Johnny Watterson: Boris Johnson brings gestural politics lower

To sport and football and the sense of security it can bring in being too flimsy to provide for a full political main course, there is the sense that even ministerial buffoons will never feel a need to invade the pitch or leap the turnstile for its slim pickings.

Then this week as the UK and Ireland quietly rubbed their thighs in delight as events conspired with them, most of the other competitors fell away and the joint Euro 2028 bid delightfully became an open goal with no net minder.

As the Football Association of Ireland teamed up with its counterparts in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to form a united front, Italy indicated it would seek only to host the 2032 tournament while Uefa had suspended Russia, who had earlier expressed an interest, and Turkey looked like dropping out.

With no rival bids the champagne was all but popping. An Irish Cabinet meeting was arranged and using that lump of cable off the west coast that Russian destroyers were recently threatening to cleave before a fisherman armada sent them back to Severomorsk, it was remotely chaired from Washington by Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

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Oh the riches. The numbers told to the Cabinet were 150,000 visitors and €600 million in spending depending on how many matches could be staged in Ireland. In addition about 50 per cent of supporters could be expected to come from outside the UK and Ireland.

At this point let’s be clear. It has been fashionable in recent decades to write off “so-called great men and women” as “meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history”.

Not my words, those of UK prime minister Boris Johnson last seen gurning behind chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak as he spoke in the House of Commons about men, women and children across Ukraine seeking protection against missiles.

It was beyond ironic that Johnson would step out of his cavalcade of comedy on Thursday morning and describe Russian plans, which were confirmed on Wednesday, to host the 2028 European Championships as “beyond satire”.

Frighteningly he was speaking in Brussels, where he was to attend a Nato summit addressing Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when he was asked a direct question over whether it would be better for Ukraine to host the Euros than Russia.

“The idea of Russia holding any idea of football tournament or any kind of cultural event right now is beyond satire,” Johnson said. “I can’t believe that anybody would seriously consider their suggestion and, yes, I think the best thing possible would be for the entire Russian forces to retire forthwith from Ukraine and hand the tournament to them.”

His mendacity

Bless him, Tweedledee failed to recall that his own country and Ireland had bid for the tournament and that Tweedledum had tweeted in support of it that very day. With deference to the Irish book of retail banking and the 2013 Anglo Tapes, maybe Johnson was thinking, “Just, as Drummer would say, ‘I picked it out of my arse.’”

The message from Johnson’s official account read: “The UK and Ireland bid for the Uefa Euro 2028 has this government’s full backing. Our world-class stadiums and passionate fans stand ready to host one of the world’s greatest sporting events. Let’s bring football home.”

The wonderful and ongoing narrative of Johnson is nobody yet knows where his mendacity begins and incompetence ends. While he has yet to promise an “oven ready” Euros, his uncanny ability to deliver mutually opposing statements is apparently something he has “priced in” to his contravening rhetoric.

The political wreckage he leaves behind is for other public servants to clean up. Isn’t that why they had the fagging system at Eton?

Lo and behold a latter-day character from Tom Brown’s Schooldays duly emerged in top hat and tails as Downing Street moved to clarify Johnson’s position, saying he had been responding to a question about Moscow’s “brazen and sorely misjudged” attempt to obtain a platform on the international stage by hosting the tournament.

“Clearly we remain entirely committed to the UK and Ireland bid for Euro 2028 which retains the government’s full backing,” the spokesman said.

You sometimes wonder if Number 10 Downing St isn’t just one long-running episode of the Jeremy Kyle show where things like dignity, self awareness or grace are deliberately sucked out of the narrative.

That, or, a gone-wrong bachelor party where they all just wake up with no memory of the previous day’s events.

It is unrealistic to ask the head of parliament to take a polygraph after every statement, although, for reasons of clarity a polygraph machine would be a capital addition to the number 10 furniture, its famously imperfect and invalid means of assessing truthfulness an unlikely selling point.

Just what impact Johnson’s bantz and duplicitous attempt at the most basic of gestural politics will have on the Euro bid is, perhaps, no more than embarrassing to the adults in the room who are making it.

But his inability to tell a straightforward white lie to make another country feel better, or him feel Churchillian, causes so much gag reflex around the place.

And he has let it be known he doesn’t mind stepping the turnstile if it’s done for the one thing at which he is adept and just can’t help himself from doing, grift. Euro 2028, it could be fun. The rest is out of our hands.