What Controls The Control Freaks?

 

The most powerful influences of childhood are likely to frame our behaviour for the rest of our lives- I see this in myself. Half a century after ditching the Catholic church, I'm still likely to approach any new challenge from the moral perspective of the monks who were my schoolteachers. It's not always the best way to solve a problem, but remains my default position. Aware of this bias, I will then make a point of turning to logic, objective reasoning and common sense; there are many ways to skin a cat. It's important to recognise the forces that direct us even as we struggle to control our daily lives. But I have no wish to control my town, my country or the world. What, then, controls the control freaks?    

Politicians are created, not born. Aged 15, myself and a schoolchum named Danny began winning inter-school debating competitions. In two years of contests we were never defeated. In 2016 our final trumph was a national schools debate sponsored by the Daily Express. In short order came a sequence of unexpected consequences. First, I was approached by representatives of all the major political parties, each of them promising to usher me into Parliament after a suitable period of training. The following day, Glasgow's local newspapers sent photographers to the school to publicise our victory. On the friday afternoon I was summoned to meet the headmaster- a Jesuit monk named Brother Jermanus- and informed that a place at Oxford University was open to me when I left school. The next Monday I recieved a written invitation from the Labour Party to visit the Houses of Parliament as a guest of a well known Scottish MP. 

Unfortunately for all these eager beavers, I had fallen in love with an electric guitar and was, at that time, rejecting all offers that didn't involve the opportunity to get my rocks off. Their grand plan to steer me to the land of Glittering Prizes, Greatness and Goodness fell at the first hurdle. A decision I have never regretted, although it was not until twenty years later that I realised how very close to the edge of the pit I had wandered. 

In the late 1990's, as I watched the Jock Mafia hoisting Tony Blair to the top of the slippery pole -via St Johns College, Oxford- I couldn't help wondering how early in the game he had been earmarked for the hot seat. And who, exactly, did the earmarking? However, I have written often enough about the external operators who prepare the scripts read aloud by the likes of Blair, Cameron, May and Johnson. Today I want to look at the inner workings of a benchmark political marionette. Let us examine the formation of  one particularly crippled mind that sidelines all scruples while demanding both applause and affection as if nothing else could ever matter. 

JOHNSON & JOHNSON

The current occupant of 10 Downing Street makes a perfect case study for the "selected, not elected" theory of politics. Among a host of 21st-century puppet premiers, each carefully groomed for office, Johnson's eventual appointment as teleprompter reader-in chief was the easiest to anticipate. What propelled Johnson's ascent is plain enough -his globalist country-hopping parents, the Euro-centric political class, the collective weight of the UN / World Economic Forum agenda etc. What lies within the man, on the other hand, is a differnt affair -a dismal accumulation of inferiorities and insecurities that combined to produce the wretched creature still dominating Britain's political landscape.

 

Born in New York to a pair of energetic ex-pat Brits, Johnson was brought to England aged 5 to live in Oxford, and briefly in London. When he was 7 his father, Stanley Johnson, got a job with the World Bank in Washington so they returned to America. The following year Jonhson senior took a new job on "population control policy" (?) and the family moved to Connecticut. By the age of 8, then, this dizzy kid had lived in five cities. Looking at it logically, there's no way young Alexander had any sense of belonging, either geographical or social. 

After two years in Connecticut, the Johnsons re-located yet again, this time to a farm in Somerset England. The source of all truthiness, Wikipedia, informs us that Johnson senior was "regularly absent, leaving Alexander to be raised largely by his mother, aided by a number of au pairs." The three Johnson children, we see, had no real friends in the area, and kept largely to their own company. In other words, not much father and no friends at all. After a whole three years spent mainly on the farm -their longest stint yet in one place- the family moved to the posh delights of Maida Vale, London in late 1969. 

SWINGING SIXTIES

It is not difficult to imagine life in an upper-middle-class London household during that period of "free love" and "revolution". Castro and Mao were idolised by ztoned students (Stanley was at the London School of Economics at this point), Donovan was playing free concerts in Hyde Park, the Beatles were poised to break up, and the smart set -to which the Johnsons most certainly belonged- were doing every drug from weed to smack and shagging around like rabbits. 

It's easy to picture the six-year-old boy, bewildered and befuddled by a kalaidescope of ever-changing surroundings, nannies and nurses, now inhabiting a house where parties were commonplace, complete with all the pyschedlic and socio-sexual indulgence of the era. The world must have appeared -to this child- to be a non-stop whirl in which people and places became interchangeable -and by implication, replaceable.  He was learning very early not to invest any loyalty, because there was no payoff. Today's main characters could be dispensed and disposed of at a moment's notice -and frequently were. 

