Brexit, bananas, George Soros and infidelity. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson is but a door — which our UK correspondent Annie Kelly is helping us open — to a whole new world of apocalyptic clown play. The Tory Party has been in power 9 years now, and British politics have never been so cool. And by cool we mean weirdly anti-semitic.
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You have had a profound influence on these three lives.
Welcome listeners to the 61st chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Boris Banana
Bonanza episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Annie Kallie, Julian Field, Jake Rokitansky, and Travis
View.
United Kingdom, they've been doing a little thing called Brexit.
Now, one of the coolest features of Brexit, which stands for Brian Exit, is that nobody understands it, even those supposedly tending shop.
But that, of course, does not stop figureheads from getting fired, which is exactly what happened to former Prime Minister Theresa May on July 24th of 2019.
She was replaced by a mix of Uncle Fester, a rugby bully, and a spoiled Aryan child.
The man's name is Bojo.
Bojo, which stands for BoJack Johnson, is widely considered to be Britain's peroxidated answer to Donald Trump, a corrupt dumbass who coasted on a broken system and was crowned leader of one of the most vapid and dangerous countries in the world.
But who will the podcast blame for this massive failure?
Well, we scratched our heads.
Jake offered to do a Sean Connery impression for an entire episode, so we tied him to a chair and belted his toes.
And then we remembered someone who does an excellent British accent.
It's Bang On.
And she also happens to be our official UK correspondent.
That's right, folks.
It's Annie Kelly, your favorite PhD writer covering anti-feminists and the far right.
And today she's got full control of the fleet and she will not let the sun set on our empire until we've properly covered Bojo's Bizarre Adventure.
Welcome, Annie.
Oh, thanks for having me on, guys.
Well, I mean, technically you're running the ship and we're just along for the ride.
That's right, you should be thanking me.
Yes, thank you, Annie, for having us on.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
I brought some organic, frosted, pumpkin-flavored pastries to just open and eat and enjoy while we listen to your brilliance.
What are those, Pop-Tarts?
Well, it's kind of the off-brand, you know.
Oh my god, those are off-brand Pop-Tarts.
Hey man, come on, you know.
I didn't know they packaged depression.
I didn't want to insult our Patreon members by coming in here with actual Kellogg's branded Pop-Tarts.
Yes, but please make sure that you hold that package constantly and fiddle with it while we record so that...
They can hear every fucking crinkle.
You absolute incompetent.
But before all that...
Alright, main story is 8chan rebrands to 8kun.
Isn't it like 8kun?
8kun.
8kun.
I don't know.
I think it's a Japanese thing.
Who comes up with this shit?
I don't know.
A pig farmer and his red-pilled son.
But that doesn't even sound like a pig farmer's son idea.
Because they're all super online fucking weebs, dude.
That's what they do is they hang out all day with anime Nazis and then they come up with shit like this.
Okay, alright.
Makes sense.
So as part of the continuing effort to relaunch 8chan, the website got a new name and a new URL.
In a video posted on 8chan's Twitter account, the site owners announced the new name is 8kun.
That's the number 8, K-U-N.
And the new URL is 8kun.net, though the site is not live yet.
So, but that video they had with like the kind of like there was like a stormy weather and then the burning shape of the 8.
Of the snake.
And 100%, not joking, there's a cue hidden at the bottom.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They hid a cue.
Wait, are they doing trailers for the new 8 channel?
Yes.
And I have to admit, Yeah, dramatic announcement.
It is a pretty badass trailer, I gotta admit.
They hired someone talented, it was pretty slick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very slick.
It's the don't tread on me snake that forms the infinity and then in the tail of the snake is a clear, clear cue.
Still sounds quite conceptually messy.
Yeah, it's, yeah, I mean, graphic design-wise, look, I mean, it's a little bit, it's a little first drafty.
It's like they paid some guy who's like a Michael Bay fan on Fiverr to use his AutoCAD.
For internet, like, Nazi forum, like, it's pretty high-tech, like, to be honest.
It's amazing.
You know what?
We're proud of them.
We wish them the best.
The creator of 8chan, Frederick Brennan, who happens to be a friend and patron of the show, has been doing really noble work trying to prevent 8kun from going up.
For example, by observing crafted network requests, he pieced together a map of 8kun's network, and that has allowed him to identify the third-party service providers that 8kun will rely on to stay up.
So, Frederick, thank you so much for staying on top of that and being a thorn in the side of 8chan owner Jim Watkins.
So Frederick has offered his speculations about what 8kun means for Q in an interview with Vice News.
I expect one of his first drops on 8kun will be to post a key so that Q can use other platforms in the future.
That's why, if you ask me, it's so crucial that 8kun never be allowed to fully come online.
If it does, QAnon can spread.
Without it, QAnon is essentially dead.
Damn, dude, sounds like he's talking about like a monster in a monster movie or something.
Yeah, this is like if you remove the head of this giant infinity, like self suck snake.
Yeah, this is like the scene in the trailer with like the Metal Gear theme in the background.
And he's like, he's like, it can never be allowed to fully come online.
So around the same time that the 8coon announcement was made, a site owner, Jim Watkins, uploaded a YouTube video.
And man, it is really weird.
So here's how... I mean, come on, the guy.
Yeah, the guy is basically like made of wax.
Like he's... I'm pretty sure you just put a wick in him and he lasts like a few days and smells awful.
