Women don't go to university to find husbands, Boris, but we know why men go into politics

It’s a hard life for a blonde buffoon. Continually making offensive comments and never being taken seriously

Louise McCudden
Tuesday 09 July 2013 06:47 EDT
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(Getty Images)

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Men only go into politics so they can have affairs and still be asked respectful questions as if they are a moral authority on everybody’s lives.

Look at all the ugly buggers who stumble into politics and sleep with women who wouldn’t ordinarily look twice at them. Bloody men, they have no interest in ideology, economics, or improving people’s lives. They go into politics to get laid.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. That sounds a bit like sexism. It sounds like I’m calling men stupid, shallow sex maniacs, who are only motivated to achieve things for stupid stereotypical reasons. Don’t worry, it wasn’t sexist. It was a joke! You see, if you look like me – blue eyes, fluffy blonde hair - you get to decide. If I insult you, and you don’t think it’s funny, well, you’re wrong: it is funny, and you don’t have a sense of humour.

Boris Johnson is funny. Look at him, with his puppy face and messy golden hair. When he says women go to university to meet husbands that’s just a joke. Oh Boris, we share a burden, you and I. As a fellow white, blonde –haired, blue-eyed fluffball who says stupid things, I know your pain. Your comments are never taken seriously – even when all your actions reinforce them. If I tried making racist, homophobic, sexist statement, even if I devoted a life to building them up, and making myself known for making “gaffes” (i.e. Saying Things That Are Wrong and Often Offensive), as long as I say them in a jolly way, everyone will assume I’m kidding.

It’s especially hard on Boris, though, because over the years he’s tried so hard be understood as dead serious. He writes some of these “gaffes” down, in carefully-worded, well paid articles, for a start. In 2000 he made a point of arguing that the police were “victims of” the Macphearson report – you know, the small document that established the concept of institutional racism, in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. He dismissed gay marriage because if you allow two men to marry you might as well also allow two men and a dog to marry (he’s changed his mind now, of course, which is jolly nice of him). He made a deliberate point of condemning Hilsborough survivors and the friends and family of beheaded Liverpudlian Ken Bigley for “wallowing” in their “victim status.” In another article, he chose to write that black people have “watermelon smiles.” And so on, and so on.

Yet despite his best efforts, poor old Boris Johnson is always laughed off as “just joking” when he gives us these snippets of insight into his regressive mindset. Yes, it’s a hard life for a blonde buffoon. Imagine his frustration when, during the mayoral elections, rival Ken Livingstone made a throwaway comment about the way a gay banker might be treated in an oppressive country and got an explosion of media coverage taking him not only seriously, but literally; declaring him homophobic even when his actual policies suggest no such thing. Imagine dear old Boris’s face on seeing Diane Abbott labeled racist by key media figures for throwaway generalisations about white people, when he, Boris, has been making comments about minorities for years and being treated, at worst, as an embarrassingly bad stand-up act who isn’t that funny but probably doesn’t know any better.

With this newly unearthed video comment, Boris tries harder than ever to be taken seriously. For a start, he cleverly made it to a roomful of people who take gender equality seriously. He boorishly interrupted a person making an important point about women’s education, in a roomful of intelligent, opinionated women, who were unlikely to find it funny even if they did take it as a “joke.” And for good measure, he chose to make his comment an age-old cliche, just to be absolutely certain that no-one would be impressed by wit or pith.

How much more can he do to be recognised as the regressive conservative that he is? Poor old Boris. Ah, what a burden it is to be a fluffy-haired white man: no matter how desperately you try to be offensive, people always assume, somehow, that you’re probably just funny.

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