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November 10, 2005

BoJo and MoSo

I've gone after a couple of Monte Solberg's more notably offside/silly posts in the past, but I don't think I've never adequately expressed how much I appreciate the fact that he's sticking his neck out there on a regular basis. This, for instance, isn't great writing, but it's a refreshingly cranky reaction to a ridiculous Liberal gambit:

Paul [Martin] was in the newspaper on the weekend saying that, you know, we really shouldn't have an election now because the Libs wouldn't have the chance to fix the drinking water problem on reserves.
…
… I think we owe it to the Prime Minister to give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, have they really had enough time? As everyone knows you can't solve the drinking water problem in just twelve years. Study after study shows that it ALWAYS takes twelve years and five months to fix a drinking water problem on a reserve.

Last February Warren Kinsella famously predicted that Solberg's blog "won't last a year." He still has time to be right, of course, but any and all minor missteps thus far have blown over quickly. I sincerely hope that Canadians' manifest tolerance for politicians who are jewel thieves or borderline drug addicts is indicative of their tolerance for those who speak their minds. Ideally this would be accompanied by a similar tolerance from the media, who are well trained in the art of turning any politician's mind-speaking into a national scandal, however pathetic or short-lived.

British MP Boris Johnson, on whom regular readers will by now have noticed I have something of a non-sexual crush, needn't worry about such silliness. (His dismissal of one of his own personal mini-scandals as "an inverted pyramid of piffle" is one of my all-time favourite lines.) In fact, he has chosen this moment in his career(s), when he is widely being touted as one of David Cameron's lieutenants-in-waiting, to regale Telegraph readers with tales of his undergraduate buffoonery:

All I will say in my defence is that it was very late at night, I was about 19, in exceedingly high spirits, and apart from anything else, m'lud, I was plastered. Some events took place that might charitably be described as high jinks. I remember something to do with a bicycle, and dark deeds involving plastic cones.
…
At any rate the party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens, and trying to escape some police dogs. We were eventually rounded up and put in Oxford police station, about six to a cell.

This was a story about how Johnson doesn't trust the police, if you can believe it, and the ostensibly non-partisan pleasure he therefore took in Tony Blair's 90-day detention proposal being shot down in flames — My Life as a Toffee-Nosed 19-Year Old Post-Etonian Yob, basically, segueing into My Life as a Sharp-Tongued Tabloid-Hating Tory who Doesn't Like the Police. Canada is not ready for a politician such as Johnson, which is just as well since none are forthcoming, but it would certainly be nice if honest, forthright people with pasts just as imperfect as everybody else's could enter politics knowing they at least had a chance in hell of winning. Whether it's the media, the political parties or Canadians themselves standing in the way, I've never quite been sure.

Posted by Chris Selley at November 10, 2005 10:19 PM

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Comments

Posted by: matthew at November 10, 2005 10:54 PM

Posted by: Chris Selley at November 10, 2005 11:02 PM

Posted by: nic at November 12, 2005 10:16 PM