Boris Johnson: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

the United Kingdom home of fascinating wildlife like The Fearless mating foxes of Kent and beautiful mountains that go largely unexplored by the carefree mating foxes of Kent it's also home to some of the world's most gifted artists like whomever took this picture of the stoic mating foxes have Kent unfortunately the UK is about to be completely in a way not unlike the resigned mating foxes of Kent the UK had some very big news the UK has a new prime minister Boris Johnson took over today from Theresa May sealing the transition of power in a handshake with a queen he bowed then broke the rules by telling his new staff what she said exactly and it was apparently and I quote Deez Nuts so true she said it to every prime minister since Winston Churchill and she won't say why but yes incredibly Britain's new prime minister is Boris Johnson and even if you know nothing about British politics you're probably already vaguely aware of him as mayor of London he famously got stuck on a zip line while promoting the 2012 Olympics and if you've ever seen a photo of him you will probably remember it because it's honestly hard to find one where he doesn't look ridiculous in fact everything about his appearance is consistently immaculately wrong here is wearing a bike helmet but somehow both too small and too big for his head that's not easy to do here is looking like what would happen if an egg could be both hairy and sad even his childhood pictures are funny because here he is looking more like a young and a winter than I'm guessing she did at that age you might even have seen this clip that went viral recently of Boris's endearingly weird answer to a very simple question about what he does to relax I have a thing where I make models of Bieber lies in love where Marilyn that we build a beautiful I make busses you make models a bus I make models of fast see they're going down sister so so what I do know what I do mean models about what I make is I get I get old I don't like wooden crates yeah right and then I paint them making cold oscillate that's what you do to enjoy yourself hey no I paint the passengers enjoying themself okay great wonderful bus okay so so three things about that one yes it's magnificent - there's just no way that's true but three if it were true I now want nothing more than to see one of those buses because if they're terrible that's weird but if they're impressive that's somehow weirder the very idea of the new Prime Minister painting crates buses in his spare time to relax is just endlessly fascinating but Boris is so much more than the potential Michelangelo of vehicular crafts he was an absolutely crucial leader in the brexit campaign famously riding around in a gigantic red non crate bus with a complete lie splashed across the side of it and now he is Prime Minister and has to face the challenge of finalizing a brexit withdraw deal by October 31st which is less than 100 days from now and the consequences of messing that up could have catastrophic ramifications for Britain Europe and the world so tonight we thought it might be helpful to explain who exactly Boris Johnson is and let's start with the fact that given that Britain's new leader is a clownish vicar with silly hair and a passing relationship with the truth you may already be thinking of the person you're almost always thinking about anyway and you are not alone in that there've been countless headlines comparing Boris to Donald Trump and just this week Trump did it himself they're saying Britain Trump they can't print trap and people are saying that's a good thing that they like me over there no they don't they don't they absolutely do not they they don't like you over there and no one ever says Britain Trump unless it's in the context of a sentence like I'm getting the out of Britain Trump is coming to visit this weekend but two colorful brittle truck is neither exactly wrong no exactly right Johnson is actually a lot more complex than Trump in a number of important ways for one while Trump tells you he has the best words but doesn't Johnson is more than happy to show you how erudite he is just watch him charmingly drop some sporting trivia ahead of the London Olympics ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England it was and it was called with Wow I think you have central difference between us and the rest of the world other nations the French looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity gab dinner we looked at the dining table and sort of duty to play with what I wanted mix that is objectively funny although I'm not sure that that with woth anecdote reflects quite as well on the British as he's implying there the French looked at the dining table as a canvas upon which to create exceptional cuisine and the British saw a way to basically invent Moss tennis and look Johnson is more than happy to look ridiculous it enabled him to not just survive when he up but actually benefit that observes zipline photo from the Olympics would have killed most politicians careers the Boris found a way to laugh at himself and charm everyone just watch how it got covered on the news at the time isn't that fantastic this is a man whose summer tipping as a future prime minister look I think if anyone has won the Olympics I would say it's Boris Johnson oh hold on man if anyone want me Olympics to be clear people definitely won the Olympics specifically the winners the winners won the Olympics and in a nutshell that has been the root of Boris's appeal a lovable mess weathering adversity with humor and good cheer but the truth is there may be a great deal more calculation behind that image than first appears because Boris learned at an early age the benefit of making yourself the butt of the joke as his own sister remembers he discovered he could make people laugh when he was in a French play and he had to recite mallya and he hadn't bothered to learn his lines and he hid behind a pillar reading them out which will obviously much funnier than if he'd learned them perfectly and it stood on a stage and acclaimed them yeah obviously it's always funnier when things go wrong like in this photo of Johnson