In these few hours before the European Football Final, I confess my heart is torn. Part of me wants England to win, partly because I was born there and also because of the strong Irish component – Rice, Kane and Grealish, if that idiot Southgate even remembers to play him – in the English squad. But like you all, I truly dread the vacuous and self-satisfied outpourings from the English media and pundits if England wins, apparently unaware – as they clearly are – that there is a direct co-relationship between their boastful brainlessness and the brutal brainlessness of the nastier xenophobes amongst the English supporters.
However, perhaps the primary reason for wanting an Italian victory is expressed in two words: Boris Johnson.
The prime minister is an Englishman of a clearly recognisable type, fictively foreshadowed in various forms from Falstaff to Mr Bumble, from Toad of Toad Hall to Flashman. The core ingredients of this personality are rank cowardice and utter insincerity. But in terms of real people, Johnson follows expertly in the footsteps of Hughie Green, Meistersinger of the celebrated arts programme, “Opportunity Knocks”. The winks, the nudges, the sly innuendoes and the fake Canadian accent: these were central to the Green persona, as he introduced Mavis from Cleethorpes, who could with reasonable accuracy imitate her budgerigar imitating her, and Stan from Accrington, who could twitch his Adam’s apple almost in time to Cliff Richard’s “Livin’ Doll”.
What the world didn’t know back then and seems utterly impossible in hindsight but remains nonetheless true, was that Hughie Green ran a casting couch. Stan and his Adam’s apple were probably denied a place there, but Mavis, complete with her varicose veins and her athlete’s foot (first contracted in the Land Army in 1943, and been a right bugger ever since) almost certainly was not, while the budgerigar manfully whistled “There’ll always be an England”.
No one knows how many women Hughie Green pelvically auditioned before they made their bid for world stardom on “Opportunity Knocks”. However, what is certain is that Green was a complete fraud who was known to be a fraud by every single person watching him, yet he got away with it. And that’s the peculiar way with frauds in England: provided they are complete bounders, they are given a pass, from Malcolm Muggeridge to Bob Boothby to the even more outrageous Robert Maxwell. Having created a bogus persona of being a loudmouthed but affable buffoon, he then cheated, embezzled and defrauded all around him, using plausible frontmen to conceal his dirty work. No one’s reputation could have survived such intimate association with Maxwell, yet nonetheless, people were prepared to make that sacrifice for reasons that cannot be explained in any sentence that also contains the term “common sense”.
The success of Jeffrey Archer, an author who simply can’t write yet who sells millions of books, similarly defies common sense. Despite his imprisonment for a quite grotesque and (for what was for others) life-ruining perjury in which he had denied consorting with prostitutes, he was recently invited onto a British television chat show to bestow his moral approval on a particular speech in the House of Commons. Seeking the approbation of Archer for anything is rather like a teenage girl soliciting Bill Clinton’s advice on how to remain a virgin.
Jimmy Savile is perhaps the acme of the genre. His many forays into unspeakable and even necrophiliac depravity were made possible by the cultural presumption that some men in English life are beyond judgment, so they may therefore escape the iron rule of consequence that afflicts the lower orders. This refers not to their class but to their status within the animal hierarchy: for all of the bounders listed here were or are alpha males, blessed with an almost irresistible charisma. This is a lethal quality in any society, but within the English culture of deference, it is quite deadly, as Johnson’s rise has shown. To be sure, his charisma is not remotely evident on television: but in the flesh, it is like incandescent plutonium, thereby masking his equally thermonuclear mediocrity.
Boris Johnson is the Hughie Green of British politics. Before that he was the Hughie Green of mayors. Before that, the Hughie Green of journalism. He is also a shameless cad (a category that is almost completely missing in Irish life). His repeated public humiliation of women should have made him a target of feminists, but they leave him alone, perhaps because he is too powerful and charismatic for them to feel comfortable attacking, but also because they’re usually cowards, hence their refusal to condemn the mass-rapists of tens of thousands of working-class English girls. Cads such as him usually don’t mind their casual consorts becoming pregnant – apparently proof of their manhood – just so long as they can remain in absentia. I’ve no idea how many children Johnson has sired, or how much maintenance he is paying their mothers, though his various offspring could probably make up a full cricket XI at Eton, plus the twelfth man.
It is quite disastrous for us, for the UK and the EU that this psychopathic narcissist is a key player in the Brexit negotiations since nothing that he says on one day will have any influence on what he does the next. After all, he only embraced Brexit as a way of attacking David Cameron; he had no idea the referendum was going to back the UK’s departure from the EU. Thereafter, he realised the enormous potential of populist insincerity. So, he unconditionally promised the DUP that there would be no sea border, which he then negotiated into existence. There is no relationship whatever between what he says and what he later does; and nor does he see any reason why there should be.
His decision to award the George Cross to the National Health Service for its work during the pandemic was an exercise in purest populism at its most unprincipled. The CG is usually given for extreme gallantry while not in action against the enemy. For example, Violette Szabo was posthumously awarded the GC for her undercover work with British intelligence in France, leading to her execution. George Styles was awarded it for his heroic work defusing bombs in Northern Ireland. However, it is also as important for when it is not given. Ranger Cyril Smith, a Catholic soldier from Carrickfergus serving with the Royal Irish Regiment sacrificed his life saving his fellow soldiers during a proxy-bomb attack on an army checkpoint in October 1990 but did not get the GC that he deserved. Nor did the UDR upon its dissolution, even though its soldiers had mostly done their duty with great gallantry and many had paid an enormous price for fighting terrorism: some two hundred dead and thousands injured.
So, no GC for the UDR, but one for the National Health Service, boosting Johnson’s ratings in Britain enormously. So what will he be like if England triumphs tonight? The thought is unbearable; but so too is a defeat for England, with the worst of the Anglophobe dwarfs in Irish life exultantly capering, while the morons of the Brit-bashing social media duly go berserk.
There is a solution: a public announcement at half time this evening the truth that Johnson is actually the love-child resulting from the audition that Hughie Green gave Jimmy Savile on the set of Opportunity Knocks in October 1963, from which Savile slowly waddled, spitting out pillow-feathers. Nine months later, Savile’s proctologist was able to conjure out of his scrawny Yorkshire bottom a bonny bouncing blond baby boy, later baptised, in the arms of his adoring Dad Hughie, as Boris Green, and later still being adopted by the Johnson family. And then who in the world will notice the outcome of a mere football match between England and Italy?