King Lear may have divided the country in two and turned it against itself but perhaps, like the outgoing Tory leader, he ‘got all the big calls right’
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!
“Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?”
Snowflake is on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer at 22:30 on 4 September, followed by Tornado on 11 September. Dates for the Basic Lee tour are available now