So, I want to play a clip of, like, how the video started.
And when you listen to this, keep in mind that this is the man who is working to relaunch an unprofitable image board that is most famous for its popularity with pedophiles, neo-Nazis, and QAnon.
Hi guys!
I'm Jim!
Welcome to my YouTube channel, and don't forget to follow me and click that like button.
Don't worry, the like button's more scared of you than you're scared of it.
Oh my god, he's doing like bad gay guy stand-up shit from the 80s.
He's pretending to be a YouTube influencer.
Yeah.
This is awful!
This is a stupid world.
So Jim Watkins has testified to the House of Representatives recently.
And in that video, he seems to accuse members of the House of being in the thrall of some unnamed outside money.
Well, OK, so blaming the Jews.
Yeah.
The obvious insertion of a gigantic amount of capital into our nation's capital, and I use the adjective gigantic literally, as I had to imagine and realize what it would take myself to step on my integrity in such a brutal, practical way, as the House seems to have done en masse lately.
How much money would it take you to step all over your ethics and sell out your entire country?
For the majority of Americans, that number is higher than anyone would be willing to pay.
It takes a special weasel.
I love this new trend, though, that he's setting of, you know, pulling over on the freeway, getting out, and then recording a YouTube video.
How does he manage to do the old-person Skype angle?
Like, can't you have someone hold a camera or something?
Can't you find a place that's not literally outdoors with wind to do your special announcement about your very important website?
He says that he recorded this in Santa Monica.
What?
Yeah.
He's hanging out?
He's hanging out.
Let's get him on the show!
As Jake would say, so with gusto, and I would shut down immediately.
We'd love to have him.
Jim, no, if you're listening, no.
He then tells a clearly made up story about hearing politicians wanting to repeal the First and Second Amendment.
Any excuse is all they need to bring about the loss of your personal freedoms.
I heard even one of these silly politicians calling for repealing the First and Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Now, in case you're not aware of it, we would have to dissolve our individual union.
In order for that to happen.
This man, he's unstable at best.
Yeah, this is the effort level of that high school science fair volcano, but except it like creates Nazis who shoot schools.
Amazing.
That's not funny.
So this is how Watkins ends the video.
What do you do when you're angry?
Sit there silently until you blow your top?
No.
Speak out.
Get it off your chest.
And don't forget to follow my YouTube channel!
See you next time!
This guy has clearly had a shot of adrenochrome.
He looks a little bit younger, a little bit less sweaty, more filled with life knowing that his Nazi board is about to be reborn.
God, he looks like an overfilled red balloon, like, just about to accidentally pop in the face of the child who's blowing them for the first time.
The way- his, like, sort of- The balloon, not- The balloon, I'm not- God damn it, that sounded bad.
Come on, Travis!
A balloon, I said- I set it up with a balloon, I did not- God damn it!
No, ugh, whatever.
I'm- I'm done.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Hi there friends, it's your pal Annie here.
I've been away on a mountaintop, communing with the old gods, trying to see if there's a way I can solve Brexit once and for all.
The results were inconclusive and honestly some of what they said just kind of weirded me out.
We have so many reasons to be confident about our country and its direction and yet I feel sometimes we're like a world-class athlete with a pebble in our shoe.
There is one part of the British system that seems to be on the blink.
If Parliament were a laptop, then the screen would be showing, I'm afraid, the pizza wheel of doom.
If Parliament were a school, if Parliament were a school, Ofsted would be shutting it down or putting it in special measures.
If Parliament were a reality TV show, Then the whole lot of us, I'm afraid, would have been voted out of the jungle by now.
But at least we'd have had the consolation of watching the Speaker being forced to eat a kangaroo testicle.
So conservative Brits are a very good audience, because they think this is very, very funny.
They're just dying in the audience, fucking laughing.
Well, British people are just a little bit more clever than we are.
I mean, even their version of Donald Trump managed to get a few fucking zingers in there.
Oh, no, he blows Trump out of the water.
He proves that the UK has to be lied to in an incredibly corrupt way, but with a little more intelligence, goddammit.
But you know what?
He also kind of looks like a Princess Bride character.
I could easily see I could easily see him like, you know, like replacing Andre the Giant and like being Wally Shawn's kind of, you know, old fish.
Old fish sort of sidekick.
Andre the Giant never died.
You just they bleached his hair and he's now the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
That's not a bad one.
We could start it on TikTok.
Here on QAnon Anonymous, we tend to cover the weird and wonderful conspiracy theories being cooked up by the far right.
Q himself hasn't made quite such an impact over here in the British Isles, possibly because it's just too far-fetched to think of this country being governed over by a ruling class of elite millionaire paedophiles.
On an unrelated note, I was watching the Conservative Party conference last week and it occurred to me that our listeners might be interested in exactly what the hell is going on in the UK.
Why are our government officials sounding increasingly like the hammed up fascist allegories in a science fiction movie?
As Home Secretary, at this defining moment in our country's history, I have a particular responsibility when it comes to taking back control.
It is to end the free movement of people once and for all.
They're not even hiding it anymore.
From now on, people will stay in one place forever.
They will no longer move.
We will glue them to the floor.
I will personally carpet bomb the Silk Road.
My favorite is that we're at the point in fascism where it's like, again, it's intersectional fascism.
You can have a woman of color up there being like, fuck immigrants.
Having ending freedom be at the applause line.
To end freedom once and for all.
