Boris Johnson: the nation’s love-in continues along with the Mayor’s linguistic virtuosity

Smurfette added: “Why is Boris Johnson not a full time comedian yet?” And Mia said: “Boris will you marry me? pls bby x”

Mr Johnson was reelected Mayor by only a narrow margin over Labour rival Ken Livingstone in May.

But his popularity soared during the Olympics, particularly after he challenged Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for the United States presidency, who had questioned Londoners’ enthusiasm for the Games.

David Cameron has been forced to deny that he finds Mr Johnson an irritant, brushing off a spate of opinion polls suggesting that the Mayor would be a far more popular choice than him to be Prime Minister.

But the Telegraph columnist continues to be a thorn in Mr Cameron’s side.

In his latest unhelpful pronouncement, he claimed that the Prime Minister, who was at the exclusive Eton College at the same time as him, had deliberately fluffed a question about the Magna Carta on the David Letterman show to avoid appearing elitist.

Classics scholar Mr Johnson said: ”I think he was only pretending. I think he knew full well what Magna Carta means.

”It was a brilliant move in order to show his demotic credentials and that he didn’t have Latin bursting out of every orifice.”

4 thoughts on “Boris Johnson: the nation’s love-in continues along with the Mayor’s linguistic virtuosity”

  1. Boris Johnson ‘would be a far more popular choice to be Prime Minister’? Listen mate, Samuel Johnson would be a more popular choice than David Cameron….

  2. I just love the way Boris tries to undermine everything Dave does. They really hate each other. Personally I can’t believe Boris didn’t know West Ham’s Geoff Hurst was the hat trick hero. They are the team moving into the Olympic Stadium Boris.. you know.. soon to be renamed the Boris Johnson Memorial Ground.

  3. Dear Boris This article in NY Times is a must read:

    Flight 121 from Paris to New York began on a clear autumn afternoon. It ended over 30 hours later. For those of us without miles, it is probably still going.

    The initial delay was a mere hour or two. Some were told that our aircraft possessed faulty tires and brakes. Others were told that the crew could not find their way in from Paris. Neither scenario was particularly encouraging.

    The aircraft was indeed an interesting one. One of the overhead baggage compartments was held together with masking tape. Halfway across the Atlantic you decided to turn Flight 121 back because your altimeter wasn’t working. Some of us were worried for our safety, but your employees mostly shrugged as if to say, Ah, there goes that altimeter again.

    And so you took us to Merrie England for a spell.

    At Heathrow, fire trucks met us because we landed “heavy,” i.e., still full of fuel we never got to spend over the Atlantic. At the terminal, a woman in a spiffy red American Airlines blazer was sent to greet us. But the language she spoke — Martian — was not easily understood, versed as we were in Spanish, English, Russian and Urdu.

    Using her Martian language skills, the American Airlines woman proposed to take us “through the border” at Heathrow, for a night of rest before we resumed our journey the next morning. An apocalyptic scenario: an employee of the world’s worst airline assigned to the world’s worst border crossing at the world’s worst airport.

    The Martian took us to one immigration lane, which promptly closed. Then another, with the same result. A third, ditto. Despite her blazer, the Martian was obviously not the ally we had made her out to be. So, ducking under security ropes, knocking some down entirely, we rushed the border with our passports held aloft, proclaiming ourselves the citizens of a fading superpower.

    Come morning, you, American Airlines, provided us with a free, daylong tour of Heathrow Airport. By bus. The bus brought us to our new plane, but the doors of the bus would not open. We stood, pressed to one another, in sweltering heat, as the plane was sprayed down for no reason we could discern. It would have been nice, in retrospect, had you sprayed us down, or at least given us something to drink. After an hour, we were told this flight would be canceled because this plane, too, had caught ill. Back to the terminal once more.

    It became clear that the older and more feeble of us would be at a disadvantage. A 70-year-old cannot rush past 140 gates to check in for yet another canceled flight with the same brio as a 20-year-old. Some of us started to cry. Not because the journey was never ending, but because you can be told that you are not a human being only so many times.

    And then you stopped telling us. The American Airlines representatives we were promised failed to materialize. One passenger told us this was all part of the union’s strategy to destroy the airline. All I know is that with each encounter, I steadily began to feel that your employees were prisoners just like us, armed only with their little walkie-talkies from which issued tinny instructions, lost communiqués from some distant Oz.

    “This used to be a great airline,” one old-timer said as we were sweltering to death on the bus. I know you were. And I know you are not alone in failure. An American diplomat based in Moscow tells me he prefers flying Aeroflot to Delta. But Delta is a futuristic paradise of working altimeters and braking brakes when compared with you, dear American Airlines. So what can you do? Empires rise and empires fall. A metaphor you may need to consider closely.

    Gary Shteyngart is the author of the novels “Super Sad True Love Story” and “Absurdistan.”

    New York Times

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/a-trans-atlantic-trip-turns-kafkaesque.html?_r=1&

Comments are closed.