shaking hands with the Queen Oh Oh what an embarrassing mistake see objectively folia and by the way how are neither of you into this Boris Boris actually learned a great deal from that incident as he himself will admit do you think they do you learned something for later life from acting in plays at Eton that you could actually get more laughs by looking as if you don't know your lines then actually remembering them well I certainly think that as a general tactic in life if that's what you're driving at it is it is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on because the reality may be that you don't know what is going on but people won't be able to tell the difference and that right there is the key to Boris Johnson presenting his own lack of preparation so charmingly that you actually doubt he's unprepared but he is it's an incredibly powerful trick and incidentally it's clips like that that a one major reason why Boris is not the Brittain Trump because can you imagine Trump having that level of self-reflection look with with CAF FA the tactic was to present myself as a kind of sub literate clown to distract you from the fact that I'm a mound of skin totally stretched across the howling chasm of the space where a soul should be that's it's a very useful tool when deployed well the point here is though Johnson's bumbling persona is a carefully calibrated act take his hair multiple people have said he actually messes it up on purpose a BBC producer tweeted that he'd always ruffle it right before the camera started rolling which kind of makes sense doesn't it he's been on TV hundreds of times and he always looks like a mess what were the chances that before every one of those appearances he combed gelled and carefully parted his hair only to then be hit in the face by a goose right as they started filming no he looks like that because he wants to or take his clothing he's often seen outside in eccentric chaotic outfits but he knows how to dress he just also knows that that is a more relatable image than this one from when he was in the notoriously elite Bullingdon Club at Oxford University with his friends David Cameron now that photo was a huge liability for Cameron but not for Johnson because he's cleverly inoculated himself against that image of astonishing privilege by presenting himself as a cartoon Englishman who dresses like a raccoon who just emerged from David Foster Wallace's trash and once you realise what he's doing it makes you question everything that you previously found charming about him remember that clip were is talking about painting buses undeniably funny but some in Britain have pointed out that it might have been an attempt to change the Google search results people receive when they look for something like Boris Johnson bus meaning that people would see that delightful clip rather than this significantly less delightful now was that actually his intention it's impossible to know but you can't rule it out either and once you see the possibility that his gaps are in fact calculated manipulations you can't unsee it it's like looking at the FedEx logo and finally noticing the arrow or or looking at the Starbucks logo and finally noticing Robert De Niro's face we can never look at it in quite the same way again and beneath all abhorrest his surface charm are some truly nasty elements for one thing he is a liar as a young journalist he was fired from his first job at the Times of London for completely making up a quote in fact his editor claimed Johnson was the single worst employee he's ever had and skipped many work dates to hang out with his best friend Jeffrey Epstein which is terrible it's not true I just made that quota but now you can see just how irresponsible it is to fabricate them and from there Johnson failed upwards to a job at the Daily Telegraph where he built a following on a series of flagrant falsehoods about the European Union as their Brussels correspondent falsehoods that would help lay the groundwork for the brexit vote decades later Johnson even admits they had something called a save get it's a key command like a copy/paste of a phrase that he'd like to use to paint a caricature of the EU I had a sort of save get we didn't have saved get keys a save get kind of intro which was Britain stood alone last night as and then I would fill in whatever it was as Europe proceeded with plans to abolish the porn cocktail flavor crisp or whatever so first for those unfamiliar prawn cocktail crisps are real they shouldn't be but they are and to explain how it happened it's what happens when a country looks at the dining table and for gos foods in favor of playing with one Johnson Johnson actually write a series of columns claiming Europe was attempting to ban the prawn cocktail crisps which was a complete lie Europe was never planning to abolish them and they immediately pointed that out but Boris's allegation spread like wildfire and became a popular example of an out-of-control EU and as recently as 2016 a full 25 years after his was completely debunked Boris actually cited the great wall against the British prawn cocktail crisps as part of his case for brexit and by the way if there ever is a great war against the prawn cocktail crispy there will be no winners believe me because I will say this it's like eating a permeated mermaid but but in a bad way oh that's bad it would be bad enough if Boris were just a liar but he's also been more than willing to tap into outright bigotry to get ahead he's made repeated references to some immigrants as people that want to leech off the state and over the years he's made references to pickaninnies he said the people of Congo had watermelon smiles he's called gay men tank chopped bum boys and just last year there was this they look like letterboxes Boris Johnson wrote on Monday he even compared women who wear them to bank robbers that is an appalling comment that leaves a truly disgusting taste in your mouth much like the shrimp crisp dust that has very much voted to remain on my tongue and look when reporters camped outside Johnson's house he really turned the cartoon version of himself up to 11 ruffling up his hair donning an absurd outfit and waddling out to charm