In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background.
So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
The story is available here - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...
Portugal: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...
That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem.
I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
The nice thing about it, is it's a spectrum. If you're in the conservative-intellectual bracket, you still probably enjoy the provocation of the politically correct, and the imperial nostalgia stuff. If you're in the conservative-middle-brow bracket, you still feel good about the fact that your racism is being associated with Great British poetry.
I don't think he's a genius, or that he's playing fifth-dimensional chess, or something. I think it's just an advantage of this whole bumbling persona - that he can go to events like this and basically do what he wants. So when he thinks up some kind of stunt - like reciting a colonialist poem, or getting stuck on a rope, or whatever - he can go ahead with it, because it fits with his image. That gives him a whole range of communicative strategies most politicians don't have. What he actually communicates (the blend of dogwhistle racism and attention-seeking) is actually pretty normal.
One thing Brexit has successfully done is illustrate to all sides just how mediocre our leadership actually is.
Mediocre leaders are fine when the ship is sailing in calm waters to a known destination.
At the moment it feels like half of them want to steer into the iceberg and the other half want to abandon ship, with a few lone voices pointing out we could have just turned to port and swerved it.
Though, there are opportunists. Like Mao. Or Hitler.
> British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
Exactly. Pander to the prejudices of your voters.
And again, I'm not necessarily making judgement on his academic credentials - I made the point about his jobs. Of which a classical education is evidently rather worthless. With the exception of being a player of politics and narratives.
The guy who was editor of the Spectator, and a wildly successful columnist and speaker?
He seems to be doing well at his version. He is just not doing what you (and many others, but not enough) wish he were doing.
His front-bench roles even before becoming PM, and his previous roles, where he was fired from being a journalist for lying, for example, show he's just bad at anything other than playing the political game. And even then, you look at the advisers he has around him in order to be adept at even that.
Where he is now, his job (as he or his backers define it) appears to be to distract the voting public from unpleasant facts. He has proven very, very good at changing the public subject.
He has the complicity of the UK news media, much as W had in the US. The long-term takeover of the media by a tiny handful of right-wing extremists is proceeding smoothly worldwide, with concomittent benefits for their chosen spokesmouths.
Same goes for the USA POTUS. At some point you have to say "don't hate the player, hate the game."
When it's dozens of former colleagues, all calling someone out on their BS over the course of years, regarding unrelated incidents, and where a number of those incidents actually occurred in the public eye?
There's data points and a trend line...