Source: The London Economic

His dehumanisation allows for his permanent exile from society and gives licence to the state to inflict whatever penalties they choose to impose.

While the TV news shows him being pulled screaming from the embassy, we are fed lies to distract us from what Assange and WikiLeaks have achieved: the huge cache of information they released that exposed the barbarity of US-led oil wars in the Middle East.

Through half-closed eyes, we watched footage secretly obtained from US government sources by WikiLeaks of the helicopter gunships killing Reuters journalists and civilians, then returning to finish off their rescuers.

The barbarity of wars

Uncomfortable truths about the “war on terror” have been replaced with stories of how Assange murdered his own cat and smeared faeces on the walls of the embassy.

We are told that he wore the same socks for days, skateboarded through the corridors and ate food with his hands.

It ends with pictures of the wretched man being hauled off to Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s very own Guantanamo.

His dehumanisation allows for his permanent exile from society and gives licence to the State to inflict whatever penalties they choose to impose.

Additionally, without courageous people like Assange, they have carte blanche to impose their barbarities across the world. This principle has not been lost, even on those in the military.

Wikileaks collateral murder video

Mike Lyons, a Royal Navy submariner and today a member for Veterans for Peace, has said:

“I remember unashamedly shedding a tear the first time I saw the collateral murder video. To see such callousness and disregard for human life by the crews of the Apache helicopters made me question the part I played in the military machine.”

For expressing these views, Lyons was court-martialled and served seven months in a military prison before being “dishonorably” discharged.

Lies about Assange have been accompanied by farce.

The Swedish allegations

His embassy arrest was made on the grounds of his “failure to appear in court” for a hearing based on an expired Swedish extradition request.

Contrary to most press reports, there were two women involved, one from Enköping and the second living in Stockholm. After separate sexual encounters with him, the two wanted to track Assange down to be tested for sexually-transmitted diseases.

The mass media have incorrectly reported that he was charged with rape. They chose to ignore the words of the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finné, who said, “I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.”

They also choose not to report that on 19 May 2017, Finné applied to the Stockholm District Court to rescind Assange’s arrest warrant, effectively ending the investigation against him.

Sweden tried to drop Assange’s extradition, but the English Crown Prosecution Service has continued to behave as if it is still in place.

Finally, the two women who made the complaints against him withdrew them, with one saying that she had been pressured into making them by prosecutors linked to Swedish intelligence and their US overseers.

She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV]test”. She “did not want to accuse Assange of anything . . . it was the police who made up the charges”.

She has been quoted as saying, “I have not been raped” and that she had been “railroaded by police and others”.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape have stated :

“The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . . The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will.”

What sentence would Julian Assange face?

Behind all this has been the US government who, according to Edward Snowden, have placed Assange on a “manhunt target list”.

Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature”.

According to John Pilger: “a secret grand jury has spent years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted”.

To date, all the US has managed to come up with is a sealed indictment charging Assange with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer”.

Although this count carries a maximum five year sentence — less than the time Assange has been trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy — it hasn’t stopped Republican Senator, Ben Sasse, tweeting that he should serve “the rest of his life” in prison and US ex-Vice President Joe Biden declaring that Assange is a “cyber-terrorist”.

Is journalism the next target?

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who worked with Assange and WikiLeaks to help Edward Snowden escape US arrest said:

“If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a US extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump Administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs & punish [WikiLeaks] for exposing war crimes.”

If Assange and WikiLeaks are succesfully criminalised, the next step will be to outlaw independent online news sources like The London Economic as a practice run before they come for newspapers like The Guardian.

On a personal note, I write as someone who was a whistleblower.

During the four-and-a-half years I sought to bring corruption to light, I was sacked and lost my income and reputation, but it was nothing compared to the sacrifices made by Julian Assange, and others such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

They have suffered imprisonment, torture and exile in their attempts to inform the public of State-inflicted horrors. They have my undying gratitude for their sacrifice and courage for the “crime” of being truth-tellers in a time of lies, cynicism and war.

David Wilson is an anti-war activist, co-founder of War Child and whistleblower

David Wilson is a long-stay patient at Barts Hospital, London, receiving NHS treatment for a serious heart condition. He has led an extraordinary life, which he describes in his acclaimed book Left Field – The Memoir of a Lifelong Activist.  He has been a gaucho, a teacher, an artist’s agent, a filmmaker and much else besides. “David Wilson has lived a life and a half,” says the renowned writer Sir Tom Stoppard. “The broken world needed people like David; it still does”.

