WHATEVER ONE MAY THINK of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Mayor of London, it has to be acknowledged that he is as much fun as a barrel of monkeys. Although technically on the right, Mr Johnson was for a long time the most entertaining guest host of Have I got News for You, a television extension of the satirical magazine Private Eye, which spends a good deal of its time ridiculing people in power, like Johnson, including Johnson himself. To his eternal credit, Boris has never held any grudge against anyone making fun of him, particularly as he is the first to do so.
NEW YORK-BORN JOHNSON, a descendant of Turkish intelligentsia, German aristocracy and English, German and Scots nobility, has every reason not to have a clue about who he is, but anyone who knows their onions expects a good laugh whenever he has a microphone thrust upon him.
TODAY WAS NO EXCEPTION. At the opening of the utterly futile waste of money deemed the London Velodrome, in anticipation of the equally wasteful London Olympics 2012, his comic speech in praise of the building suggested a subtext revealing what Boris thinks when he is at home, away from the public eye.
“THE ROSY HUE”, he informed us, as if quoting from Homer, “of the building is due to it having been rubbed with rhubarb juice.” “Thus”, we were told, “the velodrome has been a great boost to England.” (my italics). English rhubarb growers have benefited greatly, and a new craft has been born: that of rhubarb rubbers, a profession which, stated Johnson, has a rosy future.
IF IT IS NOT CLEAR TO THOSE RESPONSIBLE for staging the Olympic Games that Johnson thinks the whole affair is no more than ego-masturbation, just as was the case when he insulted the Chinese authorities four years ago with the underlying joke in his famous “ping-pong is coming home” statement at the changing of batons over the Olympics, then I judge that the egg on politicians’ faces needs more than anti-subtext tissues for it to be removed.
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