Cane-Toad Johnson


I'm making this first post in the 'New Drummond Era' available to everyone so it can act as a sample of my content to people interested in subscribing. For that reason I am happy for this post to be shared around to non-subscribers.

In the 1930s Queensland farmers were facing trouble with large numbers of cane beetles eating the sugar crops that were an important part of the state’s economy. So the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations came up with a cunning plan. They would import some cane toads (a native of middle and south America), because cane toads ate cane beetles. This was sure to solve the problem in a trice. One-hundred and two cane toads were duly imported into the state, from Hawaii as it happened, to do the job.

Unfortunately this soon became a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. In fact it wasn’t any cure at all because the cane toads didn’t bother much with the cane beetles, and instead ate everything else they could wrap their tongues around. The other thing they did was multiply at an explosive rate. These days there are estimated to be 200 million cane toads in Australia, mainly in Queensland, and they cause havoc with the native fauna, not least because they have nasty poison-producing glands on the back of their head which the native animals have no naturally-evolved defence against. Curious pet dogs who mess about with a toad can die.

In 2019 Britain was facing its own crisis. It had become obvious to half the country that Theresa May’s Conservative government was deliberately trying to prevent Brexit from happening. As the other parties were even worse, the only hope for a real Brexit to take place was if a new pro-Brexit leadership in the Conservative party could be installed. After a titanic struggle, this finally happened, and Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson became the new leader, with Michael Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings at his side.

Unfortunately Johnson has proven to be Britain’s own version of the cane toad, a cure that is vastly worse than the disease. Johnson, at least, proved to be more able than his Australian counterpart at doing the job that was required of him. Whereas the Australian toad was about as interested in cane beetles as Olly Robbins was in getting the UK out of the EU, Johnson at least gave us a middling type of Brexit which, as fudged as it was, was at least far better than anything any of his fellow MPs could have got.

But in terms of being worse than the disease, Cane-Toad Johnson has proven to be far, far more destructive than the cane toad ever was. The cane toad, after all, is merely an ecological pest, whereas Johnson has proved to be a dangerous menace to the country’s liberty, prosperity and health. The poison from his glands has leached into our very life. We have become like domestic dogs who have been forced to lick them every day.

It can, of course, be granted that every other MP would have been as bad if not worse in the job, but that is like saying that Dennis Nilsen should be excused because Fred West was worse. Also, Johnson was supposed to be the freedom-loving libertarian with the courage to stand up to the powerful leftists and statists and (as the Australians say) the wowsers who have been taking over the country, who wish to curtail our liberty and our enjoyment of life and place us in a harsh, grey concrete East German landscape. Johnson was supposed to be the one who would chase these enemies of the West out of the house with his broomstick along with the Remainers, like a lot of dirty rats who had got too sure of themselves in the pantry. That was his appeal to many of the people who voted for him.

But after a brief bit of resistance in early March, Johnson soon threw his lot in with the rats. As a betrayal this outstrips Theodore Hall’s, the young American Manhattan project scientist who passed on atomic secrets to the Soviets. It’s worse, because not only is Johnson much older than Hall was, but he’s the leader of his country. That makes his betrayal all the greater. Also, Hall never hid his left-wing views, whereas Johnson has made a career out of being a patriotic, freedom-loving iconoclast, on the side of the ordinary British man and woman, and a politician who is firmly standing up against the global juggernauts that threaten to steamroll us. But it didn’t take much persuading from those rats for Cane-Toad to hop up onto the steamroller and start driving it himself full pelt over us. They whispered a few threats about the story they were going to spin to the world, and how his polling would collapse if he didn’t play along, and with barely time for a ‘Crikey’ he leaped up into the driving seat, and he has had his pedal on the accelerator for most of the ten months since.

As a result we are in a cold, grey, miserable concrete East German landscape which threatens to become a permanent state of affairs. In fact, the real East Germany was a land of freedom compared to the hellscape we currently find ourselves in.

It matters not that the same result would have happened with just about any other politician as Prime Minister. Johnson is the man with the job, a job he fought tooth and nail for his whole life, and so he must go down in history as the traitorous PM who enslaved his nation. (That’s not to say that plenty of other people aren’t also guilty of massive crimes against the British people, but Johnson is my focus in this article.)

In fact, really the situation was absolutely tailor-made for Johnson. This is the man who boasted when he was a columnist that his hero was the mayor in Jaws who kept the beaches open even after reports of a giant man-eating shark was on the loose. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity for Boris the freedom-lover, Boris the poo-pooher of pessimistic experts, to stand tall, look the world right in the eye, and say “We stay open”. It was almost like his own personal scriptwriter was on the job, setting up the perfect situation for him to go down as history as the leader who choose freedom over pseudo-medical tyranny. When even Trump, who is a germaphobe, was doing what he was told, Boris had the opportunity to do what was right, protect his country, point out the scaremongering, fight back against the media propaganda, and follow the real science. Hell, he even Sweden as an example to follow.

