A right mess | 28 April 2016

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Is Boris Johnson turning into the thinking man’s Donald Trump? Just like the Donald, he’s got funny hair, charisma, and an appetite for women. He may not be as rich as Trump — although we were all impressed by his latest contribution to the Exchequer — but he makes up for that by having a much bigger vocabulary. He’s also able to get away with saying outrageous things because people think he’s entertaining. And in his efforts to persuade Britain to leave the European Union, Boris seems to be appealing to the same anti-politics mood that Trump is exploiting across the pond.

No, I’m not talking about that ‘part–Kenyan’ remark about Barack Obama, which has been taken out of context. I mean his dredging up of that faux outrage which was Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, and his conspiratorial mutterings about the CIA’s involvement in the formation of the European Union. Michael Gove, the other Tory big beast in the Vote Leave campaign, hardly struck a blow for sanity when he said a vote to remain in the EU would leave the British looking like ‘hostages locked in the back of a car’.

Vote Leave has been eager to distance itself from the fruitier elements of Ukip and the Tory right. God forbid anybody calls them swivel-eyed. But in politics today, crazy is all the rage. No matter how much the ‘out’ campaigners may want to sound normal and positive, they know that to win they must tap into the same forces which are pushing Trump towards the Republican nomination — a distrust of the political elite and a fury at the lack of democratic accountability in this bewildering age of globalisation.