It’s almost drearily obvious to the paranoid that Boris Johnson, one of the obstinate leaders of Brexit, must be a Russian asset. Not only is the disruption of European trade and military alliances which Brexit will bring on be to Russia’s advantage, but there are two other factors. First, as has been noted numerous times, Trump, himself a suspected Russian asset, is a big booster of Johnson:
Trump has been a Johnson champion for a long time. The president undercut May at every opportunity and boosted Johnson whenever he could. Johnson has seemed his kind of politician — reckless, irreverent, disruptive, not a detail person.
Through Vice President Pence, who met with Johnson on Thursday in London, Trump sent a message of support, for Britain leaving the European Union and for the prospect of a new trading agreement between the two nations that supposedly share a special relationship. “Fantastic,” Johnson said to Pence, while noting that negotiations could be difficult, which was hardly an understatement. [Dan Balz, WaPo]
For the paranoid, dabbling in disruptive politics of our closest ally is a telling sign for Trump’s potential allegiance. The other red flag[1]? Johnson is not the best of the best, as classmate Andrew Sullivan observed a few weeks ago:
Boris was so posh it was funny. At least that’s how I saw it. And what marked him as different from the other Etonians was his decision to embrace this, and make fun of himself in the process. Others came rather insecure about their privilege and played it down — think of fellow Etonian David Cameron who decided to call himself “Dave.” Not Boris. Alongside party-boy Darius Guppy and Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, he reveled in it. As sitting president, I did my small part to help him gain his footing, despite a certain amount of class resentment I’m not really proud of. …
This reputation hurt Boris in hunting for votes to be president of the Oxford Union, and he lost the first time around to someone called Neil Sherlock who was a nerdy state school kid. Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness — with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not — and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously. He has a first-class wit but a second-class mind and got a second-class degree. If you want to measure the quality of his scholarship, check out his deeply awful biography of Churchill, a thinly veiled attempt to redescribe his own career as a Second Coming of Winston.
Johnson and Trump are alike in that they have always been deeply ambitious, but, to use Sullivan’s spot-on adjective, second-raters – their eyes bigger than their stomachs, as it were. Such people are meat and potatoes for master manipulators, and whether it’s Putin himself, or some back-room Russian guru, I think we’re seeing a public display of the lengths to which people such as Trump and Johnson will go to be thought of as in the first rank.
Even when they don’t deserve it, and will wreck everything around them doing it.
1 Forgive the pun. If you’re too young to understand, in a previous national incarnation, the Russians were known as “the Reds,” due to the color of the flag of the Soviet Union.
