Boris’ Mental Health Smear Problem

Cometh the hour, cometh … gosh readers, where’s Bozza? The thought had clearly entered to those of a right-leaning disposition that, with the polls refusing to show conclusive movement one way or the other, The Blue Team should be doing a little “weaponising” of its own. So in today’s Mail On Sunday, out came the Tories’ big one (ooer). Yes, it was time for Beano Boris to take centre stage. Cripes chaps!

The MoS was so convinced of Bozza’s relevance to the General Election campaign, and not just in London, that it splashed his intervention on the front page: “BORIS: THIS IS A BATTLE FOR BRITAIN”. Oh dear, he’s pretending to be Winshton again. This might play not necessarily to the Tories’ advantage. “Just think of the horror of Red Ed taking Britain back to the 70s - and you'll know why this is a fight we MUST NOT lose” the MoS tells.

Whenever politicians evoke the seventies, it’s a fair assumption that they’re getting desperate. And when Bozza gets desperate, he always does one thing: he starts throwing mental health smears around. Those who have experienced his getting rattled during Mayor’s Question Time (MQT) at City Hall know all about this, as Adam Bienkov, now at politics.co.uk noted last year.

“Boris's insults almost all based on mental health. Opponents are ‘mad’, ‘insane’, ‘nuts’, ‘depressed’ & in one case ‘care in the community’” he observed. It’s the same with his MoS article: we hear of “Labour government trying to impose … insane solutions … it seems to me to be deranged that we could be even contemplating going back to such arrangements now”. Bozza gets the smear brush out.

And what is his example of the go-ahead economy that would accord with the instincts of Himself Personally Now? You’ll love this: “Think of London’s new hop-on hop-off Routemaster bus, a glorious piece of low-carbon technology and one of the greenest new buses on the market – made in Northern Ireland by Wrightbus”. Overweight, overpriced, no more fuel-efficient than other buses, unreliable, and, ah yes, the weather’s been warm.

That means the complaints about the BozzaMaster’s useless air cooling system have been ramping up - in April. And don’t get me started on the all-door boarding and subsequent rampant fare evasion. But what Bozza waving his arms, deploying a few instances of “gosh” and “crikey”, and calling opponents “mad” does not address is that his party is not making a decisive breakthrough in the polls.

Add to that this morning’s lamentably bad performance by Young Dave before the host’s inquisition on The Andy Marr Show (tm), to follow an equally bad one by the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, and no amount of huffing and puffing in the pages of the MoS is going to improve matters, certainly not from a politician whose record in London is at best mediocre, and whose popularity outside the capital is, shall we say, untested.

The Tories will have to do better than Bozza’s last-minute scribbling. Yikes readers!