{"id":59921,"date":"2026-09-17T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=59921"},"modified":"2026-09-16T10:31:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T14:31:16","slug":"qotd-boris-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-boris-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Boris Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Some generous souls are claiming it’s not Boris’s fault \u2014 which may be true, up to a point, of which more in a moment \u2014 but whoever is to blame one thing is abundantly clear: Britain is a failed state, the Sick Man of Europe, and those of us who grew up believing that to have been born British was to have won the lottery in life have now been sorely disabused of the notion.<\/p>\n

How can this possibly have happened to the land of Magna Carta<\/em> and English Common Law, the heroic seafaring nation which coloured the atlas pink and stamped its character on half the world’s nations from Australia and the U.S. to India and South Africa, that invented most of the world’s best sports, produced most of its greatest literature, beat Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler and discovered almost everything worth discovering?<\/p>\n

Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?<\/p>\n

Well, it’s easy to blame Boris, as I have done on occasion, for being a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10. As we’ve learned to our cost, he’s all mouth and no trousers, great for an impromptu bon mot<\/em> or jolly photo op but perfectly useless in times of crisis, being too easily led, having no opinions of his own, the backbone of sponge and the moral character of a Plecostomus catfish.<\/p>\n

James Delingpole, “Britain is now the sick man of Europe”, Breitbart<\/em><\/a>, 2020-08-14.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some generous souls are claiming it’s not Boris’s fault \u2014 which may be true, up to a point, of which more in a moment \u2014 but whoever is to blame one thing is abundantly clear: Britain is a failed state, the Sick Man of Europe, and those of us who grew up believing that to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,84,7,53,41],"tags":[1391,1293,86,1563,539],"class_list":["post-59921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-biography","tag-borisjohnson","tag-criticism","tag-enshittification","tag-pandemic"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fAt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104823,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59921\/revisions\/104823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}