I can’t resist the thought that the occupants of the Merrill Lynch Giltspur Street offices should be marched next door, to appear at a new bar for them, and charged with crimes against the people for facilitating the obscene wealth of the richest 1% in the world. As Oxfam reported earlier this year, just 42 people hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.

While Merrill Lynch have helped create a world of tax cuts for the rich marked in the trillions, for many millions its corollary is an economy of part time, temp, contract, on call, and gig jobs, food banks, homelessness and growing poverty.

Barts Hospital, where I am now on long-stay, has its share of all that.

The Merrill Lynch world in their offices opposite Barts Hospital.

I pause my therapy walk and look over at the plush executive suite being prepared for a boardroom breakfast. On two large plasma screens at the far end of the room a film of deep blue water and sunshine. A yacht glides across from one screen to the next. The Merrill Lynch world.

If matters continue as they are, that yacht will either get mired in plastic waste, or have no safe port to return to. Or if it does there will be armed Brazilian fascist guards protecting its arrival.

So who are Merrill Lynch? They are an investment bank engaged in prime brokerage and security dealings. For you and me that means gambling with other people’s money – lots of it. In 2008 as we were all saving the banks it was reported that in one year, July 2007 to July 2008, Merrill Lynch lost $52 million daily.

The first thing they did was to charge $30 billion in losses to their subsidiary in the United Kingdom. Why the UK? Need you ask? Because in this country they were exempt from taxes. For Wall Street, London = offshore.

Merill Lynch was as bust as busted Lehman Brothers, but were saved by becoming a subsidiary of the Bank of America.

None of this stopped Merrill Lynch’s chief executive, John Thain, from paying out over $4 billion in bonuses “If you don’t pay your best people”, he said, “you will destroy your franchise and they’ll go elsewhere.”

He then went on to purchase new office curtains for their Wall Street HQ at a cost of $18,000, $28,000 for a pair of chairs, $87,000 for a “Roman Shade”, $11,000 for Regency chairs, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000.

Oh and a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.” “It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in,” said Thain. Did he have a desk and a phone?

I return to my ward to wait for a tepid cup of tea and cold toast courtesy of Serco who ‘won’ the privatised catering contract at this hospital.

In the words of  French writer Vicor Hugo, “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”

Dubioza Kolektiv: Making Money

David Wilson is a friend of the great Balkan band Dubioza Kolektiv, who are touring the UK in November 2018. Their song Making Money sums up David’s view in the article above

Money Makes the World Go Round

From the film Cabaret, with Liza Minnelli und Joel Grey. “When you haven’t any shoes on your feet / Your coat’s thin as paper / And you look 30 pounds underweight…

The awful legacy of the PFI legal robbery: Is it cheaper for the taxpayer? No it is not. In every area it has been adopted, it has cost more, and will go on costing more.

David Wilson has a heart condition requiring a long stay for treatment in Barts Hospital, London, which is still – just – in the NHS.

My brain surgeon was Nigerian and my heart surgeon was Egyptian. Assisted by Italians, Spaniards and Brits of multiple ethnicities. I wasn’t awake on either occasion to take a full itinerary of those present.

The new Barts King George V building, where I have now been a patient for five weeks, is alive with all this and I have come to love and respect them all.

But. And it’s a big but.

As I have mentioned before this brand new building is already a constructed disaster, financed on Public Finance Initiatve (PFI). The air conditioning / heating has never worked properly and the UK taxpayers will be paying off the inflated costs to the private construction companies for decades. Many of the services, from catering to porterage and cleaning have been sold off to the privateers from Serco to Virgin Care, with their staff recruited as agency workers on low pay and without contracts and unions.

Few people know what PFI is, which is no surprise since it is a sleght of hand and no magician likes to publicise his/her secrets! It is about government borrowing money but not having to set it against the public sector borrowing requirement. It allows the private sector to get involved in the health services without incurring risk. The result is a massaging of figures which allows for legal robbery from the public purse.