Don't we love our big brother?
Don't we love him?
Also, when did they get so weirdly anti-Semitic?
Just a few days ago, leader of the House of Commons and cartoon character Jacob Rees-Mogg invoked the far-right conspiracist version of the boogeyman, Jewish billionaire George Soros, as a driving force behind anti-Brexit sentiment in the UK, known colloquially in this country as the Ramoners.
May I remind her that one of the major funders, allegedly, of the Remain campaign, the sort of Ramona funder-in-chief, is one George Soros, who made a billion pounds when Sterling crashed out of the exchange rate mechanism.
Are you guys familiar with Jacob Rees-Moggattal?
Not at all.
Oh, he's utterly bizarre.
He's like the Torea story you can imagine, basically.
He's got seven children and they've all got Latin names like Septimus and things like that.
Oh my god, oh my god.
They're all raised by the nanny that raised him.
As a young boy, and she comes on holidays with them and stuff like that, and he calls her Nanny.
Yeah, she's 100% a ghost.
She died at some point while raising him, and the ghost continued to raise him, and now the ghost is raising the children.
My children are raised by the ghost of Eva Brown.
Yes, this is my firstborn, Sisyphus.
Raised by the dark spirit, Nana.
No, this guy's amazing, though.
I mean, he looks like a Harry Potter villain.
He looks like Bill Nye the Science Guy went terribly wrong.
Yeah, I mean, every time I see him, I'm just like, this is what the Americans think we all are.
Like, this guy here.
It's true.
It's true.
Then Preeti Patel, our Home Secretary, specifically singled out in her conference speech a particular area of London known for its high Jewish population.
This daughter of immigrants needs no lectures from the North London metropolitan liberal elite.
Yeah.
And in North London is where the Jews live?
Yeah, I mean, it's like pretty much what it's famous for.
It's kind of there's just like no other way you can particularly take that.
God damn it, man.
Yeah.
We live in just pure fucking hell.
Is there a large Jewish population in the UK?
Yeah, I mean, it pretty much always has been since the Middle Ages, although in the Middle Ages, that's when they have lots of pogroms and kill them all.
Right, right, right.
My family escaped from pogroms.
That was the whole deal.
Yeah, the Jewish blood libel really kicked off in the UK.
Yeah, you guys got it going.
Yeah!
No, actually, right where I live in Norwich, we still have a patron saint of Norwich who is William of Norwich, I think.
That's right.
Yeah, he's one of the most famous blood libel cases.
And it kind of turns out, like, that basically what actually happened was he probably got drunk and got in a fight, and then they kind of just added this whole sort of, like, martyred for being a Christian stuff later.
Right, it's like the whole Tommy Robinson shit where he goes around picking fights and then he's like, people are fighting me!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It feels a bit like the Conservative government is spinning wildly out of control, hemorrhaging supporters, torn in two by a ruinous Brexit referendum.
And their response has just been to flail around and try to point out the internal enemies that are somehow more responsible for Brexit not being an immediate success than the Conservatives themselves, who've been in power for the last nine years.
But they're still somehow lurching forward, relentlessly keeping hold of power, backs borne against the side, leaving the entire country wondering if this is all some kind of stress test for the very concept of the rich failing upward.
Welcome, everyone, to the Boris Banana Bonanza.
Sir, we are told that you cannot have, you cannot sell bananas in bunches of more than two or three bananas.
You cannot, you cannot sell bananas with abnormal curvature of the fingers.
What?
Welcome to British politics, guys.
Wait a minute, hold on, hold on.
He's doing that Jacob Wohl thing of like, you can't do this, you can't do that, like saying that the European Union will not let people sell bananas in bunches.
Is that correct, Annie?
That is correct.
Or if they're overly bendy or overly curved.
I mean, it's incorrect.
That's the whole thing.
But that's the rumor.
The charge is no punches of two or more bananas.
Wait a tick.
What's wrong with that?
I mean, I hate it when my girlfriend sends me to Trader Joe's and she's like, hey, get me some bananas.
She's like, but I only want two.
And I'm like, well, I'd like the straight kind.
I'm like, but they come in like a bunch of like four or five.
And she's like, you can rip them off.
I'm like, can you?
In the middle of the store ripping bananas in the bunches?
I didn't think that that was a thing.
To me, a bunch is of two, three bananas.
It's fine.
So we have a Boris Johnson over here?
What's the problem?
Okay.
No, I'm anti-Bojo.
You're saying the same thing as him.
I'm calling for bunches of two bananas only.
Oh, you want the bunches to be pre-cut.
I want the bunches to be pre-cut.
That way I don't have to feel bad because what if I make a bad tear?
What if I accidentally open the skin of a banana that I'm tearing away from and I ruin it from somebody else?
It's a waste of produce.
So this is a psychological technique Jake is using called mirroring.
So he's mirroring the stupidity of Brexit on purpose.
What?
Okay, this is a deeper 4D chess move.
I think one of my favourite ever onion headlines, because it's just like one that comes to my head so many times, is every time I'm in the supermarket I just think of the onion headline, which is like, two bananas will probably be enough, thinks world's loneliest man.
Boris Johnson, our newest Prime Minister, has been a favourite of British media for many years.
He's carefully cultivated the bumbling toff persona that seems to be a favourite of our broadcasters.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel-Johnson though, his actual full name, is quintessentially posh, raised by two independently wealthy parents who hated each other.
