Marina Hyde - The UK's Foreign Office diplomatic classifications now number four. They comprise: Europeanist, Arabist, Atlanticist and Piss Artist
Whichever way you
slice it, Boris Johnson’s appointment forces an urgent update of the
traditional Foreign Office diplomatic classifications. They now comprise:
Europeanist, Arabist, Atlanticist and Piss Artist.
The Boris news is not
so much a cabinet appointment as a three-episode comic subplot in Downton
Abbey. It casts the UK as one of those failing theme parks where bad actors
wander round pretending to be from olden times, even though their backdrop is a
stinking food court and signs reading THIS TOILET IS OUT OF ORDER.
According to the
cartographers, the sheer reach of Boris’s insults forms an alternative empire on
which the sun never sets. Boris Johnson would have represented a parodic view
of Britain in 1959. That was the year of release of the lovely movie Carlton-Browne
of the FO, which satirises the misplaced vanity and upper class ineptitude
of the post-imperial Foreign Office. Never mind history repeating itself as
farce. This is a Terry-Thomas farce
repeating itself as history.
Still, we gave the
world all the great games – amirite, Brits? – and this is just the latest one.
The race is now on to come up with the most accurate description of the UK at
this moment in its national journey. I’ll start the ball rolling with
“auto-satirical cardboard deathstar”, but expect other countries to swiftly
come out on top. As they have in all the other games we invented.
In the meantime, there are so many
questions about the style Johnson will bring to the global stage. Does he refer
to America as “the new world”? Are there any countries he has yet to mug off?
Will he trail future diplomatic incidents in his Telegraph column? Is it going
to be possible for ironists to get him, Putin, and Donald Trump in a photo –
the Yalta conference of extreme narcissism?
... my favourite bit of film
yet to emerge came on Wednesday night, and features the three most senior Foreign Office mandarins welcoming Boris to his new
Whitehall home. Is it CGI? Because I’m watching three men literally ageing
10 years in the process of a single minute’s footage. Here they are at the
door, failing to hide the fact that they’re mentally cancelling their weekend
plans – cancelling weekends, really – and preparing to make calls to 112
countries to offer a variant on “Yes, yes, well I’m sure he didn’t really mean
it. He’s quite a character, you know!”
By the time they’re
leading Johnson up the staircase, they are wearing the silent screams of people
who know a non-medicated solution is now off the table, who now regard the
decades of managed decline in their once-great office as the halcyon years, and
whose diary entries that night will read simply: “Suez on a zipwire”.
