Boris Johnson: The Butcher as Charlatan

“A bloated bag of offal, with a feeding tube at one end and an erection at the other.”
— Marian Halcombe

There have been worthless British prime ministers before, but none quite so brazenly pleased with their own worthlessness as Boris Johnson. Most serial liars at least retain some residual shame, some instinct for concealment. Johnson never bothered. He lies as easily as breathing, and then paints watercolours of lemons while the corpses pile up. His interview with Al Arabiya English in October 2025 was not a stumble or a lapse. It was a window into the mind of a man who has never paid for anything he has done, a colonial tourist moving from topic to topic, spraying poison with the confidence of someone who knows the system will always protect him.

On Gaza, he reached a level of moral putrefaction that would shame even the Blairites. There was no acknowledgement of the scale of the slaughter, no mention of the tens of thousands of dead, the children buried in rubble, the deliberate starvation of civilians, the bombing of hospitals, the documented mass graves, or the use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas. Not even the pretense of mourning. Instead, he told the interviewer that the Trump-brokered ceasefire heralded “a moment of great joy and relief for people in Israel, but also for people in Gaza,” because, as he put it, “it means an end to the horrifying bombardments.” One might forgive a dim provincial for this kind of evasive language, but Johnson knew exactly what he was doing. By calling the bombing “horrifying” and stopping there, he implied it was an unfortunate necessity, a regrettable but ultimately acceptable price extracted from a lesser people. This was after nearly two years of continuous slaughter, in which more than 36,000 Palestinians had been killed, including over 13,000 children. Gaza had been annihilated from the air and starved on the ground. Two million people had been displaced from what was already one of the most overcrowded, impoverished territories in the world. Johnson’s instinct was not horror, but applause.

His admiration extended beyond Israel to the American overseer of this charade. He praised Donald Trump for threatening Hamas with annihilation, quoting approvingly Trump’s line: “If you don’t sign this thing, you’re going to get wiped out.” This was not offered as a chilling insight into Western policy, but as a compliment. To Johnson, extermination is not a word to recoil from; it is a demonstration of decisiveness. He even found time to heap praise on Tony Blair — yes, that Tony Blair, the liar who greased the rails for the invasion of Iraq with fabricated intelligence, who helped unleash a war that killed over a million people and plunged the Middle East into chaos. Johnson said he deserved “a lot of praise” for helping with the Gaza arrangement, as though Blair were some disinterested mediator rather than one of the chief arsonists of the modern era. The Chilcot Inquiry concluded in 2016 what everyone already knew: Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction and took Britain to war before exhausting peaceful options. For Johnson, this is not an indictment; it is the résumé of a man to emulate.

His approach to Ukraine follows the same template: sabotage peace, and then congratulate himself for being on the right side of history. Few outside the Anglo-American press bubble deny by now that Johnson personally intervened in spring 2022 to pressure Zelensky into abandoning negotiations with Russia. Multiple outlets — including Foreign Affairs and Eastern European diplomatic sources — reported that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators had reached the outline of a settlement in Istanbul that would have halted the war. Johnson flew to Kyiv and told Zelensky that the West would not support any deal. The war continued. Hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have died since then, their bodies flung into what is now a losing proxy war. Ukraine has been depopulated, its energy grid smashed, its men conscripted, its state indebted beyond recovery.

Yet in the Al Arabiya interview, Johnson still insisted Russia is losing and suggested that the answer lies in escalation. “Putin’s got all these oil tankers that are breaking the sanctions. Sink them,” he said, adding only the caveat that the crews should be told to get off first. He spoke of this as though it were a bureaucratic enforcement measure rather than an open act of war against a nuclear-armed power. This is the mind of a man who has never encountered consequences. He pushed for NATO expansion into Ukraine, helped destroy the one country caught in the middle, and now wants to attack Russian merchant shipping — an act that under international law would invite retaliation and potentially world war. When pressed on what peace might look like, he simply repeated Western slogans about “a free, sovereign, independent Ukraine” as though zoning rights still apply to countries being carved apart in real time.

One might hope at least that his views on domestic policy would contain some glimmer of contrition or realism. Instead, his remarks on Keir Starmer and British politics revealed the same empty appetites and evasions. Asked about the current prime minister, Johnson referred not to any substantive issue but to spectacles and shoes, sneering that Starmer took “8,000-pound spectacles” from a donor and let China “push him around.” This kind of gossip-column contempt is not accidental. It was a way of ignoring what Starmer actually represents: an openly anti-white managerial regime that celebrates demographic replacement, and treats the native British like a problem population to be disciplined. Starmer has supported the expansion of hate speech laws that disproportionately punish white Britons, endorsed the indoctrination of English schoolchildren in racial guilt, praised Black Lives Matter while ignoring the mass rape and grooming of working-class white girls by immigrant gangs, and declared that “privilege” must be dismantled through policy. He is not merely incompetent. He is ideologically hostile to the existence of the nation he governs. Johnson, who enabled this trajectory, pretends the problem is eyewear.