If you wondered what kind of sickness this country suffers from when it comes to class and politics, it's actually more unusual to be a Prime Minister who hasn't been educated at those places than who has.
After university, Johnson seemed as if he might have an illustrious career as what has been popularly termed a fail-son, securing work for a management consultancy before resigning after only a week.
After this, he began working at the newspaper, The Times, but was fired after being caught fabricating a quote from a historian for a front-page story about an archaeological discovery.
What a dumb thing to kid God for!
God damn it, man.
Yeah, the weirdest part was that he was actually related to this story, if I'm remembering correctly.
It was his godfather or something.
So I guess he thought he could just do it because he's close to the guy or the guy knows him.
He wouldn't be like, that's wrong, I didn't say that.
But he did.
But he did, yeah.
I mean, because... He got sold out by his own family.
Well, because it was a really embarrassing lie, because he said something like, it was about a discovery of some old king's palace, maybe King George or something like that.
Something about, like, it would have been where he would have been, the king would have gone with his lover, because that's a bit of a salacious story or something, except the lover had actually died 15 years before the palace was built.
So, like, you can't be a historian and, like, have your name on the record, like, saying that, you know.
But I'm just glad that that's front page news in the UK.
We do love our king's palaces.
Luckily, you don't go to Eton and Oxford without meeting a few important people, and so Johnson began writing for the high Tory paper of record, The Daily Telegraph, instead.
Here, he became the newspaper's EU correspondent, based in Brussels for five years.
Not to be deterred by previous embarrassments, he continued polishing his flair for what is known in the industry as making any old shit up, but this time in a more political vein.
Johnson essentially tapped into the market of gullible wealthy pensioners with a mistrust for anything foreign, and basically seemed to create a challenge for himself with regard to exactly what was the most ridiculous story he could make them believe.
Some stories from Johnson's time in this stint included that the EU were going to outlaw prawn cocktail crisps, regulate coffin sizes to one standard shape, as well as ban standard English sausages for not containing enough meat.
I did actually find a rumour going round that the EU had proposed to call them emulsified high-fat offal tubes instead, but as far as I could tell that one didn't actually originate with Johnson.
It also seemed to be during this time that Johnson acquired his obsession with bananas, saying that the EU were planning to establish a banana police force which would check the fruit to see if it was the correct shape.
As Martin Fletcher, a former Brussels correspondent for The Times, puts it, He seized every chance to mock or denigrate the EU, filing stories that were undoubtedly colourful, but also grotesquely exaggerated or completely untrue.
The Telegraph loved it, so did the Tory right, Johnson later confessed.
Everything I wrote from Brussels I found was sort of chucking these rocks over a garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing explosive effect on the Tory party.
It really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power.
All of this, I should make clear, was in the late 80s and early 90s.
Long before fake news became a phrase, and all of it was published in a national broadsheet, to great success, it largely feels, looking back at all these stories, as if the entirety of a certain generation of telegraph reader was a victim of some kind of large-scale Nigerian print scam.
Except they were buying stories to make them all burst a blood vessel about how stupid and wasteful the EU is instead, which sort of seems like a less wise investment.
It seems pretty wild, given just how much mess this ended up getting us into, Many in Brussels found Johnson funny.
alarm, but sifting through the narratives from people who knew him at the time, it seems
clear that Johnson had already perfected the art of getting away with pretty much anything
by not being taken seriously. As one Guardian piece puts it, Many in Brussels found Johnson funny. One British official
spoke of a hilarious exchange between Johnson and the Agriculture Commissioner's spokesman
about how bent a banana had to be.
One said, Nobody imagined where Johnson's annoying stories would lead, said one of the British officials.
He was more seen as a colorful buffoon figure, but we didn't realize it was going to set the tone of the British debate.
He really is like Trump.
You know what the banana thing is?
It's exactly like the straw bans thing here.
Yeah, the US like occasionally you'll have like some town or whatever decide to ban plastic straws when businesses and then event Trump sells Trump branded straws and every conservative pundit says drinks from a straw and says trigger get lip, you know?
Yeah, when people are literally just just trying to like save the planet.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's actually a good idea.
I should maybe, like, get a grift on where I can, like, I don't know, dance around with bananas and be like, Triggered yet, EU?
Yeah, like bent, straight-looking bananas.
Bunches of five.
Bunches of five.
Triggered, Brussels.
We're going crazy here.
Triggered much, Brussels?
Triggered, you Belgian punks?
I still think there's something more to it though, because it's not as if these ridiculous stories about the EU's bureaucratic extravagances were made popular just by the power of Boris Johnson's charisma alone.
The official term given to these kinds of lies, exaggerations or distortions for EU policies is a euoromist, and Johnson isn't credited with inventing them, even if he did make a good living off them for a good few years.
I've met people who still repeat that EU banning bendy bananas story today, despite the various attempts to debunk it, including the EU even having a webpage for a while assuring the public that any shape of banana was fine with them.
But these stories tend to stick.
I think that the reason for that is because they've just been so useful for the people who are actually in power in this country.
Euro myths, which imply that the EU is just a waste of money and the reason there's so much red tape and everything costs so much more now, were brilliant for Tories and actually even the Labour government.
The EU is the perfect scapegoat because it's this far-off institution that nobody really understood and most of the actual work it did was intricate, dense and boring.