them and just watch how depressingly effective it winds up solely on a humanitarian mission because you've been here all day and you've been incredibly patient and incredibly and I feel very sorry for you because I had nothing to say about this about it no don't take the tea and do not thank him for it because think about what just happened there he referred to Muslim women as letterboxes and in the space of 30 seconds he had them laughing along with him he was in trouble he put on full Brett face and those journalists fell for it and for the record I can say Brit face you can't I can definitely say it we can say it together you can't say it at all that's the rule but but unfortunately Boris the Prime Minister may have just hit the limits of where that charm can take him because crucially he now has less than a hundred days to negotiate a brexit deal and his well-engineered clumsy Brits persona does not necessarily travel well we saw that during his time as foreign secretary in 2017 he was in Myanmar where for some reason he kept muttering Rudyard Kipling's colonialist poem Mandalay to himself come you back register what this [Music] the Ambassador is quick to spot that reminding their hosts of British rule might not be wise [Music] is it good stuff or is that actually bad stuff because I would argue as a foreign secretary it's best not to remind people of when your country subjugated theirs for more than a century it honestly would have been more diplomatic at that point for him to recite the lyrics to my neck my back parentheses lick it by kya my neck my back lick my and my crack good stuff good stuff John says time in the Foreign Office was littered with gas as this journalist explained with the help of a visual aid I've spoken to one figure who said that working with Boris Johnson is like walking a few feet behind a horse shovelling its is a striking quote well I'm not really sure why that journalist felt the need to be next to a horse to deliver how did he pitch that to this fable owner look I'm just worried that people have forgotten what horses look like so please stand aside while I humiliate your animal on the news and the problem is if Johnson messes up the brexit negotiation the pile up of could be considerable here as most economists believe a No Deal brexit would cause a deep recession and the EU may be extra immune to Boris his charms remember he was a key figure in the brexit campaign and has lied about them for decades in his newspaper columns on top of which he is privately referred to the French as turds and publicly compared the EU to Hitler so he's not working with a lot of goodwill at this point and Boris has made extravagant uncapable promises including that he will somehow devise a way to sever Northern Ireland from the EU without creating a hard border with Ireland but his ejections cannot work and EU commissioner jean-claude Juncker has responded pretty clearly to them young Curie iterated that the e u--'s position that the withdrawal agreement is the best and only agreement possible in other words Yoker said no to Johnson yeah of course he did so Johnson is out of luck at this point he's bumbling charm may wonders in low stakes situations but that's not where he is now thinking think of it like this Hugh Grant is delightful in romantic comedies the stammering the hesitation the inability to relate to his immediate surroundings with any level of competence you want to see Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a funeral but no one wants to see him in United 93 because the context would make his character a lot less charming sorry I just um well this is a really stupid question but particularly in view of your recent is your heart but but I just wondered if by any chance in the words of David Cassidy when he was a still with the Partridge Family I believe you might be persuaded to shushu dollar will it obviously this play believe you say because situation that matters because Johnson cannot get what he wants or has promised here and his only hope of avoiding complete catastrophe is through focus discipline and detail but those are three Achilles heels of his I'll show you one of his great plans for mitigating the potentially catastrophic effects of a No Deal brexit is to suggest that if the UK misses that October deadline it could simply trade freely with the EU under article 24 paragraph 5 B of this existing trade agreement but and you do not need to know the details of this the very next paragraph 5c makes it clear that that is simply not possible and just watch as a journalist who actually understood that challenge Johnson on it you talk about article 5 B article 24 detail right Andrew how article 24 paragraph 5 and how would you handle paragraph 5 C I would was I would confide entirely in paragraph 5 B because that is how would you get round what's in 5 C I would confide entirely in paragraph 5 B which is do you know what purposes no oh that--no was delivered with the confidence of a man who doesn't know what he's talking about but thinks it doesn't matter it's a no that says yeah I'm full of so what just walk a few feet behind me and clean it up with a shovel but but that lack of attention to detail for a process that has the potential to impact millions of people is really alarming and there is no reason for much hope here because all of the skills that helped Johnson to become Prime Minister will not paper over all of the deficits that are going to make him terrible at that job Johnson has now backed himself into a corner because Parliament has rejected the --use deal the EU says there is no better deal to be had there is really no good way out of this meaning that he's pretty much now stranded and not not the charming kind of strategy that means you've somehow won the Olympics because this time that zipline isn't over Olympic spectators it's over a volcano it's set to erupt in three months time and the only people who can help get him down are the same people he's accused of being turds and Hitler's and unfortunately for Johnson Britain Europe and the world I just don't think he's going to be able to with laughs his way out of this one you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 10,106,535

