Poor Old Boris . . . ?

As I have previously mentioned several times, one of Hemingway’s central tropes was the repeated idea that ‘A man on his own has no chance’.

It is also an idea that has come to be officially recognised—though in practice it has been recognised as far back as the beginning of history—in fairly recent times in psychology, and through psychology in advertising, and also in the visceral world of politics.

The idea involves a recognition of a popular chariness for what seems to be the isolated individual.  It is the opposite side of the coin from the inbuilt human desire to belong, to bury oneself in the crowd.  Presenting the individual as being alone, cutting him out of the herd, is the first step in bringing him down.

This is what is going on today in relation to Boris Johnson.  The position of the commentariat is that he has gone too far—not the Tory Party or the opposition or the crowds of Remain loonies who blockaded him in his house and barracked him outside of it immediately in the wake of the 2016 referendum.

No, he is the problem.

It is a recognition, of course, that he has, in De Gaulle’s words, and in a somewhat similar situation, ‘the baraka.’  He is effectively the man of the moment, the one they are all afraid of, the perceived cornerstone of the parliamentary Brexit movement, without whom it might be otherwise expected to collapse.

Nonetheless it must also be immensely flattering to him as an individual.

The truth is, of course, that he said nothing of any great offence—though it is being relentlessly spun that he did.  He just told the truth as he saw it.

What he did expose, however, was the infectious hysteria of the female intake into parliament over recent years, selected purely on the basis of being women—or ‘wimmin’—and with no native capacity to take the heat of the kitchen—though God forbid you should even mention the word ‘kitchen’.

Can one imagine how a woman of real power might have reacted in the situation?  Imagine Maggie Thatcher?

A fiction has grown up in recent decades, a fiction fostered by feminism, yet one totally at odds with its proclaimed agenda.  It is that of the weak and downtrodden woman.

I grew up in the much maligned 1950s and certainly don’t recognise any such archetype; nor observed it either.  The women of those days were more likely to be strong and tough and to run their homes and their families—and often their husbands—with a tight fist than anything else.

[The physically strongest man I ever met, and one of the most fearless, had a tiny wife of some five-foot-odd, of whom he lived in total dread.]

Indeed, there has been in recent weeks a series about Lady Jane Grey on BBC TV seeking to emphasise how strong she was in her own right and how she had been nurtured by a web of equally strong women.

The problem seems to be that modern ‘woke’ women have bought into their own—or at least into their ‘sisters’—propaganda, and in doing so undermined their whole argument, which is about empowering women.  But how can you empower women who—as in the parliamentary debate last night—show themselves to be so inadequate to the role of bearing power?

Indeed, how can you empower anybody.  And why would you want to?  Anyone capable of bearing power, male or female, should not need to be empowered.  The very fact of needing empowerment should be sufficient to rule one out of ever possessing it.

Parliament, any parliament, is not a vicarage tea party, no matter how much political correctness or a conditioned recourse to the vapours might seek make it.

That being said, it’s great to see a bit of cut-and-thrust back in politics, even if only on a foreign field.