But his own personal scriptwriter never checked with Boris that all this was okay. It wasn’t. Boris folded like he’d been sat on by himself. He failed his main test in life, badly. He thought his destiny was to be Mr Brexit, and that was all he had to do as PM. Get that done, and then he could coast out the rest of his days with a few bon mots and Latin phrases and generally be eccentrically lovable. But Brexit wasn’t his real test. Brexit was easy once you had an 80-seat majority, and you actually wanted Brexit, and the heat had gone out of the issue. You just appoint a team of negotiators who aren’t determined to give in at every point, and you make clear that you really will leave with No Deal if the EU won’t play ball.

No, Covid was the real test of Johnson’s mettle. You’ve got your own scientists telling you that you’ll be a murderer if you don’t obey them, your own advisors telling you that the media will turn on you if you don’t lockdown, and you know your MPs want it. The public is convinced that it’s the Black Death revisited. That’s a tougher assignment than Brexit was in 2020. That’s where Johnson could have been like one of the Greek heroes he is so fond of reading about, without even having to go into a real battle, but instead he became Lieutenant General Lloyd Ralston Fredendal, reputed to be the most cowardly and inept Allied commander in World War II.

Johnson won’t go down in history for Brexit. Brexit will go down in history, but Johnson won’t be remembered for that. He’ll be remembered as the man who locked Britain up for a flu. He’ll be remembered as the man we got in to “Get Brexit Done” who turned out to give us something far worse than staying in the EU (which I say even as an ardent Brexiteer). He’s the cane toad we got in to eat some beetles who ended up eating everything it shouldn’t. Worse than that, he’s the pest control man we got in to kill a rat who ended up burning our house down. He’s the doctor we got in to heal our sick child who ended up raping her.

Does that last sentence seem too much? Should we instead say “He’s a bumbling oaf, but he’s not bad guy, he’s just misguided, this was one battle too many for him”. Well, I might have agreed with you… except that for his whole time as leader of the Conservative Party, Cane-Toad has pushed Year Zero, sorry Net Zero, a thinly-disguised Communist pauperisation policy that is designed to further enrich the wealthy green upper-class while screwing the masses. As we’re using Australian pest control analogies we can say that it’s the political equivalent of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and about as welcome to us as that disease was to the wild rabbit population of Australia in the 1950s. So no, don’t cut Johnson that slack.

In fact, with Cane-Toad’s explicit embrace of the World Economic’s Forum’s sinister ‘Great Reset’ agenda we can see that he has thrown his lot in with the technocratic globalists. Whatever the sincerity of his past claims to be a libertarian, and a champion of the ordinary Brit, it is clear that the current Boris Johnson has been swallowed up whole by the green technocratic elite, no doubt urged on by his current squeeze Princess Nut-Nuts and the various upper-class greens in his circle like Zac Goldsmith. Cane-Toad dumped his wife and children and burned all his bridges to be with Nut-Nuts, so there’s no going back. The old jolly and patriotic classical liberal who used to rail against leftist tyranny, even if we allow that that was for real and not an act, is no more. He's now a "chipped toby-jug of piss and wind", in the words of my friend Simon Roberts. The green zealotry and the arrogant disdain for the proles that his father has so often displayed has surfaced in the son and taken him over. To shill for one green Communist scheme may be an unfortunate  misunderstanding, but to shill for two… well, it just makes you a green Communist, whatever your past. 

Some think that the reason that Cane Toad looks so physically bad these days is not just because he was very ill earlier in 2020 and has faced a lot of work since then (although there isn’t much evidence that he works much), it’s because there is a battle going on within him, between the new globalist Boris that circumstances and his own weakness has forced him to become, and the old Boris who wishes he still was the cheeky maverick who tweaks the nose of the left. On this theory, Johnson, who has always wanted to establish himself in history, knows that he does not have the strength of character or the work ethic to oppose the tide that is flooding over him, so he has decided to ride it instead, but there’s still a part of him that wishes he could swim backwards.

I’m not sure I buy this. The Churchillian-pastiche persona that Johnson has recently adopted tells us that probably he’s undergone a Prince Hal conversion: his juvenile Falstaffian side has been banished and the serious ruler has emerged. The nearest recent parallel is Graydon Carter, who started off as a rebel, poking the establishment with Spy magazine, but who soon became a fully paid-up and po-faced member of the ruling class when he got the editorship of Vanity Fair. But whichever theory is true is irrelevant to our judgement on Cane-Toad. If you’re fighting for the dark side you are a bad guy, regardless of whether or not your conscience troubles you.

So our conclusion must remain: Johnson must go down in history not as Mr Brexit (because the main driver of Brexit was the pressure of the people; Johnson just rode that wave as well) but as Britain’s first gulag-master, the man who locked us up on false pretences, spent more than anyone in the country’s history on paying people not to go to work, and the ruler who then welcomed in, in chaotic and desperate circumstances where the public was cowed and beaten, an entity even worse than the EU and invited it to take over the country.

The cane toad was never this bad.