Burnwinter wrote:
I do find that part pretty amazing.
Australia is a hell of a racist place, but even we might struggle to elect a Prime Minister who'd written a novel full of antisemitic, antiblack and Islamophobic caricatures called "72 VIRGINS" ... I think there's a special hall pass for Etonian racists to be honest.
This isn't to dispute the above, although it's interesting to see the external perspective, but you also have to realise that Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London. Twice. When his comments on the above were still fresh and they still didn't really hurt him despite the fact that he was representing a young, liberal multi-cultural demographic. I don't know what that says but it's a strange one to reconcile. Zac Goldsmith tried to follow him and was roundly criticised and more or less disappeared from politics.
In the end, I don't really know what to make of him but he seems incredibly malleable - or, in less flattering terms, a shape shifter. He's offered no policies in his manifesto and he's simultaneously appears to be racist, moderate (when he was London mayor), one nation Conservative, populist, pro business, anti business, pro Brexit, anti Brexit and I think he largely hopes to get elected before people realise he stands for nothing. From my pov, before Brexit I would have had him down as a centrist in the same lineage as Cameron and Blair but I now wonder whether he positioned himself as one because that's where the wind was blowing. The only thing I can say for certainty is that he craves power more than anyone else in British politics and once he's in power he'll loosen the purse strings for massive vanity projects like he did in London.
