Boris Johnson is a conservative and the 
mayor of London, he also has a reputation for independent thought (the word ‘maverick’ even comes to mind). There is also an Australian connection because long-time Liberal Party campaigner and high-profile lobbyist, Lynton Crosby, played a big part in Johnson’s mayoral election campaign this year.
In an opinion piece in the London Daily Telegraph today, Johnson very neatly puts the conservative case against the Bush administration and the Republican Party more generally:
The legacy of George Bush may take years, if not decades, to determine.
But at present he seems to have pulled off an astonishing double whammy.
However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy.
The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit – in some people’s eyes – the idea of free-market capitalism.
Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.
To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.
To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.
Johnson, of course, is alluding here to Lady Bracknell’s famous speech in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”:
‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’
Johnson also dismisses the William Ayers nonsense that obsesses McCain and the Fox News channel:
The entire set of allegations seem to be an attempt to smear him (Obama) by association, and are about as damaging as pointing out that some of Tony Blair’s colleagues used to be Stalinists, or that Tory party conferences used to feature people who advocated the hanging of Nelson Mandela.
And he delivers a zinger of a concluding paragraph:
If Obama wins, he will have established that being black is as relevant to your ability to do a hard job as being left-handed or ginger-haired, and he will have re-established America’s claim to be the last, best hope of Earth.
Transformative, indeed!