How this is done was spelled out by the great and very much missed investigative journalist Paul Foot (1937–2004). In his 2004 report An Idiot’s Guide to the Private Finance Initiative, published in 2004 when privatisation of the NHS was being pushed through with neoliberal zealotry by Tony Blair’s Labour government, Foot concluded:

“What is already clear is the awful legacy PFI has left behind. Is it cheaper for the taxpayer? No it is not. In every area it has been adopted, it has cost more, and will go on costing more. The PFI buildings are as prone to disaster as buildings constructed by any other method…. ‘Borrow more and charge more’ will forever be the PFI slogan of government, even if that means wholesale abdication from responsible accounting and eventually from all democratic government.”

Dr Phil Hammond, the campaigning doctor and broadcaster, has given examples of what Paul Foot identified as the PFI scam:

• North East NHS build cost £812 million, with total repayment costs of £5512 million.
• North West NHS build cost £1345 million, with repayment costs of 10,325 million.
• North (Leeds area) NHS build cost £903 million, with total repayment costs of £4,388 million.

Dr Hammond says of Paul Foot’s report:

“It remains a very powerful contribution and warning of the dangers of poor value deals in the public sector, the appalling debts that result, the greed and profiteering of the private sector and the reckless stupidity of politicians who are still trying to keep PFI alive with PF2. Instead, the government should buy back these debts and renegotiate the deals for an amount that represents fair value to the NHS and the taxpayer.”

Phil Hammond is touring his Happy Birthday NHS? stage show to glowing reviews and packed audiences, and has announced that in any upcoming general election he will stand against the right-wing Tory MP Jacob Rees Mogg, who is a pontificating advocate for PFI and privatisation generally.

Back here at Barts Hospital, EU staff are worried for their futures if Brexit goes ahead. They will leave and some have already done so. Who will stand by them and stand up for the NHS? Obviously not our breakit government who will brexit us even further in the direction of the PFI model of massive profits and maximum exploitation. This will be boom time for Serco and their bigger US companies, already on daily flights into Heathrow from JFK  — vultures hovering for rich NHS pickings.

There is no hope either in Chuka Umunna and other right-wing Labour MPs, whose commitment to the neoliberal agenda makes them nostalgic for the years of their hero, Tony Blair.

Our only chance is with those who are genuine internationalists and who are fighting for free movement across and beyond the EU and its borders. Don’t believe me? Check out this discusion between Yanis Varoufakis and Jeremy Corbyn, in which they outline the  “remain and reform” position they both argued in the Brexit referendum of June 2016.

William Blake: The Sick Rose

The Steve Bell cartoon at the head of this article, satirising the privatisation of the NHS, was donated to Keep Our NHS Public to help raise funds for its campaign . Bell took his inspiration from the William Blake poem The Sick Rose.

Serco should be thrown out of our hospitals and food should, once again, be treated as central to health and getting better, not as a means to enrich further the already wealthy.

His music dealt with working life, migration and racism and celebrated musical eclecticism, which of course was lost on racists.

There are no adequate words to describe that gig, but it was thrown out into the audience by Rachid’s musical talent and presence. Rock the Casbah almost brought the house down as an early present to Crossrail and his Ya Rayah removed the last bricks.

Born in 1958 near the port city of Oran in Algeria, at the height of the war of independence, slaughter stalked his country. Many readers will have read Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and /or seen Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

His father moved the family to France when Rachid was ten, where he became, in his son’s words, ‘a modern slave’; working in a Lyon textile factory.

This was not a happy time for North Africans in France. The Algerian war was a recent memory and the right-wing were agitating for the return of their north Arican colony. Only a few years before the family’s arrival in Lyon, Maurice Papon, Paris police chief and a senior policeman in Nazi-occupied France, organised the killing ot between 100 and 300 Algerian demonstrators, many of them thrown into the Seine.

The precariousness of the North African experience in France continues to this day with the racism and deprivation haunting the big city banlieues.

At age seventeen Rachid worked in a power station, was a house painter, dishwasher and encylopaedia salesman. As for many living at the sharp end of life, music was the passport to a better world and Rachid started performing a mixture of Algerian rai music, rap, salsa and funk.

He formed Carte de Séjour (Residency Permit) inspired by the Clash and Linton Kwesi Johnson. His lyrics dealt with working life and racism and, of course, celebrated a musical eclecticism which was lost on racists. It was certainly lost on the French music establishment who, for many years, ignored the Maghreb musicians in France who were offering an excitement which embraced their ‘host’ country, even when it rejected them.

Rachid dealt with all this with humour. The French Right were infuriated when he released his version of Charles Tenet’s sentimental Douce France, with drums and bass pulsing to a punk rhythm.

