Tanya Gold
Challenging Conversations: The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson

Yes that’s absolutely right. Conservatives like to talk about how Boris was a “Heineken politician,” a term based on an advertising campaign about reaching voters other candidates could not reach. Johnson has only ever been tested against far-leftists, including Ken Livingston and Jeremy Corbyn, a man so dreadful that working class miners went out in the rain to vote Conservative.

I think you have to get involved. One of the reasons why both America and Britain have elected these people who are demonstrably unfit is because we are looking away. There’s a very famous film called Network, it’s absolutely brilliant and really worth watching. It’s from 1976 by brilliant Jewish writer Paddy Chayefsky and it’s about what happens to our democracy when we turn away from it. I think it’s so easy to say that we live in an affluent liberal democracy where everything is done for us and we’ve gotten lazy. We’ve had peace in Europe since 1945 until the Ukraine War. I think we had a much healthier democracy when the thing to do wasn’t to sit at home and watch Netflix, but to go to the pub and have conversations. We’ve lost pub culture and what it means to be a member of a political party. You must participate in representative democracy, if you want better candidates you have to go out and be involved. In my experience, political psychopaths will take everything away from you if you let them, but there is one day every five years when the British people are sovereign. I think we have to keep a closer eye on our politicians and I’d like to see more responsible journalism.

I believe this is a question about a very moving campaign video which was made of Johnson. He went in to the Grodzinski Bakery and Jewish people in North London crowded around him and a Jewish man was saying “You’re going to save us from that terrible man Jeremy Corbyn.” As a Jew I found it incredibly moving to watch and I won’t deny that I was hugely grateful that he defeated Corbyn. I voted for Boris Johnson in 2019. I voted for him in the first time in my life because I believed that my family and my people were made demonstrably less safe in their own homes by Corbyn. At Corbyn’s last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was beaten on camera, so I voted Conservative because I thought the Jews were unsafe and I’ll always be grateful for that, but I wish he’d done more with it. It was a wasted opportunity. A real credit to the British people is that in rejecting Corbyn I think they were also rejecting antisemitism.