The Big Smoke

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Funny, aren’t they, all those piccaninnies with their watermelon smiles? All those coloured folks wandering around London singing their songs and doing their dances. And that’s just the dark chaps, what about the working classes? Crikey, they take the biscuit.

Step, if you dare, into the mind of Boris Johnson. A strange yet happy-go-lucky place where the year is 1924, everything is jolly and the poor know their place. Although the atmosphere is pleasantly fictitious, redolent in equal parts of PG Wodehouse and Billy Bunter, the really strange thing about this world view is that Johnson actually believes in it. So much so, he says it out loud. Writes the mad stuff down, even.

Johnson actually did call the black population of the Commonwealth ‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ in an article in The Daily Telegraph six years ago. And despite Johnson’s claims that suggesting this was racist ‘is both untrue and unfair’, some black people – would you credit it? – do think it was racist. Given that, according to Johnson, the accusation is untrue it was revealing that during the furore of the Evening Standard and Channel 4’s attack on Ken Livingstone last week for, well, nothing apparently, Johnson felt obliged to apologise.
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But what is interesting is that, by saying he was ‘sad that people have been offended by those words’, Johnson wasn’t completely apologising for what he said; he was apologising for the fact that people were upset by it. It suggests that the people who were offended were at fault because they don’t share his sense of humour.

But then we didn’t, on the whole, go to Eton or any other major public school, and lack the dazzling wit that comes with the privileged upbringing package. You know, taking the piss out of the funny way foreign people speak English, or talking of ‘chav scum’ when they mean, or I think they mean anyway, human beings.

Bumptious, self-regarding and several light years out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns, Johnson is the supreme product of a baleful public school system that operates as a production line for wankers and, by skimming off resources and the best pupils, actively encourages the educational failure that it is the lot of so many Londoners to endure.

And he seriously wants a say in the running of state schools in the capital? What policies can we expect? Lashings of cream cake and ginger beer? More postal orders and tuck shops?

Johnson presents himself as a PG Wodehouse figure but, funny though they are, Wodehouse’s stories have nothing in common with life in London now and Johnson is not, repeat not, a harmless buffoon intent on nothing more than injecting some Bertie Wooster-style japes into the dull business of local government.

Johnson belongs to a social class that despises ordinary Londoners, be we black, white or brown. Consequently we each of us have an obligation to despise that class right back and, most importantly, to deny it political power.

Never forget that, because believe me: if Johnson wins in May the brays of victory will be heard throughout west London and the Home Counties and on the distant glens and moors where his chums make their sport. It will be a triumph for an archaic social system and a tragedy for what is supposedly a modern, multi-racial, world city. Of course, if Johnson thinks I’m wrong on this we can meet up and talk about it. How about Camberwell, Boris? Lots of grinning piccaninnies, I’m afraid, but the shooting’s good.

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