9 ms·

Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally n

Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.

wastedhours 7y ago
> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think. In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
- rusk 7y ago
  Indeed, he is completely unproven in any matters of statecraft and has been founding wanting in actual matters of substance on many occasions.
- verbify 7y ago
  The news story that really made me believe that the bumbling fool shtick is real and not just an act was when he went to a buddhist temple in Myanmar and started reciting a colonial-era Kipling poem about a British soldier reminiscing about a Burmese girl that he kissed - until the ambassador intervened and told him it wasn't appropriate. If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background. So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time. The story is available here - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johnson-caught-on-camera-reciting-kipling-in-myanmar-temple https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...
  - fiala__ 7y ago
    "A Well-trained Idiot" describes the British Etonian elite so concisely I think it should become a technical term. Well done.
    - verbify 7y ago
      I've borrowed it from someone else (who was actually educated in Oxford, but not Eton), wish it were my own though.
      - noir_lord 7y ago
        For centuries a posh accent and certainty was enough for the class that ruled the UK. One thing Brexit has successfully done is illustrate to all sides just how mediocre our leadership actually is. Mediocre leaders are fine when the ship is sailing in calm waters to a known destination. At the moment it feels like half of them want to steer into the iceberg and the other half want to abandon ship, with a few lone voices pointing out we could have just turned to port and swerved it.
        all2 7y ago
        It'll take an existential threat (war?) to sort the wheat from the chaff. Typically the best and brightest of a country trickle to the top when duty finally calls. Though, there are opportunists. Like Mao. Or Hitler.
  - drcongo 7y ago
    > If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
    - verbify 7y ago
      I'm not saying he's not racist/colonialist. You only have to read his article about 'flag-waving piccaninnies... tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief...' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If-Blairs-so-good-at-running-the-Congo-let-him-stay-there.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If.... Or his argument that Obama hated the UK because he was Kenyan and had an 'ancestral dislike of the British empire'. Or any of the other dozens examples. I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem. I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
- peteretep 7y ago
  He got a scholarship to Eton and then one to Oxford. They don’t give those out with the papers, even to rich kids. We can say he is very bright without any qualification.
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    We can say he leveraged his privilege well, and I think that's different than offering someone blanket praise of being "bright". And again, I'm not necessarily making judgement on his academic credentials - I made the point about his jobs. Of which a classical education is evidently rather worthless. With the exception of being a player of politics and narratives.
    - peteretep 7y ago
      > I made the point about his jobs The guy who was editor of the Spectator, and a wildly successful columnist and speaker?
  - naravara 7y ago
    Being a gifted student as a kid doesn't necessarily translate into being an intelligent or wise adult. If you don't cultivate it properly then it either goes to waste or gets spent on stupid or petty nonsense, like the attention whoring Boris Johnson seems addicted to.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Perhaps you and he disagree about the nature of his job. He seems to be doing well at his version. He is just not doing what you (and many others, but not enough) wish he were doing.
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    I'm not even getting into Brexit, if you look at the comments made by senior diplomats when he worked at the Foreign Office (along with the very obvious gaffs including getting a British woman an extended sentence in Iran...) which has a reasonably clear remit. His front-bench roles even before becoming PM, and his previous roles, where he was fired from being a journalist for lying, for example, show he's just bad at anything other than playing the political game. And even then, you look at the advisers he has around him in order to be adept at even that.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Yes, he does terribly when he doesn't get to define his own job responsibilities. At those, he frequently needed to fall back on his blueblood heritage. Where he is now, his job (as he or his backers define it) appears to be to distract the voting public from unpleasant facts. He has proven very, very good at changing the public subject. He has the complicity of the UK news media, much as W had in the US. The long-term takeover of the media by a tiny handful of right-wing extremists is proceeding smoothly worldwide, with concomittent benefits for their chosen spokesmouths.
- rjf72 7y ago
  When a coworker chooses to negatively gossip to the media about somebody, and the media finds it click-worthy, do you think this is going to be a characteristic and unsampled bias of that person or other's perception of them?
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    True, if that were a one-off occurrence done under the guise of an anonymous or worthless tip-off from someone with an axe to grind. When it's dozens of former colleagues, all calling someone out on their BS over the course of years, regarding unrelated incidents, and where a number of those incidents actually occurred in the public eye? There's data points and a trend line...
