By TERRY MANNERS
THE GROUNDSWELL of hate for Boris Johnson that ultimately led to his downfall spread way beyond the Opposition benches the new liberal elite media and the trendy supper parties in Westminster and Camden.
True, its tentacles of unrest finally stretched from Downing Street to the Red Wall heartlands of the Midlands, Northern England and North East Wales which historically supported Labour until 2019, and across the English Channel to Paris and Brussels.
But it's real home, the home of a growing anti-Boris Army with no mercy and an endless tidal wave of Putinesque wrath, came from the internet and social media and found a safe bunker in the dark world of anonymity and a belief that anything goes in war, even class war. That place was Twitter.
Salvos of hate missiles were fired at him from the start of his inglorious reign, fuelled by anti-Brexit emotions; a hatred of Eton and wealth; an unexplained envy of his private sexual encounters and even a belief that he was a mass murderer of Covid victims and should be tried at Nuremberg.
The bombardment never stopped … ‘fraudster, serial adulterer, crook by birth, cheat, brain dead, fat, ugly, thief, traitor, racist and bloated gammon’ were all in the mix, along with four-letter expletives. The British Prime Minister was fair game. He was an easily identifiable target in today’s world of Wokeism, The Workers and anti-patriotism.
The empire was dead, along with Churchill and Victoria … and Boris, an example of it, was dead in their eyes too. Long live a new borderless country for the real working people of the world. Flags were fluttering things to be burned. Statues to be torn down. Heroes forgotten.
Newspapers like the Express and Daily Mail were the home of racism and fascism and their days numbered. People who read them and worse, worked for them like me, were evil and needed to get out of their country. The social reset was coming. Soon the cry was to come that it was white racists who should be put on the planes to Rwanda. There was no debate. The only freedom of speech was their one.
During this time, Boris shrugged off rumours that his apparent narcissism, failure to deal with details, and a growing reputation for deceit might be making him unsuitable to be PM. Did he get a little too big headed about his God-given mission? I think so. He took his eye off the Twitter ball and traded on his personality, believing people adored him for his eccentricity, love of cycling, commitment to green issues and mission to get Brexit done!
Many did and a Cromwellian war began to break out on social media. Boris was no Johnny Depp, but his tousled blonde locks, bumbling quips and ill-fitting jackets were reaching parts of the electorate others couldn’t reach. Many loved him, some women even told of crying at night because he looked crestfallen and many of us rejoiced in having a charismatic character as PM … a cruise missile distance away from the grey days of John Major.
But already the word ‘liar’ was surfacing on Twitter as the most overworked adjective used to describe him, or ‘fucking liar’ as many who struggled with expressing their view in just 30 or so words, would say. And those who disagreed were ‘fucking liars’ too. One irate Corbynite describing him as ‘corrupt and rotten to the core’ called me a ‘hairy fucking armpit facist’ who should be dead by now, for daring to defend the British PM.
Soon, like-minded anti-Borisites were joining the ‘threads’ of abuse and discontent and even the grey men of the Tories such as Heseltine and Davis, were at work throwing in the odd mischievous Tweet. It finally led to the party tumbling headlong into another bout of their periodic mania that resulted in the downfall of Margaret Thatcher years before. The Grey Tories were giving the anti-everything people in their armchairs, new cannon fodder.
By the time Brexit was done, as much as it could be, and Covid had reached our shores, Twitter’s dark bunker was bulging at the seams … the mixture of dissent and hatred coupled with an electorate at war with each other was at crisis point. Covid either did not exist; was a plant by a new world order or genocide by the Boris government seeking to genetically cleanse a revolutionary population.
Most scientists were liars, the in-word even before Partygate; vaccines were believed to be microchipped by Boris so he could boss us around in years to come or were another ruse to bump off the vulnerable elderly and cut costs. Masks didn’t work, hospitals were never struggling with patients, wards were empty, pictures faked and death from the pandemic didn’t happen in India.
