Mayor
Boris Johnson presides over London, and he’s a member of Parliament,
too, and he’s determined to preserve what’s left of the mighty Britain
that once made tyrants tremble and despots squeak. Lately it’s the
English, like the rest of Europe, who squeak under the lash of
unelected bureaucrats who preside over the continent from Brussels.
Mr. Johnson, like the Donald, is a native New Yorker, “born in
England,” he might say, “while my mother was temporarily in New York.”
Indeed, the mayor and The Donald are not personally alike at all and
it’s difficult to compare American and British politics, but they share
a skepticism — if not contempt — for the ruling elites who connive in
whittling down the greatest experiments of government in history.
But
what they do share, whether the Oxford-educated mayor admits it or not,
is an eagerness to take on the passivity and platitudes of the elites
who are afraid to confront the mortal threat to the consent of the
governed, the example that England once held up to the world, the
example followed by the colonies planted in the new world.
“The big battalions of the argument [over Britain leaving the EU] are
unquestionably ranged against people like me,” the mayor says. “We are
portrayed as crazy, cracked and all the rest of it. I don’t mind. I
happen to think that I am right. It is a very, very difficult case to
make. I have thought an awful lot about it. I have thought about it for
many years.” It’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump talking that way
about his journey in politics.
Leaving the Union, as Mr. Johnson put it in the column he regularly
writes for the London Daily Telegraph, “is a once-in-a-lifetime chance
to vote for real change in Britain’s relations with Europe. This is the
only opportunity we will ever have to show that we care about
self-rule. A vote to Remain [in the European Union] will be taken in
Brussels as a green light for more [control] and for the erosion of
democracy.”
[Full]