Recognition was ponderous and arrived on the slow train. After a few years running a nightclub, Les Refoulés (The Rejects) he broke out into the mainstream in the 80s, with albums produced by Steve Hillage, the former guitarist for Gong. Collecting around him musicians performing on oud, drums, buzugs, sintirs and ribabs alongside western lead and bass guitars he released Ya Rayah, followed by Migra, performed by Santana and then Rock el Casbah, a collaboration with Mick Jones, and later with Brian Eno.

In 2007 he and David Albarn staged Africa Express at Glastonbury where they were joined by Baaba Maal and K’naan. Their intent was to encourage African and Western musical collaborations. He went on to play at many other Africa Express events and Albarn said that Taha “was at the heart of what we did”.

In 2013 he released Zoom. Produced by Justin Adams, it included Brian Eno, Mick Jones and a North African treatment of Elvis Presley’s Now or Never.

He recorded a new album earlier this year, as yet untitled, but due for release in 2019.

Rachid called his music ‘rock ‘n rai’ or, as he liked to joke, ‘It’s all ‘Rai Cooder.’ But for me, Rachid’s genre is best summed up, again in his words, as ‘Western music read from right to left.’

Was Rachid a ‘political artist.’ Over to him. “To be called a political artist is almost to be insulted, but yes I am a political artist. I’m a working class artist. There’s not many of us left.”

My favourite album is the 2005 Tekitoi. As always he has a verbal explanation for this work. He said the album condemned, “liars, thieves, humiliators, killers, oppressors, traitors, the envious, the rotters, the diggers, propagandists, destroyers, slavers, Get rid of them! Ask them for an explanation!”

David Albarn described him as “a beautiful person, very naughty, impish and with bright eyes and generous with his time. I just loved him and always enjoyed performing with him.”

His UK manager, Rikki Stein told me, “He was an angel – our angel.”

When he sang in 2017 on Goran Bregović album Three Letters From Sarajevo, Bregović said, “You thought he will not survive, he’ll die before the second verse.” I felt this about him when we met all those years before. Perhaps we are lucky he survived so long!

Rachid Taha suffered from a disease diagnosed in 1987 where the lower part of the brain pushes down into the spinal canal. “I’m tired of people thinking I’m a drunk on stage. These are the symptoms of Arnold Chiari disease. I’m stumbling because I’m losing my balance. I’m wavering.”

The stumbling along with the music came to an end on 12 September 2018 when he died in his sleep of a heart attack.

So sad you are longer here, Rachid, with your words, humour and music. But like all great music it will not have died with you. Orkod Fe Salam.

Rachid Taha: Voilà, Voilà

In 1993, Rachid Taha released his anti-racism anthem Voilà, Voilà, which he recorded again for his 2012 album Zoom, with a number of guests, including Brian Eno, Mick Jones (The Clash) and Eic Cantona.

Rachid Taha and 123 Soleils

In 1998, Rachi Taha performed with Khaled and Faudel at the legendary 123 Soleils concert. The live album/DVD was hugely successful, selling over two million copies.

Rachid Taha: Ecoute moi camarade

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What they said about Left Field

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I went to Grenfell Tower four days after the fire to get a first-hand account and then to write about all the things we have all read about on social media and touched on – sometimes – in the corporate media. The dodgy cladding and dodgier politicians who should have been arrested by now. The absence of fire alarms and fire escapes. But then I saw the pictures of the missing, put along the streets by the community and decided to write them down.

A note on the community centre wall stated that as of 18 June Resident in hospital or hostels 108, confirmed dead 68 still missing 324.

Commander Stuart Candy of the Metropolitan Police said in a Sky interview that dozens of people are still believed to be inside Grenfell Tower. On a hot afternoon and with a large crowd there I did my best but there were walls I could not reach, names I could not read, flowers which obscured my failing eyes. I copied from the wall the names of the missing people, now presumed dead.

When I looked up at the building I saw a tomb. I hope that the tomb full of these people will become a tomb for the system responsible for their deaths. I apologise to the living and the dead for any misspelt names.

I returned a week later on 24 June, the same day that Shadow Home Secretary, Dianne Abbott, stated in The Independent that the deaths were most likely be in the hundreds. This time I counted 126 names of the missing, most with photos. There were 127 in all, only one marked as ‘Found’.