But of all Johnson’s betrayals, none is greater than his record on immigration — because it was cold-blooded and deliberate. He was elected in 2019 on the back of Brexit voters who believed he would at least slow, if not reverse, the mass influx of foreigners accelerated under Blair and continued by Cameron and May. Instead, he presided over the largest wave of immigration in British history. Between 2019 and 2022, over 4.3 million people entered the country. The majority were not skilled Europeans, but migrants from Pakistan, Nigeria, Eritrea, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, and other failed states. Net migration hit over 700,000 in 2022 alone. Illegal channel crossings went from virtually zero in 2018 to over 45,000 in 2022, with many of these migrants—overwhelmingly young men—housed in hotels at public expense. The border was not defended; it was erased. Johnson not only allowed this — he facilitated it with new visa routes, amnesty schemes, and the refusal to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Then, without irony, he blamed Labour for the exodus of native Britons, claiming people were leaving “because of a Labour government.” They were already leaving because of him.

And still, astonishingly, his greatest domestic crime may be his handling of COVID-19, which he now depicts as a triumph. In reality, he turned Britain into an open-air laboratory for authoritarianism and cronyism. He imposed three consecutive national lockdowns based on panic and fraudulent modelling from Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, which falsely predicted 500,000 dead unless the entire country was shut down. Under Johnson’s orders, police fined citizens for sitting on park benches, drones filmed dog walkers, grandparents were arrested for visiting family, churches and funerals were shut down, and protests were criminalized. He presided over a biosecurity regime in which civil liberties were suspended indefinitely, children were psychologically tortured with masks and isolation, and the elderly were left to die alone in hospital wards and care homes. The economic and social devastation was incalculable: GDP collapsed by over 10 percent, hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed, millions of medical appointments were canceled, cancer diagnoses were missed, mental illness soared, alcoholism and domestic abuse spiked, and public debt ballooned beyond historical precedent.

Meanwhile, Johnson and his inner circle held parties, drank wine, and mocked the people they had locked in their homes.

The COVID response was not only tyrannical. It was profiteering on a scale seldom seen outside wartime. Over £20 billion in contracts were handed out through a so-called “VIP Lane” to Conservative party donors, friends, and shell companies with no relevant experience. Firms linked to Tory “peer” Michelle Mone received £200 million for unusable PPE. Randox, associated with Owen Paterson, was awarded over £400 million in testing contracts without tender. Johnson’s government rejected offers from experienced suppliers in favor of political insiders who saw the pandemic as a once-in-a-generation looting opportunity.

Then came the coerced vaccination campaign. Johnson signed off on indemnity for pharmaceutical companies, shielding them from legal liability. He pushed mRNA injections onto millions while threatening NHS staff with termination if they refused. Vaccine passports were trialed and nearly implemented nationwide. Teenagers were injected against the advice of the UK’s own vaccine advisory board. Dissenters were smeared as lunatics, conspiracy theorists, or extremists. Tens of thousands suffered adverse effects, many now permanently damaged, none compensated.

Yet in his mind, this was leadership. He boasted to Al Arabiya that Britain “came out of lockdowns faster” and vaccinated more quickly than others, as though speed negates authoritarianism or the collateral damage it unleashed. He will never admit fault, because he does not believe ordinary people are entitled to bodily autonomy or constitutional rights. He believes in rule by decree.

And then, when asked about his legacy, he offered only self-congratulation and domestic trivia. He claimed to have “given [his] country back its constitutional legal independence,” a lie so vast it almost becomes performance art. Brexit under Johnson became a slogan divorced from reality. The border was opened, not closed. Northern Ireland was effectively handed to Brussels. EU law was retained wholesale. Judicial supremacy was untouched. The European Convention on Human Rights remained in force. The civil service — openly hostile to Brexit — remained intact. Britain did not reassert sovereignty. It became a dumping ground and a vassal.

Johnson’s final reflections were on his children, his painting, and his wife’s kitchen. He spoke of these things with the same insouciance he brought to questions of war and statecraft. It was an accidental revelation. He has no moral core. What matters to him is private comfort and public flattery. The trail of destruction behind him is someone else’s problem. If this were a civilization with a functioning moral immune system, he would be in a cell writing his memoirs on prison-issue paper. Instead, he will almost certainly be rewarded with a peerage, invited onto corporate boards, and treated as an amusing elder statesman by the same media that once pretended to oppose him.

In a just world, he would die in disgrace. In this one, he will enter the House of Lords and sit beside other traitors and war criminals, Blair included if the timing suits. Let the record reflect what actually occurred: Boris Johnson did not lead Britain. He helped bury it. He did not defend the West. He helped accelerate its decay. He did not bumble into disaster. He steered straight for it and cackled as the hull split open.

Remember him always as Marian Halcombe described him: “a bloated bag of offal, with a feeding tube at one end and an erection at the other.” There is no better epitaph for the man, and perhaps none better for the class that spawned him.