What a filthy sod

Alexander ‘Boris the Animal’ Johnson likes wowing credulous, ignorant journalists with a soupcon of classicism into his usual ramblings.  It makes him look dignified but ‘not one of them’ i.e. career legislators – the anti-politician politician.  Indeed, his views lead as far as being the anti-state statesman.  Saying all this, there is a fair chance he will be prime minister in 2020, leading a coup against Cameron (who will have lost the 2015 election) and capitalising on a continuing sluggish economy under Labour.

Recently, he was railing against an EU proposal to cap banker’s bonuses at a year’s wages (or two years with the consent of shareholders) by regaling hacks of Diocletian’s edict against inflation to counter the effrontery of defending a profession now more despised than estate agents (even Michael Gove, on Wednesday’s Question Time, was maundering about how no bankers had been sent to prison for the economic tsunami they unleashed in 2007/8).  David Cameron had no such easy fallback, a PPE degree losing out to the classics.

Today, he said he would love to be prime minister ‘if called to serve’ (like the pope, the traditional refusal before grabbing the reins of power).  He invokes Cincinnatus (from whom, 2,000 years later, the name of the city Cincinnati was derived) toiling away at the sod of his farm before being called from his plough to rescue Rome from a grave crisis.  The know-nothing hacks hail Cincinnatus, innocuously, as ‘a Roman leader’ – and that he was.  There are greater nuances inherent, however. 

By the time he was called back Cincinnatus was in retirement, so come back when you’re 65 Boris (after all, Winston Churchill was still serving at the age of 80).  More pertinently, Cincinnatus was recalled as a Dictator.  This has not quite the pejorative overtones that it has today, but it was still a suspension of democracy (of the form the Roman Republic practised) and constitutional norms, with rule by decree.  The Bojo jackboot in Number 10?  Further, to protect against a slide back into kingship, the dictator was only allowed to serve for one year (thus the great furore when Julius Caesar made himself Dictator for life).  So Bojo, you can become a latter-day Alec Douglas-Home and we can kick you out after one year?  Then again, if you were being true to Cincinnatus, you would step down voluntarily after the passage of a year and go back to obscurity.  Deal?  No, because you’re just a hypocrite who likes to bamboozle the fawning media with irrelevant historical anecdotes.  We can only hope that as Conservative party leader with realistic chances of being PM, journos put you under more scrutiny and call you out on these public-relations statements.  But then we need a higher class of journalist and not even Leveson can solve that.