We wondered how he would respond to a crisis. Now we know – and it’s hard to think of anyone less able to inspire confidence
In his one phrase that everyone knows, Karl Marx wrote that Hegel was right that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice”, but he forgot to add: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx was comparing the fatuous mid-19th-century French politicians posing for the original revolutionists, and “the nephew for the uncle”: the opera buffa seizure of power by Napoleon III in 1851 besides the first Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1799. What words would Marx have found to scorn “Boris for Winston”?
Six years ago Boris Johnson published The Churchill Factor, which one learned reviewer called“a self-aggrandising pot-boiler”. But his more besotted admirers have since taken up his own implied comparison. The Daily Telegraph, once an austerely honest newspaper, has morphed into a teenybopper Boris fanzine, with columnist Tim Stanley shouting: “It’s time critics saw Boris for the Churchillian figure he is.”
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