Bozo Blames NI Brexit Mess On Labour

Over a decade ago, the man who at the time was London’s very occasional Mayor vented his spleen over the rising tide of allegations of phone hacking, the claims that those working for the now late and not at all lamented Screws had been intercepting voicemail messages on an industrial scale in order to secure, and more importantly, stand up stories.

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (for it was he) was having none of it. As Dave Hill reported for the Guardian, “Asked by Labour assembly member Joanne McCartney about any conversations he had had with police at the time, Johnson replied that ‘to the best of memory I was satisfied with the police position, which was that no new information had been substantively revealed and therefore nothing more was going to be done. So I don't think I actually had any conversations’”. And there was more.

He had dismissed concerns over the Screws’ behaviour “as ‘codswallop’ that ‘looks like a politically motivated put-up job by the Labour party’”. Hill added the ominous coda “The mayor's playing down of the phone-hacking affair comes as a number of high-profile alleged victims begin legal action against the News of the World”.

And we know how well that Bozo prediction turned out. So when The Great Man pulls the “look over there at Labour” stunt when he’s in a tight corner, it is a manoeuvre that should start alarm bells ringing. Fast forward to the run-up to the 2019 General Election, and he was at it again. This time, the subject was the Northern Ireland Protocol.

During an interview with Sophy Ridge of Sky News, she put to Bozo “Last month, you told businesses in Northern Ireland that they would face no forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind under your Brexit deal … how come, then, that this Government document that was leaked this week says that that’s not true, that there will be checks and forms”.

Bozo wasn’t having that. His deal “allows the whole of the UK to come out of the EU, and the only checks that there would be, would be if something was coming from GB via Northern Ireland and was going on to the Republic, then there might be checks … there’s no question of there being checks on goods going NI - GB, or GB - NI”.

Then came the giveaway: “This is another of these things that has been produced by the Labour Party”. But what Ms Ridge had put to him was the right story: he, and his impossibly overrated Brexit supremo David Frost had signed up to checks, and Bozo then appeared to do his usual party trick, and lied through his teeth about it.

And, once again, when Bozo says it’s a Labour stunt, he means it is in fact dead right, and he’s been caught out (again). Or, as the BBC has put it - rather well - in its latest report, “The government said border checks on goods from Great Britain it signed up to in the 2019 Brexit divorce deal had proved unsustainable”. Checks it signed up to.

Ominously, we then read “The EU said it would not agree to renegotiate the terms of the 2019 deal”. Because the people in Brussels have had enough of Bozo and Frostie talking the piss, banging on about “purism”, which actually means “sticking to the rules”. Allowing an open door to the European Single Market ain’t going to happen.

So when Bozo tells interviewers to “look over there at Labour” - he’s bang to rights.

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