These New Puritans.

And how many sources confirmed your story?

Last week I read this piece in the New Statesman, by professional journalist Andrew Gimson, who also wrote a biography of Boris Johnson.

Long ago, when he went to Brussels as a correspondent, his rivals accused him of embroidering his news stories for the Daily Telegraph in a way that was not strictly true. This was intensely annoying for them, especially when they were hauled out of bed to follow up reports that turned out to be inaccurate. They were not prepared to accept the defence that Johnson had made these imaginative embellishments in order to dramatise a deeper truth – namely, that Jacques Delors, the then president of the European Commission, was grabbing power at the expense of the nation states.

Gimson's wider thesis is that the Conservative party and wider society are now riven not on left-right lines, but between fun-loving types like Boris Johnson and Puritans, amongst whom he counts Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May.

The quotation above is designed to make the point that while the Puritans insist on mere facts, there is a deeper level of truth which can be accessed by buccaneering free-wheelers like Mr Johnson.

I agree with Mr Gimson. There is certainly a place for those who generate imaginative narratives about the way the world works in order to dramatise their philosophical, cultural and political perspectives. It's called fiction, and it's what I make my living teaching and researching.

Mr Johnson wasn't publishing fiction at this point (though I have read his comic novel about suicide bombers, Seventy-Two Virgins and his book of cautionary verse). He was writing for the news pages about specific events and decision made by actual people in a real organisation for credible newspapers whose readers had an expectation of accuracy. And yet he cheerfully concocted stories from soup to nuts, or as Gimson has it, 'imaginative embellishments'.

This marks me out as a Puritan, clearly. But the story isn't really about Boris Johnson. Yes, his blatant lies contributed to the public's trust in the EU decaying to the point of Brexit. The wider story however is that Andrew Gimson and the New Statesman have succumbed to the disease of 'truthiness'. An early example was the exchange between journalist Ron Suskind and George W. Bush's spokesman back in 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Sadly we expect our politicians to lie to us these days. What's really poisoned the public sphere is the total collapse of the dividing wall between 'news' and 'opinion': if Boris's tall tales were on the opinion pages we'd all have giggled at his exaggerations. Instead they were on the supposedly factual news pages and therefore gained illegitimate credibility.

The New Statesman knows that Johnson's claims about straight bananas, standardised condom sizes and banned sausages were lies, because it recently printed a piece dedicated to linking these lies with the referendum result. Now, however, they're happy to print without comment a defence of such behaviour which entirely rejects the notion of basic factual truth, on the grounds that it's boring or short-sighted.

Why should I ever believe anything Mr Gimson or the New Statesman (I'm a subscriber) prints in future? I have to assume that any claims they make are informed by a desire to access a 'deeper truth' which – crucially for this discussion of media ethics – must remain untestable and even invisible to the reader. We all know that journalism is necessarily incomplete and can never be impartial, but this is a new low: a journalist and a news magazine proclaiming that it's OK to lie, and uncool to object.

(I sent the NS a short letter on this subject: it went unprinted).

Semper virilis: a statement on meritocracy on behalf of the Johnson Family

What-ho, chaps and chapesses. 

Bozza here, yours truly. Pater, who was an MEP, and my brother Jozza – also an MP and now a Minister - have asked me to explain to you villeins what a 'meritocracy' means. 

Apparently some of you are cutting up rough about so many Johnsonians running the show. Now this is what fine Roman chap Horace called an inverted pile of piffle. Alright, you say, why is that Jozza and Bozza get to run the country, just because they went to Eton and Oxford, and were members of the Bullingdon club along with jolly old Call Me Dave and Gidders and the lead writer of the Financial Times who gave Red Ed a damned good thrashing for his obsession with 'equality', whatever that is? The only 'level playing field' I like comes with sheets, pillows and someone else's wife. Huzzah!  

The new Cabinet

It's about time you oiky types caught up. The School, the University and the Buller are what we call meritocracies. They only let the best in. Trotskyists, our cousins from the colonies and women keep on moaning ad nauseam that they're 'exclusive' because they're restricted to men from Eton (and in act of charity, Osborne who only went to St. Paul's) but they're amazingly wrong. You have to shake the cornflake box and see what rises to the top. In this glorious country, those who rose to the top - indicated by their use of white tie and tails as casual wear - were yours truly, my brainbox brother, Gideon and somehow Dave. My old man was a very clever chap despite only attending Sherborne before Oxford, so naturally Bozza and Jozza are also very clever chaps (as is my sister Razza except she understands she can't run things being a chapess of the female persuasion). In fact Comrade Dave proves that the system works. Descended from Charles II via the wrong side of the blanket and the son of a funny-money chap of the kind lefties describe as a tax avoider, he's very much the kind of guy who had to buy his own furniture. Good job he's got a fruity wife from the top-drawer to help him draw a veil over his origin in trade eh readers? 