It's highly likely that by 1970 the young Alexander  had already developed his trademark attention-seeking compulsion as a survival mechanism - a way to stand out against the tumultuous background of the Johnson family's whirlwind existence. Look at me - I'm important!   

 

In 1973, Stanley abandoned his American dreams and re-invented himself as a staunch europhile, taking a job with the European Commission. This of course required the whole family to move to Brussels, where young Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson atttended the European School and learned to speak French. Any feeble roots the young Boris might have planted on English soil were torn out gasping once more. By this point, whether by he imagined himself to be American, British or Belgian is anybody's guess. All three, I would suspect, considering his pathalogical enthusiasm for being everything to everybody that would, in adulthood, lead him to Westminster like a seal to the circus. 

The Brussels adventure lasted only two years however, as his mother suffered a nervous breakdown in 1975, and all (now four) Johnson children were returned to England and sent to boarding schools. At the age of 11, having inhabited six cities and three countries, Alexander was, as one might expect from his father's own clearly boundless ambitions, bound for Eton. 

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

Now hundreds of miles from the father he had never really known, with his mother incapacitated, and having no real friends, Alexander entered the junior gentleman's club on the outskirts of Windsor with little but a classical education and a runaway ego to sustain him. So he probably fitted in rather well, as most of the other sorry little bastards he met there will have been equally handicapped, from a developmental perspective. 

A few years pumping your own weight at rugby, buggery and philosophy has long been the ideal  preparation for a spell at Oxford, where a chap can collect the right sort of phone numbers. Which is as much as most elite parents ever demand of their offspring. The average1970's Etonian schoolboy was every bit as unloved, disturbed, disloyal, suspicious and conniving as his predecessors. No wonder the real string-pullers like to recruit their mouthpieces from Eton and Oxford -the word "average" doesn't do them justice. Two of Britain's last three PMs -Cameron and Johnson- are hollow, addled neurotics you wouldn't leave in charge of a market-stall let alone an economy.      

To absolutely no-one's surprise, Johnson's sole arena of excellence involved excreting long sentences adding up to not much. Accordingly, he was made President of the Eton Debating Society and Editor of the school newspaper. Again, we see the measure of the man already baked into the child. In the forty years since, Johnson has never produced anything at all except a lot of babble about things he didn't really care about, understand or believe. That's what they teach you to do in debating societies, trust me. 

WORD IN YOUR EAR

Conveniently for a hollow shell like Alexander, the entire charade of political 'debate' centres upon faking sincerity regardless of what you might actually feel. The longer you practise this art, the more your thoughts and emotions become detached from your public and private behaviour. Words are either camouflage used to disguise your intentions, or bricks to be thrown at your opponents, in a battle where nobody even gets scratched. 

It's for this reason that no amount of revelations, no list of his dreadful blunders or sins will ever have the slightest effect on the inner Johnson, because the inner Johnson does not exist. Alexander never really left Eton, and in his puerile mind, is still editing the school rag, trouncing the boy across the table in the common room with a well-rehearsed quip. Arrested development can take you a long way -all the way to the top, in fact, where you'll never be arrested again. 

In the summer and autumn of 2011, I spent many happy days and nights in Windsor (mainly at the racetrack) and several times enjoyeded the spectacle of young Etonians trooping between buildings in their finery, like the penguin-parade in an unfashionable zoo. Eton high street shopping was a blast -you could buy a decent white shirt for as little as £59.99.  The tramping children grinned with adult ferocity, competing to preen and swagger, just as you bloody well would do when you've figured out your parents have a lot more money than love to offer you. Eton, I perieved, was no more than a Jurassic Park for fucked-up teenage Veloceraptors. I might have found some sympathy for the little sods, if the school had been anything more than a production-line for predatory animals. (CLICK HERE to explore Eton College)   

A CLASSIC

In 1983 Balliol College Oxford welcomed Alexander Johnson with open arms. He had won a scholarship to pursue "a four-year course in the study of the Classics, ancient literature and classical philosophy." Because we really can't get enough experts in that field, right kids? 

A great choice for a fellow like Johnson, though, as it basically meant re-reading the stuff his parents had already crammed into him, while pissing life up the wall for four years with everyone who was going to be anyone. It was here that Alexander finally cemented himself as 'Boris' -and launched the fake-goofy persona designed to attract the attention he craved.  Look at me! Listen to me!

