Alex Phillips: When comedy Boris speaks the real world effects aren't funny

I’m going to start this with a disclaimer.

Dear Riewer, I love Boris.

The blustering, bumbling, blond, boisterous British buffoonery is just irresistible. He’s on my dream dinner party list, even though he’d lollop in late, upend the Claret, dominate the chat and leave a wreckage of raucous ruination.

To not enjoy Planet Boris you have to have a sense of humour bypass. Following a conveyor belt of grey and lifeless leaders with about as much collective charisma as a Convention of Trappist monks, to imbibe Boris is to imbibe optimism, patriotism, gleeful wit and erudite punnery.

He is an utter joy to listen to. The Best Of Bojo would be a bestselling stocking filler up and down the country.What wasn’t to like about the Mayor of London, dangling from a zip wire like an enormous lego man in a spider's web, waving his little flags astride his rotund bobbing form under that thatch of inexplicable electric shock hair?

As an Ambassador for Curious English Eccentricity and Affability, not even Dickens could have crafted such a captivating caricature.Trying to find the words to explain the Boris magnetism, I landed upon one phrase. He does not take life too seriously, and that is truly a magical gift. It’s all jolly hockey sticks and hullabaloo and terrifically good fun, even if you are actually running a country.

This is what I now worry about.

When the speeches end and the standing ovation trickles out of the auditorium, it’s no longer a laughing matter when gas prices are soaring, China is threatening to invade Taiwan, little kids are watching hardcore porn, the French are plotting blockades and the Prime Minister is talking about managing it all by unleashing some long bottled British spirit like a magical genie in a Disney movie.

Apart from the most famous pop stars and the odd Brazilian footballer, few people are instantly recognisable by first name alone. And Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson was quite clever when choosing his brand, just as repeating the village Stoke Poges in his conference speech earlier was bound to tickle the British funny bone with tantalising quirky mouthfeel. A cartoon name for a cartoonishly coiffed cad. In fact, his speech was as good as anything at The Comedy Club and left me with the warm glow of having consumed too much rubber chicken and wine inside a wedding marquis.

But sometimes when Boris speaks, the real world effects aren’t as convivial. Just ask Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, still languishing in an Iranian prison after Boris, then Foreign Secretary - handed the perfect excuse to her detainers by clumsily breaking with official line.

Ooops, sorry Naz my old mucker doesn’t quite cut it.

Or when he galavanted around gladhanding Covid victims before finally winding up in the ICU himself. The litany of screeching u-turns betrays a Prime Minister who gambols off enthusiastically, like a puppy with ears pricked and tail wagging charging across a frozen lake, before being summoned back with a sharp whistle as a flock of geese scramble in flaps of despair.

It’s all rather fun to watch, but potentially perilous were it not for buildings on Whitehall packed with experts getting on with the grunt work of running the country.

But aside from being a resplendent orator, what is Boris? What does he represent?

This is the man who headed up the most elite group at Oxford University infamous for allegedly taunting plebs, hiring hookers and trashing restaurants.

This is the man who had the audacity to make up quotes to back up a front page splash in one of the UK’s most respected broadsheets, getting fired as a result.

This is the man who purportedly ummed and ahhed over which side of the referendum to support, scribing two opposing chest beating versions of his extremely lucrative newspaper column on the eve of his announcement, working out which position would serve Boris better.

This is the man who has marauded through marriage in much the same style, who has reportedly claimed to be broke, despite the grace and favour accommodation and Prime Ministerial salary due to the litter of offspring he must keep shod.

This is the man who unflinchingly called the nation’s media to the Ten Downing Street Rose Garden to allow his brain in a vat to serve a cold plate of cynical bumph as an excuse for flagrant flouting of national emergency laws that have seen ordinary people fined thousands, or face prison.

Something then occurred to me as I chuckled through the various memes of Build Back Better, Butter, Bitter, Batter, Beaver. That much like a magician’s distraction technique, here we are grinning from ear to ear at the simple and harmless silliness of it all, on the very same day more than 800,000 people will be pushed into poverty.

Today, we need to talk about Boris.