Business Secretary, Grant Shapps, tweeted a photo celebrating a space launch in Cornwall with former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, airbrushed out. On January 17, in Parliament, Mr Shapps apologised and explained that his team had been confused.
“I simply told the team he needs hair brushing, not airbrushing.”
What a plonker.
But the idea of airbrushing Boris Johnson from history is an attractive one.
This time last year, Lord Andrew Adonis, then the chair of European Movement UK, tweeted,
“If Boris goes, Brexit goes”.
It was of course, grandstanding nonsense, which is precisely what I tweeted back at the time.
Boris has gone, and Brexit is still here, with a Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak) more of a Brexiter than Johnson ever was.
But what if Boris Johnson had never got involved with the Brexit campaign? Then almost for sure, Brexit would not have happened.
Boris Johnson was the Brexit poster boy responsible for the biggest lie of the Leave campaign that clinched their victory.
Yes, the lie on the ‘Boris Brexit bus’, that falsely claimed that Britain sent £350m a week to the EU which could instead be spent on the NHS.
Even the Brexit Svengali campaign boss, Dominic Cummings, agreed after the referendum that without the claim on Johnson’s bus, Leave would not have won.
The bus claim was a whopper of a lie that influenced millions to tick the Leave box on the ballot paper.
The truth is that Britain never sent £350m a week to the EU. We only sent about a third of that. But that wasn’t the real core of the lie.
What wasn’t mentioned by Boris Johnson or anyone else was that, in real terms, EU membership cost Britain nothing.
On the contrary, being in the EU was hugely profitable, bringing in billions more to the UK than the paltry cost of the annual EU membership fee.
And now we’re out of the EU, Britain and Britons are poorer, meaning less money available for our beleaguered NHS.
Without Boris Johnson, and without his behemothic bus lie, Brexit would not have happened.
If only Boris Johnson could be airbrushed from history, what a better place we’d all be in right now. Britain without Brexit, allied with our friends and family in Europe, as we should be.
Well, of course, we can’t airbrush away what’s happened. But we could have a clean sweep of the rotten politicians now ruining Britain, and set us on a new path.
Let’s do it!
Jon Danzig is a campaigning journalist and film maker who specialises in writing about health, human rights, and Europe. He is also founder of the pro-EU information campaign, Reasons2Rejoin. You can follow Jon Danzig on his Facebook journalism page at www.Facebook.com/JonDanzigWrites
