IN a week when the Conservative Party front-runner and future Prime Minister Boris Johnson was accused of racism, my mind was distracted by the callous murder of a young infant boy on the southside of Chicago.
The murder took place in 1924, a mere 40 years before Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was even born. So, even in these days of Netflix, Quantico and Mind Hunters, Johnson has a decent alibi.
In May 1924 a young Jewish boy called Bobby Franks was abducted and brutally murdered in a hire car in Chicago, his body disposed of in a watery grave, on the rural outskirts of the city, in an area frequented by ornithologists.
The murder gripped Chicago and came to be known as the crime of the century. Eventually, the police arrested two local teenagers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who it transpired had killed the child in the belief they could outsmart their community and commit the “perfect crime”.
The two killers were exceptional students who set up their own secret society – a “Bullingdon Club in breeches’”– where they acted out their superiority through selection, initiation and aggressive snobbery.
At their trial, the murderers showed all the traits of amoral privilege, and when their attitudes to life were exposed before the law, they bore many of the character traits of Boris Johnson, in distant days long before he was born.
Last week, when the Conservative leaders’ debate was televised on the BBC, I was busy reading Compulsion by Meyer Levin, one of the greatest docu-novels of the twentieth century and a forerunner of Truman Capote’s more famous true-crime classic In Cold Blood. But something about the story kept dragging me back to Johnson.
What took me by surprise was how closely the murderer’s behaviour corresponded with his self-centred decorum.
Not only were the murderers privileged, clever and from an elite school prone to pacts and unhealthy scheming, they were contemptuous of those around them, intolerant of the shortcomings of others and truly believed that they had knowledge that was vastly superior to the runts of everyday life. Journalists frequently say that Johnson is not good at reading briefs. This is not simply a failure of concentration it is because of his arrogant self-belief, that commeth the hour, his improvised wit and his pick-and-mix intellect will get him out of any tight corner.
Unfortunately, the complexity of the Northern Ireland backstop, the tense vagaries of the Middle East and the constitutional complexities that bind Scotland to the union, are subjects that are not easily busked even by the most consummate bullsh****r.
Like the Chicago killers, Johnson believes his intellect is not only superior but flexible enough to wriggle away in the face of hard questioning. Having once been a journalist, he thinks he has their number.
Johnson’s past journalism is now haunting him like a grim ghost. Many of his pieces for the Daily Telegraph articles concocted a set of “Euromyths”, designed to stoke deepening hatred of Europe.
They included plans to ban prawn cocktail crisps and establish a “banana police force” to regulate the shape of the fruit. It was nonsense in search of an ideology.
When police eventually arrested Leopold and Loeb they discovered that they were students of Friedrich Nietzsche and believed in the then fashionable concept of ubermensch – the so-called superman.
It was intoxicated rubbish which argued that a woman’s major role in society is to give birth to the true ubermensch.
Like Johnson, the killers came from immigrant families, but with time and from the privilege of their pampered homes they built-up racist resentments, cruising Chicago’s racially-mixed Southside abusing “Wops”, “Polaks” and “Negroes” on their way.
Johnson’s casual racism, which SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford itemised in his question to Parliament, is born out of an innate sense of superiority.
He has stigmatised Muslim women comparing them to pillar-boxes and used faux-risque language like “picaninnies” and “watermelon smiles” as if they carry no weight other than humorous nostalgia.
BLACKFORD could have gone further and might also have interrogated Johnson’s fitness to lead Britain, after he published contemptuous prejudices about Scots, those “tartan dwarves” of the north.
Whilst we may bristle, the collective loathing in Liverpool is just as great.
Johnson once published a damning verdict on Liverpool in the wake of the Hillsborough families’ fight for justice and the brutal murder of Ken Bagley in Iraq in 2004.
Under his now tainted editorship, of The Spectator, a magazine which seems hardwired to the snobby prejudices of Tory England, it was once claimed that “an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.
“They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.”
Unelectable in Scotland and widely loathed in Liverpool and much of the north, it is difficult to see how his coronation as Prime Minister can heal any of the wounds of the Brexit era.
READ MORE: Double trouble: The startling similarities between Johnson and Trump
For Scots there is at least an option, he may the very last unelected Tory Prime Minister we have to suffer.
What I fail to understand about Boris Johnson, as with the Chicago murderers, is why their intelligence leads them inexorably down a path that may lead to self-destruction?
It could be that they are not as clever as they think, or more likely that their access to elite and conservative thought, drip-fed to them from birth, has cultivated the belief that the rest of us are mired in stupidity, only fit to be servants, housemaids or the victims of puerile humour.
Johnson will win but in a much greater sense he has already lost.
His questionable past is riddled with so much self-regard and tousled bigotry, that he cannot possibly reach the standards of decency and diplomacy that global politics needs. Nor has he the instinctive curiosity about other people that will allow him to emotionally connect with people in nurseries, care-homes and failing schools, they are already in a scrapheap he rarely visits.
Johnson is a relic of a Tory arrogance crumbling under the weight of its own prejudices.
Try as I might, I cannot prove that the accused, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, actually murdered the wealthy schoolboy Bobby Franks.
He wasn’t around at the time and would not be born for decades to come.
But the two teenagers who committed the crime displayed the same studied superiority, the same selective privileges and the same belief that their towering classical intellect would always come to the rescue and baffle mere mortals.
As I glanced up only periodically at the BBC televised debate last week it was obvious from his fidgeting bewilderment and the now studied ruffle of the locks, that Johnson didn’t want to be there.
He holds no great respect for the obligations of democracy and even glanced over at his rivals as if they were mere supplicants.
The only silver lining I can see in the dark clouds of this vile man becoming Prime Minister is that it will hasten the cause of Scottish self-governance.
Step forth Boris, the dwarves of tartanry welcome your unrivalled wisdom and your mountainous superiority. We are unfit to be in your “precious union”.
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