Rating: 4.8064036 out of 5

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Id: dXyO_MC9g3k

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Green_Ari]

I feel bad that he thought that crisp tasted so bad. I wanted to offer him a Bud Light Lime to get the taste out of his mouth.

[u/armcie]

Here's a wonderful, somewhat lengthy, piece by Jeremy Vine talking about Boris' carefully planned carelessness.

In summary:

Boris showed up late to an awards ceremony where he'd forgotten he was giving a speech. Rambled on with an anecdote about sheep, told a long joke and forgot the punchline, and had to look at the posters to check where he was. The crowd loved it.

18 months later Vine was at another event. Boris turned up late. Forgot he was meant to be speaking. Gave a rambling anecdote about sheep, forgot the same punchline and turned around at the same moment to check what event he was at.

[u/everadvancing]

Jesus christ, that clip of him being a foreign secretary on a trip to Myanmar quoting colonialist bullshit from Kipling is like something out of Veep.

[u/magicsonar]

Great piece by John Oliver. The only bit i would contest is at the end where Olivers says in reference to Brexit

"Because Johnson cannot get what he wants or what he has promised."

I disagree. Johnson wants a hard Brexit. He doesn't want a deal nor do the people behind Johnson. So the question then becomes: if he calls an early election prior to Oct 31, can he win it? If he doesn't call an election, can Johnson somehow manipulate Parliament to accept a hard No Deal Brexit? The key thing Johnson has on his side is, if nothing is done, a No Deal Brexit goes into effect by default. So his challenge isn't to make a deal, his challenge is to get away with doing nothing. He's pretty good at that.

[u/westbamm]

Every segment about Boris Johnson starts with making jokes about how goofy he looks.

That is fucking brilliant, because they can spend less time about what he does.

So if you want to go in politics, look goofy and you can do whatever you want, because the Media mostly talks about that.

[u/grambell789]

I just have one question for Bois, 'whats the status of the 350m in NIH savings from Bexit?'

[u/overseergti]

FAKE NEWS!! Prawn Cocktail crisps are awesome.

[u/dudewherearewe]

Anyone have a mirror? The vid seems to be unavailable.

[u/manaworkin]

Wow that tea bit was horrifyingly charming.