And you can hardly blame people when the news they're getting about the EU is cartoon fantasy policy made up by people like Johnson, while their lives are getting immeasurably worse and being told that there's not enough money for this library or that hospital, to start to grow resentful of this institution that they see as being at the heart of that waste.
It's amazing because essentially what they did was they saw an opportunity to make the EU and this kind of like yearly meeting and all this stuff seem like the Jewish meeting in the Protocols of Zion.
They were like, yeah, there's like a shadowy cabal meeting every year to decide your fate.
And they were just like, what if we kind of did a little antisemitism in their direction?
My question is, What is the point of doing Brexit?
What do they get out of it?
Is it just privatizing stuff?
Is it selling it abroad?
Where's the money?
What's the financial gain here in promoting this stuff, other than just the attention and the careers?
The EU is basically at the heart of pretty much all of our employment regulations, for one thing.
So it would pretty much do away with a lot of worker protections that we're afforded.
So that's why half of the Tories hate the EU so much.
And also, yeah, that, you know, they're kind of seen as that sort of like she she liberal Europe minded thing.
So they, you know, they do lots of kind of grants for, I don't know, you know, kind of disability grants and kind of, you know, for minorities and that sort of thing.
So that's why the other half of them hate it.
Copy that.
It's certainly true, though, that Boris cultivated an image of himself because he knew that being underestimated as a sort of harmless eccentric let him get away with more.
But I also think that now he's in power, the media are purposefully avoiding that nagging question of how much they helped.
Even when Johnson was a journalist, he regularly appeared on the popular political comedy panel show Have I Got News For You, where he would play up this bumbling persona while becoming something of a celebrity.
Boris claimed that he was dropped off Radio 4 recently because his accent wasn't correct for the new plebby BBC.
Oh, that's quite right.
Well done, yes.
And I have always suspected that to be a complete load of old rubbish.
They just dropped you off the programme because the programme moved on.
No, actually it is true that that was the stated reason.
And I thought it was quite a funny point.
Boris Johnson was sacked by the BBC for being too posh, although he recently told The Guardian a voice can be changed, we plummy-voiced Breyers can adapt.
So how's it coming on, this adaptation?
Well, I haven't... I'm making progress.
Right.
So yes, it's true that Boris Gets Away was continually lying because he styled himself like a cartoon character.
But this wasn't something he did by himself.
He was helped every step of the way, so that by the time he did run for parliament in 2001, he had become enough of a public persona to win a comfortable majority, and then become a shadow cabinet member just two years later.
Being a celebrity politician isn't always everything it's cracked up to be though, and in 2004 the story broke that Johnson had been having an affair with another columnist called, brace yourselves, Petronella Wyatt.
Another Princess Bride character.
It sounds like a character in Harry Potter, right?
Johnson initially denied the allegations until they were proven with more evidence provided by Wyatt's own mother.
He was asked to resign by Michael Howard, the then Conservative Party leader.
Johnson refused, and so was fired instead.
It wouldn't, by a long shot, be Johnson's last political scandal.
After becoming Mayor of London in 2008, accusations of corruption and cronyism continued to mysteriously crop up.
First, his friend Conservative MP Damian Green was arrested under suspicion of political misconduct.
Boris made the incredible move of declaring in public that he had spoken with Green, an alleged criminal suspect, and then proceeded to announce that he had seen evidence and didn't think it would reach courts.
This coming from the Mayor had the potential to prejudice the ongoing investigation.
The case was later dropped.
Johnson was also accused by his predecessor Ken Livingstone of using his position as Mayor to buy good press, appointing a former editor of the newspaper The Evening Standard to a well-paid Arts Council position.
There was then a disastrous interview on the BBC in which he implied that the wage he earned for being Mayor of London wasn't enough to get by on.
Now, the leader of your party, the Conservative Party, David Cameron, is trying to take a grip, at least as far as he can, on his own party.
He's told his shadow cabinet that they must abandon all their outside activities, their second jobs, by the end of the year.
Now, you are the Mayor of London.
I checked this morning.
I believe your salary is just short of £140,000.
You have a massive job.
You've just told me how dizzyingly exciting and challenging it is.
And yet, you have a contract with a national newspaper worth £250,000 a year.
Chicken feed, yeah, OK.
Chicken feed?
Listen, let's be... Do you think most people in London will regard it as chicken feed?
Particularly at a time of economic recession, that you're earning £250,000 on the side as a newspaper.
Well, I don't presume to ask what you earn from the taxpayer.
Oh my God!
Wow!
Yeah, I mean, this was right after the 2008 crash, like, lots of people had literally just lost their jobs when this happened.
He really shows his colors, though.
The way his face kind of, the way he's standing there, chicken feet.
Like, you can really see the fucking, like, spoiled, like, wealthy.
But just to see a journalist press a politician like that is refreshing.
You love to see it.
Also, I like that the British version of Peanuts is chicken feet.
But it's so funny, too, how the interviewer immediately gets pissed off the moment.
Like, his demeanor completely changes.
He's like, sir, excuse me.
He immediately is like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Like, I first just, basically, we're talking about almost $400,000 if he's doing $140,000 to get to be the mayor.
And then he's got a $250,000 contract.
And they're pounds, baby.
So that's like half a million dollars.
Yes, that's like half a million.
And this guy's like, chicken feet.
Yeah, I mean, one thing I will say for our press, which I hold in quite a low regard, as you can probably tell, is that I do really like that old British style of interviewing where they're just like, unbelievably hostile from the second.
