I DON’T know about you, but I reckon Boris Johnson is a bad advert for optimism. This is not a political observation, or not exactly, more an opening thought about the uses of cheerfulness in difficult times.
Other ministers and friendly commentators are always keen to emphasise the power of optimism as contained in the shambling form of Boris Johnson, with his lame jokes, booming intonation and confected air of larkiness.
Told once too often that a man is an optimist, you might want to kick the tyres to make sure (or closely inspect his scuffed shoes). Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, is the latest minister to roll out this leaky old barrel, yesterday telling Sky presenter Sophie Ridge that Johnson’s “optimistic fizz” would keep the United Kingdom together.
I tend to be optimistic myself, apart from when I’m not. The shorthand summary would be that I am a foolish optimist; a foolish optimist married to a wise pessimist, although those characteristics leave room for each of us to step into the other’s small arena, as it were.
My own optimism is being tested by events (the already mentioned disappearance of two jobs). Wider than that, the general national optimism is being tested by Covid-19, in small and large ways. Levels of anxiety are high, with the Office for National Statistics reporting in June that high anxiety had more than doubled since before lockdown.
In a sense you don’t need a survey to tell you that, although it helps. Anxiety thrums in the air around us, causing a sense of ill ease, as if we are waiting for something to happen, or waiting for life to resume its old shape, which even an optimist must admit seems unlikely.
And a prime minister whose main setting is blathering optimism doesn’t exactly fit the sombre mood, especially when his government has performed so badly, and so many have died.
We all have different ways of coping at this time and my strategies include losing myself in baking bread (a top sourdough yesterday to replace all those dispiriting discs of flat plasticine-like dough); writing blogs to keep my brain ticking over; and being cutting about Boris Johnson whenever the mood takes me, which it does perhaps too often.
As for Raab’s “optimistic fizz”, that is just the latest draft of stale bubbly. What does it even mean?
Perhaps it was optimistic fizz that got the government so keen on “air bridges” (Johnson does like a bridge, even if he has to make do with one made of air).
You may recall that these ‘bridges’ to supposedly safe countries would allow everyone to fly on off holiday this summer. That is what hardier and less broke Brits than me did in the past few days – scooting off to Spain, only to find that they would have to spend two weeks in quarantine on their return.
This, you see, is where unguarded optimism gets you. You rush off on to Spain, on a tank-full of optimistic fizz, only to see everything fizzle out overnight, leaving you with two extra weeks to take off work on your return.
Optimism is all fine and well, and I really do try to swallow a spoonful each day, but in the hands of politicians it becomes something else, a distraction, a shield, a worthless reason to like a leader.
In truth, I have no idea if Boris Johnson truly is an optimist, so being told that he is quite so often is off-putting. Besides, it’s almost certainly not optimism as such, just a show-off version designed to fool us.
After all, and I hate to bring this up, putting faith in Brexit, as this country narrowly did, seems to have been a decision based on misty-eyed optimism and stale grandeur. As the final deadline for a deal looms, we are still armed with nothing more substantial than Johnson’s optimism. If that brings to mind the optimistic captain of a sinking ship telling everyone that everything will be all right, you won’t get any disagreement from this battered optimist.