Tottenham MP David Lammy has tweeted: “Survivors cannot believe that the death toll has not risen. Speaking to people on the ground, there is huge suspicion of a cover-up.” Speaking on BBC Newsnight on 26 June 2017, he said:

“The 79 figure which has now stood for a week does not accord with those who live down there and say that there’s a gap, that they know there’s a gap. In one flat alone people say there were up to 40 people, a gathering because they gathered in the flat. It was Ramadan …. There are lots you can use. DWP lists for those on benefits. There’s a local school. Through the local authority you can assess how many kids showed up for school or not showed up for school. You can use mobile phones. You can speak to mobile phone companies. They will assist. I saw this during the riots. Who’s been on their phone at 12 o’clock before the fire started. There are ways in which you can assemble lists of people and numbers … When you have tragedies of this kind that could have been prevented. We know from Hillsborough and other affairs in our national life, that governments, local authorities, big corporations, companies, the contractors – they cover their backs and that’s why I raised issues around the documentation. Have the police seized documents yet in this one? We know nothing about whether that’s happened … It doesn’t really matter what I think. It matters what people on the ground think .. what people say is that if you put the numbers out early you will have civil unrest.”

My two visits to check on the missing confirms this. Nearly two weeks after the fire it is left to people like me to inform on who are possibly missing, possibly dead, possibly neither. Grenfell residents’ groups are trying to compile lists of victims and survivors.  This is either gross incompetence on the part of the ‘authorities’, gross negligence or worse. David Lammy says, “It is difficult to describe the pain people are going through.”

I received a message after I first published a photo of a missing family, which said: “The family in the photo are the Choucair family who i knew very well…Nadia and her immediate family i grew up with. My family and i always remained close and in touch ever since. We were all like one family. Her mother, Sirra Choucair, was living one door away from Nadia but she is not mentioned here. I’m devastated. They are still reported as missing.” (See video interview with Nadia Choucair’s brother Nabil)

Please read these names slowly to give them a bit of their lives back. Let them touch your heart and then let them touch your anger.

Naming the missing

Fatimah Afraseiabi
Sakineh Afraseiabi
Amma Adulkerim
Sakinah Aghlani
Amaya Ahmadin
Amal Samia Ahmadin
Hammenur Ahmadin
Fadumo Ahmed
Amal
Ahmedin
Mohammed Alhajali
Fatuya Alsanonse
Alexandra Attala
Fatima Aloselabi
Fathaye Alsanousi
Abu Feros Alsanousi
Esva Alsanousi
Amal and Mohammed + daughter Amaya
Fouazia al-Wahabi
Abdul Azziz
Omar Baljadi
Bassan
Zainab Bean
Jermiah Bean
Hosnah Begum
Razia Begum
Rhima Begum-Ali
Maryom Begum-Ali
Hadizah Begum-Ali
Mohammed Begum-Ali
Omar Belkadi
Raymond ‘Moses’ Bernard
Vincent Chiesina
Naia Choucar
Bassem Choucar
Mierna Choucar
Fatima Choucar
Zeinab Choucar
Jeremiah Dean
Zeinab Dean
Anthony Disson
Make dua’ao
Mariem Elgwahry
Hesham El Raaman
Fatuma El Raaman
Sina El Raaman
Abdul Aziz El-Wahabi
Faouzia El-Wahabi
Mehdi El-Wahabi
Nurhuda El-Wahabi
Yasin El-Wahabi
Sakinha Fasimbi
Rania Fathima
Abu Feras
Mario Goltardi
Fernando Guarinos
Izzah Guarinos
Jannah Guarinos
Briket Haftom
Buroke Haftom
Farah Hamdam
Leena Hamdam
Rania Fathiu Hamia
Abdul Hamion
Abdul Hanif
Agnes Hayno
Nur Hudan
Mehdi Hudan
Abufars Ibrahim
Esa Ibrahim
Ramia Ibrahim & two daughters
Ali Jafar
Ali Yawar Jafari
Lucas James
Firdows Jemal
Hashim Jemal
Nuara Jemal
Yahya Jemal
Yaqub Jemal
Hamid Kani
Khadija Khallouth
Hashan Kidir
Debbie Lamprell
Mary Mandy
Marhuda
Yassin Mehdi
Kuthri Mia
Ligaya Moore
Denis Murphy
Nadia
Mohammed ‘Saber’ Neda
Isaac Paulus
Steven Power
Hesham Rahman ’Mother’ Rama & children
Fethia Hassan & Hania Hassan
Abdul Sahran
Yahya Sahran
Khadija Saye
Isaac Shawo
Sheila Smith
Suhan
Suva
Hosina Began Tanime
Gloria Trevisan
Amaya Tuccu
Mo Tuccu
Jessica Urbano
Ernie Vital
Marjorie Vital
Jay Walled
Crazy’ Yasim. Photos and names with only first name: Arsad
Fatima
Fatina
Firdows
Hammenut
Hashim
Mevia
Nierna
Nura
Yahya
Yaqub
Zainab
Zainde.
RIP

