Bus-slogan Boris

Boris Johnson makes it very hard for me to like him.

It isn't his air of entitlement, or even his perpetual clown act, his indolence or his insouciance. It isn't even his serial dishonesties or his utter lack of principal. Maybe it isn't the impossibility of taking him seriously.

Maybe it is all of the above. But what bites me at the moment is his inability to talk in anything other than sound-bites. Striking little phrases, devoid of much in the way of actual meaning, but catchy and resonant.

HIs Brexit bus ought to have been warning enough.

We send the EU £350 million a week
Let's fund our NHS instead
Vote Leave
Let's take back control

He kept on displaying this same slogan, even after it was roundly discredited. Why ? Because while it was untrue or misleading, it caught the voters' imagination. The actual truth of it was not an issue.

Now, he is spending £8.5 million on writing to 30 million households (what's wrong with texts and email which would be a lot cheaper ?). At the heart of his message, another bus-slogan: Save the NHS.

It doesn't seem mean to point out that the government has spent the last decade imposing austerity, a large part of the programme being the withdrawal of funding from public services in general and from the NHS in particular.

It doesn't seem too tough to ask whether our national resilience, and the NHS, might have have been more able to cope had the Tories focused on saving it a whole lot earlier. The constant reorganisation of the NHS, which led to staff losses and demoralisation were hardly a signal improvement.

No matter. Bus-slogan Boris will continue to fly the Save the NHS flag as long as it feels expedient.