I have long maintained that posterity will view Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, as the greatest statesman of this or any other age. Here he is in today’s Torygraph promoting free trade. He is, of course, absolutely right, as he always is. He also gives the great unwashed anti-capitalist protestors a well-deserved kicking:
In student bedsits and in terrace Kensington houses, the alienated children of the middle classes are planning to subvert the G20 summit. Across the desolate wastes of the Leftie internet, their wrathful campfires are already burning …
and – what is even more endearing – he throws in a Tolkien reference for good measure:
… and when April dawns they will surge like the orcs of Mordor in the general direction of the Bank of England.
Bless.
Henry, I’m a great Boris fan too – I don’t always see eye-to-eye with his politics*, but he’s superb value for money.However, in Tolkein’s universe, would the forces of capitalism be more likely to be orcs? Viz what had happened to the Shire at the end of LoTR?* BoJo was struggling a bit to defend not imposing a higher rate of tax on those earning £150K+ on last Friday’s Any Questions. After he said if we did this we wouldn’t get the sort of excellent people we needed in the City of London, there was the sort of general feeling that the we could do to lose most of the ‘excellent’ people we’ve had in the City of London…
I think Boris’s comparison of anti-capitalist protestors with the orcs of Mordor referred more to the appearance and behaviour of the protestors as much as their political allegiance. And, perhaps, the fact that protestors and orcs alike are soulless automata that blindly follow the bidding of some totalitarian authority, of course.
IMO, the most important part of that sentence the great mayor inked comes at its beginning (and, if you think about it, it begins with Chaucer and leads to Eliot, particularly since he deploys “when” which alludes to “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote” and the other shoe dropping, “April is the cruelest month . . .”; thus, Lenten Bless in this, The Post-Postalholic Waste Land
).p.s. Nice CyberDigs, Henry and regards to our girrafegrrl, my heroine (thanks to Maxine)– http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/Booksblog/
Wow, Judith – that’s quite some analysis. I wouldn’t be surprised though, given Boris’s erudition.
Well, he did write that utterly gorgeous column calling for that radical right-wing idea, you know, the one where he pushed poetry for all its worth and scored a few points in that area, a few salient points worth their weight in withits?(And, yeah, if it were any other statesman in this century, I wouldn’t even give them the credit of consideration; but, Boris? Well, that’s what I call something-special delivery. We are blessed to have him among us. What a mind! What a man! What a fab wardrobe
! I say we circulate a petition to make him Prime Minister of Canada (in his spare time, LOL). Wonder if Mr. B. Clegg could begin a co-op poem on that subject? Okay, I admit it: The sky’s no limit when it comes to serial sillinesses; but, give my best regards to our Mini-Grrl, eh? K . . .– http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/Booksblog/