Photographs of dead bodies in the street were from another era. It was just flu. Doctors lied. The armchair experts said so. It must be true. Prove it’s not, they said. Ministerial documents were dismissed and findings from scientists without jobs or recognised qualifications, appeared on screen as anti-establishment evidence.
Even when Boris himself was hospitalised with the virus, it was just a propaganda trick to gain votes. Whatever was happening in the world, other countries were coping but not us. Boris was letting things spiral out of control because he didn’t care. He was locking us all up and infringing our human rights. It was him who should be locked up.
He didn’t understand us, what with being born with a silver champagne ladle in his mouth and ermine slippers warming by the fire and all that. How could he? And of course, the majority never voted for him anyway. If we added up the poll figures, including those who didn’t vote, the Tories never won, the bunker claimed. That proved it.
By the time Putin and his rapist conscripts in their outdated tanks rumbled through the forest roads of the Ukraine, some of the angry brigade were claiming it was the West that was destroying civilian buildings, killing babies and transmitting fake pictures of the conflict. Even now, if you mention a well-documented atrocity that happened in the early days of the invasion you are told to prove it by the unbelievers.
It was another plot by Boris and Biden, to take our minds off the problems of the struggling workers at home, now that most people wanted to return to the EU or bring in Corbyn to make us all rich, by nationalising football. Where are the millions of Corbynites today we wonder? They are still with us. Perhaps many of them are in the bunker?
Still Boris couldn’t be dislodged until along came a ghost from lockdown — Partygate — the crime of the century by the PM, of course, even though every other leader in the civilised world locked down their countries too. In the bunker, the anti-Boris brigade found a new regiment to bolt on to … people who had lost loved ones in the pandemic and had not been able to share their last moments. This was truly sad, of course.
But suddenly, and for months from then on, the outraged Labour Party led them into battle when pictures emerged of Boris with a cake and a glass of wine at his lockdown birthday bash. Even though millions of Brits had broken lockdown rules in parks, at beach barbecues, in restaurants, at discos and parties. Even media pundits themselves, we know who they were. Tweets of ‘burn him at the stake’ and ‘the killer of old folk’ were now banded across the net. One party became an orgy of parties with a drunk Boris swaying from room to room, woman to woman.
Meanwhile, others in the Twitter bunker were telling the over-60s to hurry up and ‘push up the daisies so we don’t have to pay your pensions’. Odd values. Odd caring. These were the people claiming to care about plight of the elderly in care homes, of course.
And by the time rich Rishi froze the Triple Lock, pensioners were enemies of the state in the minds of some of the younger anti-everythings … because old ‘gits’ were wealthy on the riches they had stolen from the property market during a time when life was so easy.
As we know, the most recent crisis erupted after lawmaker Chris Pincher, who held a government role involved in pastoral care, quit following accusations he groped men in their private parts at a private club. All the fault of serial adulterer Boris it seems.
The shouting began again from some. Boris became social media’s greatest groper and then he apologised after it emerged he was briefed Pincher had been the subject of previous sexual misconduct complaints before he appointed him. The PM said he had forgotten. That was a ‘lie’ as powerful to the bunker people as denying you murdered your grandmother when you really had.
But apologies aren’t good enough in our new world … the antis wanted him strung up at the gates of Southwark, like William Wallace, and there were some who volunteered to hang, draw and quarter him themselves, even though they may once have groped the private parts of others too. That didn’t count. They weren’t in government.
Media pundits, MPs, churchmen and others joined the Twitter bunker in their disgust. The rest is now history. And as Boris prophetically said: “The herd instinct is powerful — when the herd moves, it moves and, my friends, in politics no one is remotely indispensable.”
When the herd moves on Twitter it is uncontrollable. Let us hope that the removal of charismatic Boris does not leave us with a zombie government of grey people, spending more time worrying about being squeaky clean than the cost of living.
Terry Manners (@telbabe) has 24,656 followers on Twitter
