I’d a customer affectionately known as ‘Bill the blute’. Bill struck me as a man from another age. I never saw him not wearing a suit, tie and waistcoat from which was strung a silver pocket watch, and on his head he always wore a trilby hat, which he never failed to doff upon entering and exiting the pub.
Bill’s nickname was due to his abhorrence of strong language; on the rare occasion he lost his temper, he’d substitute ‘blute’ for a more oft-heard obscenity.
“Blute off and leave me alone,” was his rebuff to the local idiot annoying him at the bar.
Society would classify him as eccentric – and let me be clear before someone decides to take offence where none is meant: I’m not talking about people who have a medical diagnosis or some form of personality disorder, I’m talking about people who either through intention or temperament, have decided to live outside societal ‘norms’.
Take a glance through the higher echelons of the Tory party and you’ll see the type I mean. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a prime example, a man who dresses with such antiquity he looks like he’s walked off a Sherlock Holmes film set.
Jacob holds the record for using the longest word in Parliamentary history, ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’, meaning the act of estimating something as worthless – a word which could never be used to describe Jacob who, after accruing a fortune while working on the stock exchange, then married an heiress worth £45 million.
But the embodiment of eccentricity is without doubt Boris Johnson who if you’d suggested only a few months ago he would today be PM, no-one would have taken you seriously.
Make no mistake – his unruly hair, gaffe-prone utterances, shirt never tucked in and general demeanour of an absent-minded public schoolboy are a conscious façade behind which hides a calculating politician.
While always a ‘good turn’ at Tory party conferences – their version of Donald Trump – everyone knew that, like Trump, he lacked the personal discipline and intellectual rigour necessary for leadership. Yet here we are, with the leaders of two of the most powerful countries in the world sharing not only horrible haircuts but massive egos which greatly outstrip their very limited abilities.
Not that I’d argue that being eccentric should in itself debar anyone from high office. History is littered with great leaders with unusual habits. For example, Churchill loved walking around naked. Discovered in such a state by President Roosevelt, whom he was visiting, Churchill quipped: “The prime minister of the UK has nothing to hide from the president of the US.”
The sexual exploits of John F Kennedy would have made Caligula blush and for most of his presidency he was on a cocktail of medication which would have put a horse to sleep.
His successor, the irascible Lyndon Johnson, saw nothing strange in urinating in public, a habit he shared with Russian dictator Stalin, who was known to drop his trousers at the drop of a hat. A man of monumental paranoia, Stalin insisted on having a bodyguard stand beside him on the rare occasions he actually used a toilet.
All of this was long before the internet and our 24-hour news cycle. Today, when a political eccentric such as Boris Johnson or Trump engage their mouths before putting their brains in gear, the consequences can be serious. Trump recently suggested four Democratic Congresswomen "go back" and fix the "places from which they came", even though all are US citizens.
When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested and charged with spying while on a family holiday in Iran, Johnson was Britain's foreign secretary. When asked in the House of Commons about her case he misspoke, suggesting Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been in Iran to train journalists. His gaffe vindicated the Iranians, as far as they were concerned, and, as a result, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe languishes in an Iranian jail. So a mother is separated from her child because Johnson, as is his habit, lazily refused to read the brief prepared for him by his civil servants.
Boris is the man who promises to fix the Brexit backstop by utilising technology which doesn’t exist, implemented in a fashion yet to be tested but, which he assures us, will work brilliantly.
That his advisers imposed a media blackout during his PM election campaign speaks volumes of their lack of confidence in controlling his verbal diarrhoea. The bumbling Boris persona cultivated by Johnson, while entertaining on comedy panel shows, will be found wanting as prime minister.