I know some of you will struggle to understand this, given that you have IQs under 85 – about the same as my beagles – but you need coves like my chums and me to look up to. How could you possibly aspire to that second lavatory without the example of the landed aristocracy occupying the jolly old corridors of power, business, the armed forces, the media and so on? A little inequality might give one or two of you a shove and look where you might end up? We gave little Johnny Major a go, and there's always that nice Mr Shapps who amuses us all with his magic computer tricks. He's 'not quite' if you catch my drift, and he's down rather well for himself. 'faber est suae quisque fortunae' as we say at the Athenaeum. 

So let's hear no more about the politics of envy from you toilers. It's all a bit infra dig. We've jolly well earned the right to run the show (and rather a lot of the folding stuff along the way) so don't worry your greasy little heads about it: vae victis and so forth. I rather fancy we've heard quite enough of the vox populi for now. Pop off back to your allotments, foot-the-ball and bingo secure in the knowledge that some bloody good chaps – and Dave –  have it all under control. And if you all behave, we'll let you have a brace of pheasant each when the season starts! Don't worry: our secretary Theresa's got your address. 

Alea iacta est. Which is Bozza for 'pipe down plebs and carry on'.* 

Toodle-oo.

*And if you don't, we have another Roman tag for our administration: 

flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo 

Lex talionis very much applies - no more panem et circenses for you. Think on.

Why… er… thanks!

A belated birthday gift has arrived from one of my wittiest and loveliest colleagues. She has, in her wisdom, given me a pair of voluminous Y-fronts. Not just any old Y-fronts: Boris Johnson Y-Fronts.

Needless to say, I disapprove of Boris Johnson: under the clown is a very unpleasant right-winger of the worst sort: like Cameron and Osborne, he's a hereditary millionaire fond of telling people that a bit of hard work will drag them up from the gutter.

If they're anything like Boris Johnson's own pants, these would spend quite a lot of time on the floor of somebody else's bedroom. As it is, they'll keep me amused for years, and when he's Prime Minister of England (I can't see Scotland, Wales or even the NI Unionists sticking around for Boris), I'll donate them to the People's History Museum, along with my 2001 election lollies depicting Tony Blair, Michael Howard and whoever the Lib Dems had in those more innocent times.

While I'm in a visual mood

… I'll tease my friends. Hilary is the Liberty statue from a 4th July celebration, the toad appeared in my parents' garden, and the posh blokes include David Cameron (2), Boris Johnson (6) and George Osborne (8) - they've suppressed the picture but I grabbed it before they traced every copy. Neal is straining at the Black Country Living Museum.

Jacqui Smith

I posted this as a comment over at Demented Demon's site, but thought it worth dumping it here too.

It's all rather hilarious, but shouldn't be a news story. They're not to my taste, but these films are legal, and presumably he's missing his hard-working wife. It seems that they have a TV/phone/internet bundled package, so it's easy to see how the payment would have slipped through. I'd have a lot more respect for the couple if they'd stood on the steps, said sorry for accidentally putting the £10 on expenses and ignored the howling of the faux-moralists. 'It's either Chav Lez Action 12 or harrassing the cleaner', he could have said…

What is annoying me is that the News International tabloids are screaming loudest - the organisation which includes the satellite and Pay TV service subscribed to by the Smiths. The same goes for the Express, which is owned by a pornographer but which takes a highly moralistic stance in its pages. So clearly it's OK to make and sell porn, but not to watch it.

I think the story is a sign of the media's desperate hysteria. They've decided to lynch the government, Labour MPs and all politicians (in that order) and are prepared to exaggerate any little thing, aided by judicious bribery of partisan civil servants. What an aid to the public sphere the tabloids are.

On Ms. Smith: I've no strong feelings about her either way (except that as a cabinet minister in this government she's clearly a class traitor), but I think some boring ministers are pretty much what we need. Do we want the Boris Johnsons, Alan Clarks, Tom Dribergs, Ron Browns etc in government? They might be good fun for the papers but there's more to government than entertainment.

And now… the climax of the week

Yes, the results of the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards are in and the winners are: Rachel Johnson, for "a mounting, Wagnerian crescendo" which has room for the woman in question to think of slugs and moths… she's the sister of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Mayor of London, so presumably he's helped with the research. Updike was also given a Lifetime Achievement award, which will please Howard Jacobson and all the other pseudo-American wannabes. (No link to the Literary Review because their site's useless).