It's always like really gratifying, especially seeing like American public figures come to the UK and get interviewed by one of those kind of old school sort of just like, Antagonistic journalists, because you can tell they're like really upset.
They're like, does this person have a problem with me?
And it's like, probably not, you know, you're all in the same kind of like media class.
But that's just how we do it here.
We just like, I don't know, we have just like a kind of need for blood when we watch politicians and like political figures get interviewed and stuff like that.
Like that Jordan Peterson interview, I don't know if you saw, where yeah, everyone's kind of like, oh, you know, they thought that the interviewer was like a feminist and was personally angry at Jordan Peterson.
She wasn't.
That's just how they do interviews.
They just try and rip you apart on anything.
Yeah, they've migrated the style a little bit over here with a guy named Piers Morgan.
But he's usually the one getting grilled.
He's usually the one by the end of the interview going, How dare you, sir?
How dare you accuse me?
Despite this, alongside an expenses scandal, accusations that he had had another extramarital affair which this time resulted in a love child, and reports that his wife had kicked him out of his family home, Johnson largely continued to receive positive coverage from the media who, with the honourable exception of The Guardian, frequently didn't even bother fact-checking some of his more outrageous lies about what his administration were up to.
Part of this was because most of the people working at these newspapers were friends with Boris, who'd after all been a journalist for his entire working career, and Boris, to his credit, reciprocated.
So, when Rupert Murdoch and his company News International were implicated in a vast phone hacking scandal, with the reporters even having hacked the phone of a missing child, Johnson publicly attacked the allegations as Codswallop.
It was later revealed that News International were offering him £2 million worth of sponsorships at the time, which I'm sure had nothing to do with it.
If there has been any kind of silver lining to the Brexit referendum permanently breaking the brains of every single person over the age of 45 in this country, it was probably getting to see Boris Johnson look like he might genuinely be sick on camera.
I'm not sure how well known this is outside of the UK, but the Leave campaign, which was headed by Johnson, didn't actually expect to win.
And it's not really clear how much they wanted to win.
Certainly not Boris, who despite making a living off of mocking the EU for a while, had historically disavowed the idea of the UK actually leaving, until he realised there might be a benefit to playing the other side.
The Vote Leave campaign had been designed to gain a decent but losing share of the vote, blockade those rebel MPs in the Tory party who genuinely hated the EU for the next 20 or so years, and set Boris up to be the next Conservative party leader after Cameron.
It was all a bit awkward when Leave actually won, and the main Leave campaigners had to admit they hadn't actually planned for this eventuality.
Worse still, those misleading statistics and outright lies that they'd used to persuade people were suddenly gaining a lot more scrutiny.
Let's deal with your arguments.
One of them is on the side of this bus.
We sent 350 million to Europe.
We don't.
And you know we don't.
No, we don't.
You know we don't.
Admit that that figure is grotesquely misleading at best.
I won't.
The true figure is £161 million, correct?
No, the true figure is £350 million.
In net terms, the real figure is £161 million.
If you take out the abatement and the money that comes back, the UK money that comes back via Brussels, the figure is obviously lower.
Boris, who had before been on what looked like an unstoppable trajectory towards leadership, was forced to do the political equivalent of that gif of Homer Simpson disappearing into a hedge while the Prime Minister resigned and the Tory party crumbled around him.
This is probably where I come closest to feeling empathy for Boris.
Because who hasn't at one point in their lives fucked everything up and just wanted to disappear for a little while?
While few of us can say we fucked an entire country up, it's still admittedly very relatable.
Johnson didn't, as was expected, put himself in the running for the Conservative leadership, leaving that dubious honour to Theresa May.
This worked about as well as you could expect, given May belonged to that class of Conservative with exactly the same degree of moral fibre as Johnson, but absolutely none of the mannerisms that might lead a person to recognise them as a fellow member of the human species.
What was the naughtiest thing you ever did?
Oh, goodness me.
Well, I suppose the... Gosh, do you know?
I'm not quite sure.
There must have been a moment.
Nobody is ever perfectly behaved, are they?
I mean, you know, I have to confess, when me and my friends sort of used to run through the fields of wheat, the farmers weren't too pleased about that.
Despite May's best attempts over the next few years to possibly try and create a Brexit deal that would make literally anyone at all happy, she failed miserably and was finally forced to resign earlier this year.
The Tory leadership contest that ensued afterwards felt like it took a really long time, but that might just be because about 20 people signed up for it and most of them looked and talked exactly the same as one another.
Although I should make at least an honourable exception for sensible centrist hero Rory Stewart on this one, who former guest of the show Matt Grissman once described as looking like Willem Dafoe looked directly into the Chernobyl
reactor.
Boris was largely the only one people could pick out of the lineup and so in July he ascended to
the highest electable office in the country while not actually having been elected.
I imagine it felt like a little bit of a poison chalice though, particularly for a man whose biographers make a big point of mentioning that he used to say he wanted to be king of the world as a child, because what a mess to inherit!
And Boris wasted no time turning a very large mess into a colossal one.
The official deadline for Brexit, October 31st, was looming, And Parliament had already shown with Theresa May they were more than willing just to vote down any Brexit deal whatsoever for a laugh.
More seriously though, it was deeply unlikely Johnson would muster the votes to be able to force through a no-deal Brexit, which I've affectionately come to call the Mad Max option.
