Dear Boris. Time to go...

Dear Mr. Johnston,

I gather you’re going to carry on as normal.

You remind me of my old prep school song:

“Boys of Forres! Son or rain

Struggle on with might and main.

Do your duty, ne’er complain,

Faint not! Sons of Forres.”

And there you are, dear man, struggling on with might and main…

It’s absurd, of course.

What you’re saying and doing is utterly detached from reality,

but then almost everything you say or do is detached from reality.

And so was our upbringing:

preparing us to govern an empire which no longer exists.

You also remind me of a boy called Whitley. A boy I knew at public school.

He had blond hair, like you, and was arrogant and very sure of himself and  had a real talent for a jeering put down. Also like you.

I was horribly insecure and afraid at that time and I very much wanted to be his friend.

So I was very pleased to be sharing a study with him in my second term.

There were four of us in the room, him and me and a boy called Bull and someone else I can’t remember.

Everybody hated Bull, for some reason, and Whitley tormented him.

I probably colluded.

Being beastly to Bull was considered jolly good form and absolutely the thing to do and I am sorry, deeply sorry, for the times I was part of that too.

I did it because I wanted Whitley to like me, but it wasn’t enough because very quickly Whitley turned on me.

He didn’t beat me up or trash my things or call me names. He did that to Bull constantly.

What he did to me was treat me like I didn’t exist.

I don’t know how he did it, I guess because everyone else was afraid of it, but soon everyone in the boarding house was doing the same.

So for 11 or 12 weeks in the winter of 1964 no-one looked at me or spoke to me or ever acknowledged my presence in the room.

I was thirteen years old, Mr. Johnston, and my mother had died just a little over a year before.

The world of the English boarding school is a very small one, Mr. Johnston, as you know, with its own rules and values and codes of behaviour.

Small as it is, for a boy of 13 imprisoned in its cruelty it is everything.

And when you’re being bullied you feel utterly alone; and if you’re being bullied, you feel it’s all your fault.

You know this, Mr. Johnston; and you know that the only defence is to be liked.

You need to be liked, always; and I know where that need comes from.

“Let no slacker mar your ranks

Give no rotter place nor thanks

Idle folly, feeble pranks,

Scorn ye! Sons of Forres.”

I’m very glad we never met, Mr. Johnston, because I suspect you are a bit of a rotter, and a slacker too, and I’ve no doubt you’d have been more than capable of making my life a hell on earth if you’d been given half a chance to.

And so whenever I see you on a screen, or read about you in a headline, I’m reminded of that time in my life when I was orphaned and friendless and felt like an utterly worthless person who deserved to suffer.

I never complained.

“Do your duty, ne’er complain…”

Never, not even when we were made to stand, naked, in a shivering line, in an unheated communal bathroom in winter, and then have to take a cold plunge in an oversized bath installed for that very purpose.

And then go outside into the school yard and do physical jerks, snow, rain, frost or shine.

I think this was supposed to make us men.

I tried my very best, Mr Johnson, as our headmaster was always telling us to, and as a result suffered quite unnecessarily for years and years.

And caused deep suffering to those I loved.

You seem to have caused great suffering to those who loved you, Mr Johnston, and I imagine you must have suffered too.

Suppressing the tender, sensitive part of oneself does cause much suffering.

And so I imagine that you suffer still.

I gather you were very close to your mother, and were distressed by the cruel way your father treated her, and by the fact that her depression caused her to withdraw from you.

So you, too, were sent to prep school, a place where the pupils were repeatedly and savagely beaten, and that distressed you too.

You see, Mr Johnston, I suspect you do have a sensitive side to you, which I imagine you exploit to make yourself attractive to women, though for most of your life you work very hard to suppress it.

Many of us do. Powerless as we were made to feel, there seems to be no other option.

No other way to deal with our grief and our shame.

We harden ourselves and pretend it isn’t there.

That’s how we survived our schooling, Mr. Johnston.

You better than me, I imagine.

You fitted in, when I did not.

You were popular, when I was not.

You got into Oxford, when I did not.

You excelled at debating, in the skill of putting people down, and have continued to excel in it in the grotesque public school debating chamber called the house of commons.

As for me, I never learnt not to cry, something I was deeply ashamed of, but which looking back I can see saved my sanity and saved my life.

You see we were both broken by our schooling, Mr Johnston.

But I refused to stay broken. And I was lucky enough to find ways to slowly heal the wound.

You, on the other hand, just deepened it.

And because you were broken, Mr Johnston, and have stayed broken, no good can come of you.

You constantly bluster and make statements but you can achieve nothing positive.

You can only cause more hurt and damage to our institutions, our country, and our people.

You cannot heal or prevent any of the crises engulfing us.

You cannot stop the destruction of the natural world. Indeed you actively promote it, imagining your associates will profit from it.

But nobody profits from ecocide, Mr Johnston. It will destroy us all.

You cannot stop the growing injustice and inequality in our society.

Children are going hungry, Mr Johnston, hungry in a Britain that used to be called great but is now only fractured, pitiful, and failing.

This is your doing, Mr Johnston.

You have power, and you have consistently and criminally misused it.

You are broken, and you are breaking our country. You are breaking our world.

Your tragedy has become ours.

Because the personal is political, Mr Johnson.

So it’s time you went.

I find myself thinking: I hope you go to jail.

Because I would like you to experience the hellish squalid life in one of your government’s privatised prisons.

Just as I would like you to know what it’s like to suffer trying to live off Universal Credit.

But I try not to be vengeful. And perhaps losing power in failure and ignominy is punishment enough.

But go, Mr. Johnston.

For our sakes;

and also for yours.

The picture was made by an incredibly gifted street artist and activist called Heather Marshall. Check out her work here: https://instagram.com/creative_electric?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=