As Boris Johnson walked up to the podium at 10 Downing Street to make his first address as prime minister, they should have played Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows as his fanfare: “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied.” For the one thing that can be said in Johnson’s defence is that he is not a conman. Yes, of course, he speaks fluent falsehood as his native language. But he deceives no one. Everybody knows.[...]
Johnson’s fictions have always had a kind of postmodern quality – everybody knows they are fictions. Take the example that Johnson himself has constantly cited, what he called his “foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp”. Everybody knows and has always known that there was no such ban. Why? Because everybody could walk into a shop and buy a packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps.
Equally, his more recent brandishing of a kipper to embody another Euro-infamy was a kind of camp self-parody in which the performance is everything and the relationship to truth simply irrelevant. In this sense, there is no more deception than there is at a pantomime. The point is not to make a claim about reality. It is to draw the audience into a knowingly comic complicity with unreality, so that, when the EU says “but we never banned prawn cocktail flavour crisps”, everyone can shout out together, “Oh yes you did!”
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