To be clear, nobody in government actually wants to be responsible for no deal, because while it might be good for the disaster capitalists, it almost certainly will cause medicine and food shortages.
So it's become a little bit of a disciplinary measure, where the Tories threaten everyone with it unless they stop misbehaving.
Johnson took this tactic one step further though, by declaring he had asked the Queen to prorogue Parliament from the 10th of September, essentially forcing all MPs out of the decision-making booth altogether.
This is one of those weird moments in British law, because unlike you Americans listening, we here in the UK don't actually have a proper codified constitution which can say whether this stuff is explicitly allowed or not.
It's more helpful just to think of our governing powers as more based on a general code of norms, which everyone just hopes that politicians will feel some great sense of shame or dishonour about breaking.
So, most people's reaction to this happening was something like, hang on, he can't do that, can he?
As it turns out, the answer to this question was, well, sort of, but no.
Firstly, the Tories lost 22 MPs in one day who resigned in protest.
23 if you count Johnson's own brother quitting two days after that.
This left the Conservatives without anywhere close to a working majority to actually pass any laws.
Secondly, Parliament did get suspended on the 10th of September, although not without a bit of drama.
Mr Speaker, the Lords who are authorised by Her Majesty's Commission to declare her Royal Assent to Acts passed by both Houses and to also declare the prorogation of Parliament Desire the presence of this honorable house
My god, so this is amazing because she's she looks dressed like she's literally part of the Illuminati
It's a woman with what looks like a sword over her shoulder.
But it's not a sword.
It's something else.
It's like a curtain.
It's like a golden curtain rod.
She has lace coming out of her leather gloves and a giant golden pendant and she looks like she's been kept in a posh broom closet somewhere.
And meanwhile, the Mexican party next door at the Catholic School, who are celebrating Oktoberfest, it is currently 10.15am over here, and they are fucking on the eccies, they are coming up, they are fucking absolutely peaking, and the rave has just commenced, and so we're trying to do our best over here, but if you can hear music in the background, you know what it is, and may I just say that the Mexicans know how to party.
Yeah, it's a good time.
We will, in between recording episodes, we will be going over there to see if we can get some quesadillas and tacos that we've heard being advertised over the loudspeaker for the last 45 minutes or so.
So we completely fucked everything up for poor Annie, but we're trying to react to these videos that she's prepared because my lord is this exciting.
It's so much cooler than American shit.
Congress never does anything this epic.
Yeah, they never do anything fun.
They never, you know, banter at each other.
I love how everybody goes, no!
No!
Boo!
Boo!
Yeah, it's just so, it's so jovial.
I love it.
And not so, it doesn't take itself so seriously.
Well, except for this woman with the sword over her shoulder.
It's a duality.
It's like on one hand there's all this sort of like underhanded sort of understated snark and then there's all this weird sort of esoteric ceremony at the same time.
Yeah, I love it.
Finally, just a day later, Scotland's highest civil court ruled that the government shutdown in fact had been illegal because it was done with the purpose of preventing Parliament doing their job, something which Johnson incredibly unconvincingly denies.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Times uncovered that during his time as Mayor of London, Johnson failed to declare a series of potential conflicts of interest over what they described as a close friendship with an American former model.
The business of the woman in question received a total of £126,000 in public money, and she accompanied Johnson on three official overseas trade visits.
Here, Johnson didn't even unconvincingly deny the accusations, so much as just straightforwardly refuse to answer them in an excruciating interview with Sky News in New York.
There are questions from your time as Mayor of London.
You and your office stand accused of repeatedly doing taxpayer-funded favours against official advice for a very close friend of yours, Jennifer Arcuri.
Is it true?
Well, what I can certainly say, Sam, is that we did a huge amount of work when I was Mayor of London.
This might be uncomfortable but it is important.
the world beating the drum for London and indeed for the UK.
I'm very proud of what we did and I can tell you absolutely that
everything was done with complete propriety and in the normal way.
Look, this might be uncomfortable but it is important. What was your relationship with Jennifer Arcuri?
I can tell you that everything we did to promote London and the interests of
London.
London business was done completely in the normal way and with utter propriety.
And I'm actually proud now to be doing the same sort of thing again here in New York,
promoting our country, promoting our economy.
But is it the case that you're just not answering questions about that relationship?
I mean, is it because you used to be a journalist?
Is there a sense that because with the laws that the Supreme Court are looking, whether you broke or whether questions around whether or not you used public money properly, is there any sense at all that the norms and rules don't apply to you?
No, look, I've given you a very clear answer about my time as mayor and what we did to promote London, I'm
very proud of that.
Wow. It's amazing.
I thought he was going to say everything that we've done together was completely in the nude.
Stop saying I wore my clothes during the acts.
I did not wear my clothes, I never have, me and this woman together, only naked, only naked all the
time.
I just like that he just keeps on repeating like this was done in the normal way.
It's the normal way.
Missionary!
Yeah, she's actually done a tell-all, that lady Jennifer Arcuri has done a tell-all recently where she said, I've only seen the headline, but it said something like, Boris was my Henry VIII and I was his Anne Boleyn.
I do have to admit that there has been some grim schadenfreude in watching the disaster of Boris's premiership unfold, in that he and the Tories as a whole have been playing this game for a very long time.
On the one hand they were selling off large chunks of the country for a quick buck, and on the other they were pointing to the EU's supposedly massive wastefulness as a place where all the money was going.
