Fintan O’Toole: Boris Johnson’s gibberish may be surreal but it's also dangerous

It's not when Boris Johnson is lying that you have to have to worry. If he's lying, that just means he's still breathing. No, the real danger sign is the gibbering. It's what he does when he can't be bothered to think up a lie.

Even for someone with so much practice, mendacity takes a bit of effort. When it’s too much trouble, Johnson just babbles. The big problem for Ireland is that his most delirious gush of gabble is about something that matters a great deal to the future of this island: the Northern Ireland protocol to the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

It was inconceivable that the EU would ever have agreed to 'light touch' protection of its precious Single Market. Hence, of course, there is a barrier down the Irish Sea

Last week, Johnson was interviewed by Mark Devenport for an excellent BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight film on the centenary of Northern Ireland. It says much about how inured we have become to the extraordinary fact that this man is the prime minister of the United Kingdom that the interview passed off as a normal event.

In fairness, Johnson did make some effort. He roused himself sufficiently to make up two wild untruths, just for the sake of politeness. But then he gave up and let the stream of consciousness flow.

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Johnson claimed that the Northern Ireland protocol was “always intended to be a light-touch measure” and not to “create any kind of barrier down the Irish Sea”. That’s self-evidently false. It was inconceivable that the EU would ever have agreed to “light touch” protection of its precious Single Market. Hence, of course, there is a barrier down the Irish Sea.

When Johnson signed what he hailed as a “fantastic” deal with the EU, he agreed that goods going from Britain to Northern Ireland would be subject to the EU customs code. The relevant regulation is 2015/2446. It is 557 pages long. To use the kind of classical allusion that Johnson favours, that’s as light touch as a thunderbolt from Zeus.

Article 16

The second fabrication Johnson deigned to concoct was on the very important question of article 16 of the protocol – the bit that allows for its provisions to be suspended. He told Devenport that “it wasn’t the UK that involved Article 16 of the protocol. It was the EU at the end of January, and, you will recall, [it] actually went straight ahead and put a barrier across the island of Ireland for the purposes of forbidding the export of vaccines, would you believe it?”

Well, no you wouldn’t. The EU Commission did very stupidly invoke Article 16 at 4pm on January 29th. It withdrew that action at 9.30pm that same evening. The threat lasted for five-and-a-half hours and there was full acknowledgment that it should never have been made.

But nothing ever happened. To claim that the EU "actually" put a barrier across the island of Ireland is like claiming that Johnson is "actually" the man he so loves to invoke, Winston Churchill.

There are actual consequences for a society whose recovery from a traumatic conflict is still fragile and reversible

These lies, however, can at least be said to be purposeful. The first is consistent with Johnson’s policy of simply denying what he signed. The second distracts from his own repeated threats to break international law by flouting the protocol. The purposes may be nefarious – but some kind of strategy can be descried.

The deeper problem is with what Johnson said when Devenport asked him what he wants to achieve in relation to the protocol: “What we’re doing is removing what I think of as the unnecessary protuberances and barriers that have grown up and we’re getting the barnacles off the thing and sandpapering it into shape.”

Mystic protoplasm

This is when you know Johnson is completely winging it. He lapses into a druggy word association game where sound replaces meaning. So “protocol” suggests “protuberance”. “Barrier” morphs into “barnacles”. The image of the border in the Irish Sea fires in his synapses some memory of boats being hauled onto land and the props being sandpapered to get the barnacles off. If the cameras had not been rolling, the sandpaper would have turned into a sandpiper and flown off with a barnacle goose into the mystic protoplasm of the global British future.

This is not some dude with a big bong writing awful poetry at three a.m. It is, to use the word Johnson has so much trouble with, “actually” the voice of the sovereign government of Northern Ireland. There are actual consequences for a society whose recovery from a traumatic conflict is still fragile and reversible.

And there is an actual threat. The point that Johnson was making in the interview is that if he can’t sandpaper the barnacles off the protuberances, “then frankly we’ll have to take further steps and we will.”

Effectively, he is threatening to break the withdrawal agreement and undermine the protocol. In itself, this is deplorable: to maintain the fiction that he did not create a border in the Irish Sea, he will continue to feed antagonisms and uncertainties on the unimportant side of that sea.

But what’s worse – and more dangerous – is that he doesn’t care enough to be able to articulate a comprehensible strategy. He will engage with the issues just long enough to spin a fabrication or two. After that, we’re all stuck in the audience at Boris’s tragedy improv.