Posted on 07/30/2019 6:20:44 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Until his car passed through the gates of Buckingham Palace en route to the kissing of hands, I didn't quite believe Boris Johnson would actually make it to the premiership. That's partly because many years ago he arrived late at a Spectator lunch, told us he'd just realized he was going to be prime minister, and we all laughed. Yet, a quarter-century later, here he is. As his sister Rachel points out, only fifty-five people have ever become UK PM, and, even if one has difficulty recalling the names of any of the recent occupants, that's still fewer than have gone into space.
Back in those Speccie days, he was one of those writers you read not because of what he had to say but because of the way he said it. Here he is on the saskatoon - not the town, but an innocent Canadian berry that had fallen afoul of some control-freak Blairite regulatory agency (from which abyss it was rescued by the EU - a reminder that not everything that's hellish about modern Britain is the fault of Brussels). At any rate, Boris turned in what is undoubtedly the best ever column written about the saskatoon:
You may not have been aware that the saskatoon is to berries as the Cohiba is to cigars. It is the king of the bush. It is used all over Canada to make jams, syrups, salad dressings and even crème brulée. According to some bumf I have from the Canadian High Commission, it is standard practice, at all Canadian state banquets, to sprinkle every course with saskatoons. When one contemplates the volcanic energy of this century's great Canadians, from Mark Steyn to Conrad Black to Margaret Trudeau, one can only ascribe it to the saskatoon-based national diet.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
He said bumf, LOL
Excerpt highlight....
Does that make him a philosophical Brexiteer? Doubtful. In the 2016 referendum, he considered the Leave and Remain choices in terms of what served his interests. To favor Remain meant supporting David Cameron, the de facto leader of the cause, and consigning himself to being a mere gentleman of the chorus. Whereas, if he chose the other side, his star power would make him the face of the campaign.
He expected the Remain guys to win, and himself to have done himself a world of good with the Tory base come the next leadership election. Instead, and at least partly because of him, Leave won, and the chaos of the last three years began.
Something of a similar head fake is going on right now. A threatened “no deal” departure on October 31st is supposedly being touted by Boris just to force the EU into re-negotiating Theresa May’s floppo “withdrawal agreement”. So M Barnier and his backstop boy Leo Varadkar are insisting that’ll never happen, and it’s the May deal or nuthin’. Let them huff on.
My view is that the whole re-negotiation thing is a feint, and Boris actually wants to leave with no deal. He wants a clean split - and the UK reborn as a sovereign nation, no ifs or buts. Whether he wants it because that’s his preferred public policy or because it cements his place in history is unimportant if you happen to believe, as I do, that that’s in the best interests of the United Kingdom.
“There was a young fellow from Ankara
Who was a terrific wankera
Till he sowed his wild oats
With the help of a goat
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.
*Extempore limerick in conversation with Nicholas Farrell and Urs Gehriger for the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche. On the grounds of its spontaneity, it has been judged the winner of The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition
“
Definition of chunter. intransitive verb. British. : to talk in a low inarticulate way : mutter.
Only Steyn knows such words and can use them in a sentence to great effect.
bumf noun INFORMAL•BRITISH
useless or tedious printed information or documents.
I love his lessons in English usage...
You need a thesaurus, dictionary, Wikipedia, to get through some of Mark’s columns. He includes the most obscure and esoteric references, but they’re fun to read - in a painful kind of way.
Sounds like an old beef from years ago that never healed. Too bad. I like both Steyn and Boris Johnson. Whatever is the case, our conservative, non-globalist leaders need our support, even if we don’t care for them personally, Mark.
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