Boris Johnson

i.

What an amazing way to run a war on terror. The Libyans have a leader who genuinely has a record as long as your arm in sponsoring terror; and he gets the kiss from Blair, because Libya has signalled that it is willing to do business with the West.

In Iraq, by contrast, we had a man who positively rejected the al-Qa’eda network, and who was rejected by them, and who was not associated – in spite of all the nudge-and-wink suggestions of the Bush administration – with any particular group of terrorists or terrorist outrages. And what do we do? We whack him, at considerable cost, and remove his regime; and to be frank I am delighted that we have got rid of Saddam.

That last sentence….clearly Boris had it in mind to write that we should have left Saddam and gone for Gaddafi, but then realised he was heading up his arse with this one, so quickly tacked on that last phrase – which unfortunately makes the whole paragraph incoherent, as well as being rubbish.

He finishes with this touching tale:

The other day a group of schoolchildren came to see me here in Westminster, and a 10-year-old girl stuck up her hand and said, please, she was worried about being blown up in the House of Commons. Was I worried?

I told her very firmly not to worry, and that everything would almost certainly be all right, and that she had less chance of being blown up than she had of being blinded by a champagne cork or decapitated by a Frisbee.

But, afterwards, I must confess that I felt slightly angry that this child should be so troubled, and I blame the grown-ups, and in particular Tony Blair. He made a speech in Sedgefield recently that was quite absurd from a public figure who is meant to be providing reassurance, and encouraging people to go about their businesses as normal.

He said that we were all in “mortal peril” and painted an apocalyptic picture of the threat. Even as I write, his scaremongering is being acted upon by the architects at Westminster. A great pontoon is apparently to be constructed in the river, so that we may not be attacked by al-Qa’eda speedboats. […]

Yes, there is a threat, but we have had terrorist threats for years in this country. We have had bombs in London and Birmingham and Manchester, but we never said we were “at war”.

There is only one reason why the Prime Minister uses this rhetoric, and tries to keep us on a “war footing”, and that is his guilty conscience over a different war, where there turned out to be no threat to us at all.

This is the voice of a man who hasn’t got a clue.