I read Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare by Heathcote Williams in one sitting. It was the first cold evening of early November and our cat was agitated by the sound of fireworks. My agitation was brought on by this book. I had to turn the heating down because I was starting to shake in anger.

How had so many been taken in by this tousel-hared (deliberate misspelling) bully. A man who sends his enemies emails with the words, ‘fuck off and die.’ A man who conspired with an old ‘Bully Them’ buddy to enable an act of serious physical assault.

Williams has said, ‘There’s a German word for people like Johnson: Backpfeifengesicht. It means ‘a face that needs to be punched’. I don’t want to get that close to him, but after finishing this book I would willingly get close enough to throw it at him.

Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe wrote ‘It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.’ Boris is certainly that, but also a throwback to an earlier age of imperialism and racism we thought might be gone, if not for good, on its way out.

For Boris, migrants ‘leech, bludge and scrounge off taxpayers,’ Ugandans are descibed as ‘piccaninnies’, Chinese workers as ‘puffing coolies’, Nelson Mandela moving Africa towards a ‘tyranny of black majority rule’.

Nearer to home Liverpudlians have ‘an excessive predilection for welfarism’. Bundled off by his party leader to apologise he ungraciously sulked that his trip was ‘Operation Scouse-Grovel’.

To his hatred of ‘the other’ may be added his love for those like himself and his family who have wealth and privilege. ‘We should,’ he said, ‘be humbly thanking the super-rich, not bashing them. They are victims just like the homeless … They are a put upon minority … like Irish travellers.’

By your enemies know your enemies. Conrad Black, neo-conservative past owner of the Daily Telegraph described Boris as, ‘Ineffably duplicitous’. Ex-Tory MP Jerry Hayes suggested ‘Boris has a morality which would make an Algerian brothel owner blush.’ Right-wing historian, Max Hastings, has said that ‘Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – with my wallet,’ while ex-Tory MP Matthew Parris, has said Boris has ‘creeping ambition in a jester’s cap’.

There is nothing jester about Boris and his politics. Williams suggests that the man is not even against the EU, but used the Brexit campaign as a means to get to No 10. Having failed in this he left it to others to clear up his mess and, in the words of Lord Heseltine, ‘He’s like a general who leads his army to the sound of guns and at the sight of the battlefield abandons the field. I have never seen so contemptible and irresponsible a situation.’

Meanwhile on that battlefield others have been left wounded and some dead.

In the aftermath of the Boris-inspired Brexit vote the Daily Mirror reported: ‘Racist and xenophobic abuse, attacks and hate crimes are being reported all over the country.’ In Polly Toynbee’s view: ‘racist graffiti and abuse was given a new license by Boris Johnson, who adopted Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant tactics.’

Williams descibes UKIP as a kind of Waitrose version of the BNP. Boris is more like a Fortnum and Mason’s version.

This man is now our Foreign Secretary! As Williams tells us, ‘The most indiscreet man in public life is now also in charge of M16 and GCHQ: a man with no moral compass is in charge of a senior department of military intelligence.’

Mind you was it ever different? Perhaps like the Trump presidential candidacy in the USA, and despite the man’s efforts to hide his real identity with his deliberate bumbling dishevelment, Boris is not the joker in the pack after all. He is the man who exposes the unmasked face of all the Kings, Queens and Princes.

Brexit Boris is illustrated by some of the UK’s top cartoonists, including Steve Bell, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

David Wilson is author of Left Field: The Memoir of a Lifelong Activist, which you can buy here…

Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare

Uncovered here are the lies, the sackings, the betrayals, the racist insults, the brush with criminality, that should have got Boris Johnson disbarred from ever being considered for high office.

Now in its second edition, available from Public Reading Rooms:
Price: £8 post free