- joncrane 7y ago
  This means he's also meta-smart. He focuses his limited mental energy on the things that lead to success in the areas he wants (he's been elected PM, that's the peak of success by any measure). The fact that he has gotten away with being "dumb" on some details is a fault of the system. Same goes for the USA POTUS. At some point you have to say "don't hate the player, hate the game."
  - mendelmaleh 7y ago
    the United States of America President of the United States?
rusk 7y ago
I think Johnson’s distinguishing trait that enables him to do this, is a lack of shame more than anything else.
kmlx 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8 yes, he is much smarter than he looks.
- phatfish 7y ago
  Hopefully anyone that completed a degree in that focused on Ancient Greece/Classics could muster a reasonable performance in a debate like this, even if they couldn't manage a first ;) If anything his public speaking is above average, and the inflated ego and confidence that goes with attending Eton certainly helps with that. Nothing here shows any great intelligence, maybe marginally more than he likes to let on though.
  - kmlx 7y ago
    i didn't mention a "great intelligence", only "smarter than he looks", aka smarter than he leads us to believe.
pisky 7y ago
Isn't the most likely case that his advisers told him to do this?
smcl 7y ago
I don't think these ideas come from Boris himself, more likely some PR firm either he or the Conservative party have hired
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Much more likely it's a result of Cummings, who appears to be the real power and brain behind the throne.
drbw 7y ago
Maybe, but he's always been lazy and unwilling to do much actual work, apparently [1] his headmaster wrote to his father in 1982: Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies... Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else. [1]: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/letter-to-boris-johnsons-dad-from-eton-college-resurfaces-online-and-it-explains-a-lot/25/03/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/letter-to-boris-johns...
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work, never mind Prime Minster of the UK. Being unwilling to do work purely on other people’s say so is a separate trait from being lazy. He also has a much better command of Ancient Greek than anyone unwilling to apply themselves could acquire however wonderful the teachers the were exposed to. This is quite apart from the question of whether he’s a buffoon. If anyone but Corbyn was in charge of Labour the Conservatives would be cruising to a large electoral defeat soon but we don’t live in that world.
  - ttepasse 7y ago
    > No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work I can't speak for the 90s but watching the Daily Telegraph in the last years my impression is that the chief qualifications of their journalists and especially their columnists seems to be how much they mirror the weird political stances of the Barclay brothers, the owners of the DT.
  - bloogsy 7y ago
    No, but some people get to be Telegraph columnists and into positions of power without having to do as much work and face as much scrutiny as others because of their skin colour, their familial wealth and connections, and because they went an elite school.
jacquesm 7y ago
If his aim is to come across as a lovable bumbling fool then he's failing, he comes across as a malicious pompous ass who will happily wreck his country for minimal personal gain.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  The question is not "does this work on you" instead it's "does this work on enough of the population to have a significant effect". Observing my social groups, Is answer that it does. People often question something like "how does this buffoon get to be PM".
viraptor 7y ago
In this case we don't even know if it was his idea. For all we know he's paying a lot of money to a really good PR company.
- ghostDancer 7y ago
  He's smart enough to have one and follow their advice, at least in this case.
hobolobo 7y ago
As Ian Hislop put it: Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'
- js8 7y ago
  Boris Johnson is a man of average intelligence pretending that he is an idiot, so in case when something goes wrong and he really looks like an idiot, people wouldn't be able to blame him, since obviously, from the start, he was an idiot!
ed_elliott_asc 7y ago
I also can’t help thinking that all the dom cummings business is boris lining up someone to take the fall for him when he needs it. Boris has all the power and he can drop dc on a whim and blame him for anything he has done wrong.
ddalex 7y ago
The problem is BoJo isn't that his smarter than others thinks. It's that he's not as smart as he thinks he is.
journalctl 7y ago
Perhaps not, but I don’t think that’s going to help people who, say, live along the Irish border or who will be impacted by drug shortages. This isn’t just some kind of game.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  If the problems of the working class are “hypothetical” (as they are to the elite ruling class basically everywhere) then it literally is a game. They see things like this as edge cases to be sort of muddled through later, because they’ve never known anyone who uses the public health system.
sergioj97 7y ago
Having an intelligent strategy does not mean you are intelligent, specially in politics. Probably none of this was his idea, but some adviser's.
adgasf 7y ago
Read this https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/my-boris-story/ https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/my-boris-story/

wastedhours 7y ago

> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think. In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.