And the thing is, it worked for them until it didn't.
Eventually the dam burst, and this has ended up completely destroying some of recent history's most powerful conservative politicians, of which I can only hope Boris will be next.
But there has just been something intensely frustrating about watching this happen too, because I basically know that Boris is going to be fine.
He probably won't be glorified in any history books unless he writes them himself, but he's not ever going to go hungrier without medicine, unlike a lot of this country if we get our Mad Max Brexit option.
Because unlike some of the more marginal right-wing politicians I've talked about on this show in the past, Porus's past isn't full of insane conspiracy theories about the establishment's global Marxist invasion.
All he needed was to make pensioners scared of the secret police coming for their bananas.
And behind the silly character he puts on, it's really just been the same old boring Tory selfishness and corruption.
It's even made me into something of a conspiracy theorist myself!
Like, he must have dirt on all these powerful people for them to keep letting him get away with this stuff so brazenly, right?
But then maybe that's not a conspiracy at all.
Maybe that's just what these institutions like Eton and Oxford University are really for.
They're just a protection racket for the powerful, ensuring that no matter how badly you fail, you won't ever really be held to account.
But for now we seem stuck in this mess until we leave the EU or the rising sea levels mercifully wipe out this little island once and for all.
Did you lie to the Queen when you advised her to prorogue to suspend Parliament?
Absolutely not!
And indeed, as I say, the High Court in England plainly agrees with us, but the Supreme Court will have to decide.
We need a Queen's Speech.
We need to get on and do all sorts of things.
Amazing!
This guy is a hero to anybody who wants to have a great clown character.
Yeah, he really is sort of the classic Lecoq style clown.
I mean, all that's next is we're just waiting for him to get de-panced or something, you know, in front of the entire, you know, parliament.
Yeah, I mean, I really like that he's, like, had to make... he's kind of, like, behaved so ridiculously and fucked things up so badly that the Tories' only, like, response from this point is just to start getting really anti-Semitic.
Like, they sort of can't really think of anyone else to blame.
Yeah.
They've had the highest office in the land for like nine or ten years now.
You really just can only go conspiracy-minded at that point.
Yeah, that's always a break glass in case of emergency of like demagogues when shit hits the fan.
Soros!
Well, thanks so much for preparing this for us, Andy.
It was really amazing.
Yeah, this is a fascinating look into this monster.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like I understand Brexit a little bit better now, but man, it is a clusterfuck.
And it turns out Brexit, the soundtrack to Brexit, is a giant Mexican Catholic church party.
So, hey!
I mean, what do you think the endgame is?
Do you think October 30th is going to come and go and it's just going to be like...
Like it just sort of seems like everything that's happening now is just kind of for show.
It's just kind of this like, you know, big reality shit.
It's like the same shit that's going on in America.
It's like fucking season four of Brexit.
And for us, it's like season four of like Spygate, Russiagate, all that shit.
Well, I think if we do just sort of fall out of the EU without a deal, which is kind of the scary option, I think the problem is everyone sort of thinks that's going to be it, but that just actually means we just get more Brexit all the time because then they have to Negotiate a deal without one, having exited the EU, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
So it's sort of one of these things where people keep on being like, oh, let's just go on with it.
It's been four years, blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, the problem is that that's not really how it works.
We still have to solve, like, kind of all of these sort of questions that are coming up anyway.
So I guess the worst case scenario is that we leave, everything stops for a while, and then we just get a shitty deal because Because you're already out.
Because we're already out and we have no choice.
And there's no bargaining chips anymore.
It's just like, well, you guys are already out.
You'll take what we give you.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I think probably we will.
There'll probably be a general election.
Hopefully, which will decide whether, which will like hopefully extend the deadline.
But honestly, who knows?
We didn't even think we were going to have Parliament for about two weeks and then we suddenly got it back again.
Yeah, it's bizarre.
The Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues have been saying he's making progress.
The EU's chief negotiator The Chancellor of Germany, the Taoiseach of Ireland say no proposals have yet been made by the UK.
If the Prime Minister thinks he's made progress, will he publish those proposals that he's put forward to replace the backstop?
As the right hon.
And as the Honourable Gentleman knows very well, you don't negotiate in public and we are making substantial progress.
We're making full progress. And we're moving forward.
You've been listening to the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Thanks.
Listen it until next week.
May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's fact.
Now, today's Auto-Tune.
♪♪♪ The first day,
Vinay was a truck being inaugurated in January 2016.
He went straight into the CIA headquarters office.
I don't know if it's in the White House or where it is.
And he read the right to him that there's going to be no more child sex trafficking.
That's how bad it is.
And he screamed and shouted at them and he said, this is it.
And he ordered the investigation from that moment.
It could be the 20th of October, it could be the 15th of October, it could be this weekend.
They're not going to tell you when they're going to start doing it, but they're going to start doing it.
And there's thousands and thousands of marines, and it is going to a national emergency.
Have you heard me talk about this could create a national emergency in our country?
And if we have a national emergency in our country, and this is why I'm asking the question about are the British League going to come Sealed indictments, which are warrants for arrest.
This enables Boris to then take us out, because within a national emergency, because we have the same constitution as America, the Prime Minister has unlimited powers.
That means he can take us out of the European Union without talking to Parliament, because it's a national emergency.
And this is why I've been so excited about it.
Not just the fact that he can take out all these scum
