With one bound...

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‘Dick Barton – Special Agent’ was a hit radio series which ran from 1946 until early 1951, which means that the final episode was broadcast before I was even born. That’s one of the very few things that I have in common with Boris Johnson. My knowledge of the catchphrase which grew up around it is not, therefore, based on any direct memory, merely the way in which an older generation used it from time to time. Whatever difficult situation the hero was in at the end of one episode, he managed to suddenly escape at the beginning of the next – hence, “with one bound, he was free”. I don’t know whether Johnson is familiar with the catchphrase, but it sounds like the approach to difficult situations on which he has always been able to rely.

There was a story in the Sunday Times this week (£paywall, but summarised here in the Guardian) about ‘allies’ of Johnson (i.e. people who he hasn’t yet betrayed, and who labour under the delusion that he won’t do so in future either) having been engaged in discussions with Farage to mount a cunning plan, under which Johnson would woo Farage to rejoin the Tories and mount a reverse take-over of the party. There are more than a few minor obstacles to overcome first:

1.    Farage has to stand for election – and win a seat

2.    Johnson has to persuade one of the few remaining Tory MPs after the election, in a very safe seat, to give up a £90,000 a year job and disappear into obscurity so that he can stand instead

3.    The central Tory Party have to accept a disgraced former PM and serial liar as a suitable person to represent the party, and the local association have to select him as their candidate for the by-election, despite everyone knowing that he will inevitably bring the party into further disrepute and that he is standing with the express intention of undermining and usurping whoever happens to be the leader at the time

4.    The electorate have to elect said disgraced former PM and compulsive liar as their MP

5.    Once he gets into the House of Commons, he has to somehow persuade a Labour-dominated chamber to set aside his 90-day suspension for misleading parliament, the implementation of which he avoided by resigning before he could be sacked. If he fails, he will presumably be immediately suspended from parliament giving the electors a chance to demand a recall by-election. In that case, steps 3 and 4 above need to be repeated.

6.    He then needs to persuade Farage to swap parties and join the Tories, despite Farage’s visceral opposition to many of Johnson’s policies on issues such as net zero

It’s quite a list. Even the scriptwriters for Dick Barton might have at least cavilled at the scale of the single bound which was necessary to extricate the hero from that predicament. The real killer for the cunning plan, though, comes after all of that, because one of the two men would then need to agree to play second fiddle to the other. And that is beyond the limits of anything which might be remotely credible. Yet it seems that there really are people in the Tory Party who seriously believe that this is their party’s way forward after the forthcoming trouncing. Dick Barton was, of course, the product of fantasy. It’s a fact which seems strangely relevant here.