rusk 7y ago
Indeed, he is completely unproven in any matters of statecraft and has been founding wanting in actual matters of substance on many occasions.
verbify 7y ago
The news story that really made me believe that the bumbling fool shtick is real and not just an act was when he went to a buddhist temple in Myanmar and started reciting a colonial-era Kipling poem about a British soldier reminiscing about a Burmese girl that he kissed - until the ambassador intervened and told him it wasn't appropriate. If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background. So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time. The story is available here - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johnson-caught-on-camera-reciting-kipling-in-myanmar-temple https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...
- fiala__ 7y ago
  "A Well-trained Idiot" describes the British Etonian elite so concisely I think it should become a technical term. Well done.
  - verbify 7y ago
    I've borrowed it from someone else (who was actually educated in Oxford, but not Eton), wish it were my own though.
    - noir_lord 7y ago
      For centuries a posh accent and certainty was enough for the class that ruled the UK. One thing Brexit has successfully done is illustrate to all sides just how mediocre our leadership actually is. Mediocre leaders are fine when the ship is sailing in calm waters to a known destination. At the moment it feels like half of them want to steer into the iceberg and the other half want to abandon ship, with a few lone voices pointing out we could have just turned to port and swerved it.
      - all2 7y ago
        It'll take an existential threat (war?) to sort the wheat from the chaff. Typically the best and brightest of a country trickle to the top when duty finally calls. Though, there are opportunists. Like Mao. Or Hitler.
- drcongo 7y ago
  > If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
  - verbify 7y ago
    I'm not saying he's not racist/colonialist. You only have to read his article about 'flag-waving piccaninnies... tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief...' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If-Blairs-so-good-at-running-the-Congo-let-him-stay-there.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If.... Or his argument that Obama hated the UK because he was Kenyan and had an 'ancestral dislike of the British empire'. Or any of the other dozens examples. I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem. I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
peteretep 7y ago
He got a scholarship to Eton and then one to Oxford. They don’t give those out with the papers, even to rich kids. We can say he is very bright without any qualification.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  We can say he leveraged his privilege well, and I think that's different than offering someone blanket praise of being "bright". And again, I'm not necessarily making judgement on his academic credentials - I made the point about his jobs. Of which a classical education is evidently rather worthless. With the exception of being a player of politics and narratives.
  - peteretep 7y ago
    > I made the point about his jobs The guy who was editor of the Spectator, and a wildly successful columnist and speaker?
- naravara 7y ago
  Being a gifted student as a kid doesn't necessarily translate into being an intelligent or wise adult. If you don't cultivate it properly then it either goes to waste or gets spent on stupid or petty nonsense, like the attention whoring Boris Johnson seems addicted to.
ncmncm 7y ago
Perhaps you and he disagree about the nature of his job. He seems to be doing well at his version. He is just not doing what you (and many others, but not enough) wish he were doing.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  I'm not even getting into Brexit, if you look at the comments made by senior diplomats when he worked at the Foreign Office (along with the very obvious gaffs including getting a British woman an extended sentence in Iran...) which has a reasonably clear remit. His front-bench roles even before becoming PM, and his previous roles, where he was fired from being a journalist for lying, for example, show he's just bad at anything other than playing the political game. And even then, you look at the advisers he has around him in order to be adept at even that.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Yes, he does terribly when he doesn't get to define his own job responsibilities. At those, he frequently needed to fall back on his blueblood heritage. Where he is now, his job (as he or his backers define it) appears to be to distract the voting public from unpleasant facts. He has proven very, very good at changing the public subject. He has the complicity of the UK news media, much as W had in the US. The long-term takeover of the media by a tiny handful of right-wing extremists is proceeding smoothly worldwide, with concomittent benefits for their chosen spokesmouths.
rjf72 7y ago
When a coworker chooses to negatively gossip to the media about somebody, and the media finds it click-worthy, do you think this is going to be a characteristic and unsampled bias of that person or other's perception of them?
- wastedhours 7y ago
  True, if that were a one-off occurrence done under the guise of an anonymous or worthless tip-off from someone with an axe to grind. When it's dozens of former colleagues, all calling someone out on their BS over the course of years, regarding unrelated incidents, and where a number of those incidents actually occurred in the public eye? There's data points and a trend line...
joncrane 7y ago
This means he's also meta-smart. He focuses his limited mental energy on the things that lead to success in the areas he wants (he's been elected PM, that's the peak of success by any measure). The fact that he has gotten away with being "dumb" on some details is a fault of the system. Same goes for the USA POTUS. At some point you have to say "don't hate the player, hate the game."
- mendelmaleh 7y ago
  the United States of America President of the United States?

