I watch political debates out of my love of theater. Last night's duel between Governor Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist didn't disappoint, the latter at one point accusing the former of telling lies. When this happened, DeSantis wore the look of a stoic but sulking schoolboy. That inner rage and indignation reminded me a little of Richard Nixon, and I wondered if they will carry him as far as they did Tricky Dick.
I suspect most Americans are looking forward to the end of political ads, but probably only here in Florida are they equating our country with Cuba.
My wife, a breast cancer survivor, hates how Ron DeSantis is using his wife's bout with the disease for political advantage. Whenever she comes on the TV, in an ad with the intent of humanizing her husband, Hania insists I change the channel.
I’ve been a regular reader of The Spectator since 1980 – when I would go through it back-to-front in the British Council in downtown Warsaw – so I’ve known about Boris Johnson longer than most Americans, and probably a few Brits. He wrote a column for the magazine in the ’90s and in 1999 became its editor. I was struck more by the seeming incongruities of his name than by his prose, primarily because it usually focused on politics, and I spent most of my time in the back of the book. The Spectator distinguished itself then, and still does today, by pairing its High Life column with a Low Life column, which back then was written by the inimitable Jeffrey Bernard, who once wrote: “I wish the police would block off memory lane.”
When the conservative Johnson became prime minister there came, in this country, the inevitable comparisons to Trump, which I hated. Trump had never edited a sophisticated magazine. He had never written a biography of one of his predecessors in office. He had never engaged in a public debate on the merits of the Greeks over the Romans. (Johnson’s opponent in that learned and entertaining scuffle was the Oxford classics professor Mary Beard.) Trump had never, in a television interview, recited from memory, and in Greek, long passages from The Iliad.
What the two men do share, as Johnson’s stint as prime minister has clearly shown, is a stunning unsuitability for public office. But while Trump has few talents, Johnson has many, governing just not being one of them. I am happy to see him leave 10 Downing Street, but I look forward to his next chapter. Should Trump disappear, the world would be a better place. Should Johnson disappear, it would be considerably less interesting.