From top: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson; Dan Boyle

Boris Johnson seeks comparison with Winston Churchill. The better comparison would be with Alex Douglas-Home, the rather dull, unelected and ultimately unelectable, Prime Minister, defeated in the 1964 British General Election, mere months after Johnson himself was born.

Churchill was a product of Harrow and the military college at Sandhurst. Hume, like Johnson, was a scion of Eton and Oxford.

It isn’t difficult to see why Johnson wants to invite the Churchill comparison. He has even gone to the trouble of writing a biography of him.

Churchill undoubtedly is a British/English icon, but he was also a deeply flawed individual. Perhaps this is what Johnson identifies with.

Politically promiscuous, Churchill flitted between the Liberals and The Tories. Johnson’s chameleon-like behaviour saw him become a liberal Mayor of London, only later to embrace Brexitism as his preferred route to Downing Street.

Like Churchill, Johnson chose journalism as an entry portal for politics. Although the jingoism both wrote could hardly be described as journalism.

Johnson has practised a politics not based on values but on vanity. His strategic approach not calculated but more informed by fantasy.

Churchill, at least, seems to have had convictions. Even if they were often horribly applied.

If Brexit wasn’t a thing Johnson probably would have another context to define himself. His promise to lie before the bulldozers to prevent an additional runway being developed at Heathrow Airport, was an obvious attempt to add an green string to his bow.

Although in what has become typical Johnsonian logic, his proposal to avoid further environmental degradation at Heathrow was to suggest the building of an entirely new airport elsewhere.

His Kubla Khan garden bridge over the River Thames seems to have come from a similar place.

Subsquently abandoned by his successor as Mayor, this project encapsulates two defining features of his political career.

The first being a tendency to attach himself to the most immediate, most superficially popular cause. The second being an obvious lack of nous to succeed on those areas he has deliberately chosen not to understand.

The carefully cultivated persona of Boris would be considerably undermined if the the British and international media referred to him by his actual name – Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson.

If de Pfeffel was the media tagline instead of Boris, it would be a far more representative of the privilege and entitlement his barmy Brexit army have come to represent.

Stripped to his essence, at the heart of Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson is an emptiness, a hollowness, a shallowness. England deserves better. So do we.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

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