It's a feature of elite educational establishments that huge numbers of clubs and societies spring up within the walls and persist like weeds. This is despite -or perhaps because of- the fact that the majority of individuals involved are utterly self-centred sociopaths with not a shred of empathy for anyone outside the club. So it was that Alexander the Average at last found a substitute for the family he conspicuously lacked, in the nauseating Bullingdon Club, where all the juvenility of public school was echoed in cartoonish foul manners and arrogant displays of wealth and privilege.

BOYS LIKE ME

 The mainstream media make great play of listing and profiling the Bullingdon boys (click for details) who shared his company in those golden years - William Hague, David Cameron, Michael Gove etc- yet it is in the normal way of things that such creatures gather in clumps. They share the same emptiness, lack the same graces,but swing the same way and swim with the same tides. Such people are condemned to each other's company, not mutually seduced. 

Beyond doubt, all four had been auditioned for the Theatre of Parliament by the time they were eighteen. If the talent-spotters of 1976 got round to the likes of me, in a school packed with Gorbals
ghetto-children, they could hardly have missed those kind of geezers in the mid 1980's.  And in a sense, Alexander's entire life pre-Oxford had consisted of one long audition for government.

 

Johnson's subsequent odyssey from Oxford to Downing Street was a long and winding road of crass distractions. There's little insight to be gained from accounting his litany of failure -the cushy jobs and the inevitable sackings, the serial infidelities, the diversions into TV presenting, even his preposterous stint as Mayor of London. These were, after all, just ways of passing the time until it was his turn to read the globalist script for the cameras. Shepherded into a safe Conservative constituency by fifty tons of well-positioned money, Boris fastened his teeth on the steel bit placed in his mouth all those years before, and advanced on Downing Street like a plague-dog scenting a bed of soiled straw.

THE WORLD TURNS

The ironic gut-punch that follows idle contentment is that we get the politicians we deserve. Given a couple of decades of relative comfort and joy, we'll turn a blind eye to the fat controllers fleecing us at the fringes, leeching on our endeavours and shaving a slice off every profit we can turn. Just keep the lights on and police the streets we say, with a sigh of resignation - but sooner or later, even that is no longer guaranteed. In such moments are the Johnsons of the world summoned to the breach.

Johnsons are dinosaurs of convenience, churned out like the tin-can cars of Henry Ford; mass-produced bargain-buys, with a short shelf-life and a jaunty aspect that hints at good times just around the corner. As I write these words an entire generation of clones are being readied for release. As I have explained, they are identified in childhood, seduced with promises, trained like carnival horses and ridden until they break down and fall -broken- to the dust in the centre of the ring. Discreet retirement -with benefits - guaranteed. 

Alexander Johnson and I share far too many experiences in common for my linking, but perhaps the most pertinent is that we have both been fired by the Times newspaper. In his case, for the sin of inventing a lie about an obscure historical figure. By contrast, my unforgivable journalistic crime was writing an honest report about a landmark protest march it happened: the million-strong Hyde Park anti-Iraq war rally in 2003. I'll settle for the distinction -but one day, I promise, I will reveal to whatever readers I have left, the private, but very satisfying personal revenge I managed to exact upon the blond bum-boy from Manhattan as he prepared for his ascent to glory. 

STRAW MAN

At no point in his life was this creature of the establishment permitted any realistic choice beyond the primrose path to the sparkling illusion of power. Unlovable, he was nevertheless admired (often enough for his purposes) by the parasite class that swarm in the wake of the plump elite puffer-fish. Amoral, disloyal and quietly despised by everyone he knew, he trod the turgid mill of celebrity until his allotted time, then stepped into the longed-for limelight on the threshold of the Great Pandemic Pantomime - an ideal climax to a career of shallow, mindless assaults on the Everest of popularity. 

The pitiful Churchillian mimicry,  the bluff and bluster that worked so well in the panelled halls of Eton and Oxford were, in the end, all he had to offer, and he will be reviled in memory as the worst of the worst we ever had. This was a ghost-man of paper-thin value, with little to offer and nothing of substance. We can at least enjoy the satisfaction of knowing he is -just about- intelligent enough to refelect, in his dotage, that the misery he wrought upon so many others was merely a reflection of the inedequacies that raged like a savage cancer within himself from the day he was packed off to school by the parents who couldn't find anything in him to love.

Ian Andrew-Patrick

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