rusk 7y ago

I think Johnson’s distinguishing trait that enables him to do this, is a lack of shame more than anything else.

kmlx 7y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8 yes, he is much smarter than he looks.

phatfish 7y ago
Hopefully anyone that completed a degree in that focused on Ancient Greece/Classics could muster a reasonable performance in a debate like this, even if they couldn't manage a first ;) If anything his public speaking is above average, and the inflated ego and confidence that goes with attending Eton certainly helps with that. Nothing here shows any great intelligence, maybe marginally more than he likes to let on though.
- kmlx 7y ago
  i didn't mention a "great intelligence", only "smarter than he looks", aka smarter than he leads us to believe.

pisky 7y ago

Isn't the most likely case that his advisers told him to do this?

smcl 7y ago

I don't think these ideas come from Boris himself, more likely some PR firm either he or the Conservative party have hired

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Much more likely it's a result of Cummings, who appears to be the real power and brain behind the throne.

drbw 7y ago

Maybe, but he's always been lazy and unwilling to do much actual work, apparently [1] his headmaster wrote to his father in 1982: Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies... Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else. [1]: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/letter-to-boris-johnsons-dad-from-eton-college-resurfaces-online-and-it-explains-a-lot/25/03/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/letter-to-boris-johns...

barry-cotter 7y ago
No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work, never mind Prime Minster of the UK. Being unwilling to do work purely on other people’s say so is a separate trait from being lazy. He also has a much better command of Ancient Greek than anyone unwilling to apply themselves could acquire however wonderful the teachers the were exposed to. This is quite apart from the question of whether he’s a buffoon. If anyone but Corbyn was in charge of Labour the Conservatives would be cruising to a large electoral defeat soon but we don’t live in that world.
- ttepasse 7y ago
  > No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work I can't speak for the 90s but watching the Daily Telegraph in the last years my impression is that the chief qualifications of their journalists and especially their columnists seems to be how much they mirror the weird political stances of the Barclay brothers, the owners of the DT.
- bloogsy 7y ago
  No, but some people get to be Telegraph columnists and into positions of power without having to do as much work and face as much scrutiny as others because of their skin colour, their familial wealth and connections, and because they went an elite school.

jacquesm 7y ago

If his aim is to come across as a lovable bumbling fool then he's failing, he comes across as a malicious pompous ass who will happily wreck his country for minimal personal gain.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
The question is not "does this work on you" instead it's "does this work on enough of the population to have a significant effect". Observing my social groups, Is answer that it does. People often question something like "how does this buffoon get to be PM".

viraptor 7y ago

In this case we don't even know if it was his idea. For all we know he's paying a lot of money to a really good PR company.

ghostDancer 7y ago
He's smart enough to have one and follow their advice, at least in this case.

hobolobo 7y ago

As Ian Hislop put it: Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'

js8 7y ago
Boris Johnson is a man of average intelligence pretending that he is an idiot, so in case when something goes wrong and he really looks like an idiot, people wouldn't be able to blame him, since obviously, from the start, he was an idiot!

ed_elliott_asc 7y ago

I also can’t help thinking that all the dom cummings business is boris lining up someone to take the fall for him when he needs it. Boris has all the power and he can drop dc on a whim and blame him for anything he has done wrong.

ddalex 7y ago

The problem is BoJo isn't that his smarter than others thinks. It's that he's not as smart as he thinks he is.

journalctl 7y ago

Perhaps not, but I don’t think that’s going to help people who, say, live along the Irish border or who will be impacted by drug shortages. This isn’t just some kind of game.

wayoutthere 7y ago
If the problems of the working class are “hypothetical” (as they are to the elite ruling class basically everywhere) then it literally is a game. They see things like this as edge cases to be sort of muddled through later, because they’ve never known anyone who uses the public health system.

sergioj97 7y ago

Having an intelligent strategy does not mean you are intelligent, specially in politics. Probably none of this was his idea, but some adviser's.

adgasf 7y ago

Read this https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/my-boris-story/ https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/my-boris-story/