Burma, Kipling, Sinatra and Boris – the anatomy of a non-scandal

I’m an admirer of Brian Cox so I was struck by a tweet of his yesterday, where he seemed to have encountered a scientific formula for the Antichrist. ‘If you removed all that is good in Britain, leaving only blimpish sludge, and emptied the residue into one man.’ It turns out that he was referring to the Foreign Secretary. The story in question was one where the Guardian claimed that Boris Johnson had ‘recited part of a colonial-era Rudyard Kipling poem’ in a Buddhist temple. The story was written to mislead the reader into thinking that Boris had read a poem in public in Burma, causing upset to guests. In fact, he’d been reminded of the Road to Mandalay, a poem that has inspired musicians (from Sinatra to Robbie Williams) for generations.

If you removed all that is good in Britain, leaving only blimpish sludge, and emptied the residue into one man.