The Media Won’t Fool Us Twice

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” In other words, if you get tricked by someone once it means they’re an a**ehole. But if you get tricked twice it means you’re a sucker.

This handy saying came back to me amid the rolling wall-to-wall coverage of Boris Johnson’s “humiliating defeat” this week.

The media are fond of telling us repeatedly how stupid President Trump is and before that they kept telling us how he would never ever become the president. This week they all seem to be on the same page telling the public repeatedly about Boris Johnson’s “humiliating defeat”.

Only three years ago the media were convinced that the Brexit referendum would not succeed. Now the same voices are informing us that “Mr Johnson’s Brexit plans are in tatters and his prime ministership has been dealt a crushing blow”.

[…] for the life of me I cannot see a scenario in which Johnson’s position isn’t manifestly stronger after his supposed “humiliating defeat”.

Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Boris planned the whole thing himself.

[…] There are three very good reasons Boris Johnson would dearly love an election.

The first is the natural human instinct of a newly installed party leader wishing to give his prime ministership legitimacy […]

The second is that by almost every measure, the Conservative Party is enormously likely to win majority government under Mr Johnson […]

And, thanks to the expulsion of all the Tory MPs who crossed the floor, all newly preselected Conservative candidates would be, by definition, Johnson loyalists, thus tightening his grip on the party.

The third, and most critical, is that an election campaign under Mr Johnson would serve as a defacto second referendum on Brexit and give him an undeniable mandate to press ahead with Britain’s departure from the EU under any circumstances […]

And so an election for Mr Johnson is the ultimate magic bullet. It would strengthen his leadership, his party and his cause. It would be his political Holy Trinity.

The only thing standing in his way is that the UK has fixed five-year terms and so Mr Johnson would need an extraordinary trigger for being able to justify calling one. Something like, for example, a “constitutional crisis”.

This is almost certainly what Mr Johnson intended to manufacture when he announced his shock parliamentary shutdown and, sure enough, the hysteria of his opponents gave him precisely the crisis he wanted. […]

Now, instead of looking like he’s making a cynical power play to prop up his parliamentary numbers, Boris can play the reluctant hero, appearing befuddled and besieged and attempting to resolve this historical impasse by humbly submitting to the judgment of the people — a judgment that virtually every poll shows will deliver him a thumping win.

[…] Mr Corbyn’s own position on Brexit was so hopelessly compromised and confused that his only tactic of the past two years was to loudly and constantly demand the Conservatives go to the polls, apparently blissfully unaware of the possibility that when they finally granted his wish, it might be under a different leader.

Now of course his bluff has been called and sooner or later, he will have no choice but to send himself to his doom. Honestly, anyone who ever gets the chance to play cards with this guy should immediately take him up on it and chuck their car keys in the pot. A five-year-old could beat him with pair of deuces.

[…] In short, it appears right now that Mr Johnson will get the election he wants, will win that election with party unquestionably loyal to him, will have a mandate to do what he wants and will have the numbers to do it.

If that’s a humiliating defeat then I’ll have a double.

A Newspaper

The more the media tell us how bad Boris Johnson is, how stupid he is and how he is bound to fail, the more cheerful I become. Next year look out for the same kind of thing in our media. The more they tell you that a politician is stupid and can’t win the more likely it is that that politician is going to do well. The reverse is also true. If they tell you that the election is sewn up and that everyone loves Ardern, pop the champagne in the fridge.