EVER wondered why pensioners like your gran keep voting Tory? Here are some strange distortions of the facts a worrying number of older people seem to believe.
Johnson is responsible for the Covid vaccine
Scientists and health professionals did the actual work and Johnson just dressed up in a lab coat. His role in fighting Covid has as much medical value as going to your GP with agonising headaches, them giving you a free drug company biro, and you leaving with no treatment. And being completely satisfied with this.
People are jealous of him and Carrie
Your gran doesn’t understand politics, so she makes up nice, simple, bullshit explanations for things. Excess Covid deaths and lockdown rules are complicated, so it’s obvious Boris’s critics all want to marry young, pretty, blonde Carrie. Your gran would faint if you admitted to thinking she’s an awful, grasping Tory PR who sometimes resembles a frog with huge teeth.
He’s doing his best in difficult circumstances
Your gran only watches BBC news, so she probably gets this generous view of Johnson from their studiously ‘balanced’ and uncontroversial coverage. Thus she believes the problems facing Johnson just spontaneously happened, like flash floods. Never mind that he’s a lazy bastard who brings more problems on himself and others than Homer f**king Simpson.
Boris will take us back to the good old days
The good old days is a vague project to create an idyllic Britain with no teenagers, no drugs and no more than approximately 150 non-white people in the UK. No one ever makes any progress with it, because it’s bollocks, but the Tories and therefore Boris are indelibly associated with it. Even if a pathological liar and adulterer isn’t the best person to entrust with bringing back 1940s-style morals and decency.
Boris is standing up for Ukraine
Actually what happened is that Johnson saw a chance to act out his Churchill fantasies and – more importantly – claw back some popularity. It’s not his money, so Ukraine can have as many British missiles as they like. It would be interesting if Johnson had to pay, say, £1 of his own money towards each missile. It’s likely the Ukrainians would suddenly get a box of old Sten guns and some out-of-date field rations instead.
He’s one of us
An actual view expressed by some oldies. How a posh, completely self-interested, Eton-educated borderline sociopath is the friend of a pensioner from Rotherham is anyone’s guess. It’s like a sheep introducing a wolf to his flock saying ‘Don’t worry, Fang is one of us. That red stuff round his mouth is just Waitrose beetroot salad.’
