Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Stewart Lee

How will history recall the reign of Bad King Boris?

Illustration of Boris Johnson wearing a red crown scrawled on with a crayon
Illustration by David Foldvari. Illustration: David Foldvari/The Observer

Boris Johnson’s “victory tour” is the insane peacock parade of a monster of a man who has ruined everything, trolling the entire country, rubbing the noses of those whose lives he has destroyed in the filth he has wall-spaffed into their faces. The French would have strewn burning tyres and broken baguettes all over the motorways by now, God bless them, and set fire to hayricks in the middle of rural roundabouts, while choking back successions of small sour drinks and making inscrutable obscene gestures at press corps helicopters. Instead, Brexit Britons sit around, tutting and shrugging into their milky tea as they dunk the soggy digestives of their impotence, like eunuchs in a penis factory. I hate us. We don’t deserve rock’n’roll.

Johnson’s grand tour ought to feel like King Lear’s last route march around Britain, in the enduring tragedy of the same name, but it doesn’t, quite. Shakespeare depicted the mad monarch tramping from one now unwelcoming former supporter to another, his presence nothing more than an inconvenient embarrassment. But Johnson’s valedictory progress, as I write this on Wednesday, seems to be a success. In Dorset, he boasted of his broadband. In Barrow-in-Furness, he surveyed a submarine. It is not known if, in Islington, he posed proudly by the sofa upon which he had spaffed into a pole-dancing data analyst, who was then awarded tens of thousands of pounds of public money when his wife was away serving the British justice system. Doubtless his indefatigable supporters would have loved to have seen the stained cushions anyway. Funny Boris!

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.