Opinion: Why Boris Johnson is the Bad Joke no one Asked for

In the final season of Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick of It, the story of Mr Tickel, a nurse made homeless by an uncaring government, is initially treated by the series’ characters as a mere irritant, not worth their time and the butt of cruel jokes about his mental health. That is until he is found dead in his car, having committed suicide.

Tickel’s death ultimately leads to the downfall of the series’ foul-mouthed antihero Malcom Tucker, when it is discovered that he had illegally obtained his medical records and leaked them to the press during Tickel’s three week tent based protest. In real life, a story such as this would be front page news for weeks, wouldn’t it?

Thus, if the story of Richard Radcliffe surprises you, perhaps you’re not alone. With media attention largely focused on COP26 and the litany of corruption stories engulfing the Conservative government, the fact that Radcliffe is currently on his eighteenth day of hunger strike outside the Foreign Office protesting the UK government’s callous handling of the case of his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe - who remains detained in Iran on trumped up charges of espionage - is only now making media waves; indeed, opposition leaders Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner recently met with Mr Ratcliffe.

The fact that the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe continues thanks in no small part to the carelessness of a former UK foreign secretary is not lost on her hunger striking husband. A shame then that rather than being punished for such reckless incompetence, Boris Johnson – for of course, it was he – is now Prime Minister, his Downing Street residence a stone’s throw away from Radcliffe’s protest. Naturally, Johnson has neither the wit nor compassion to bother meeting with Mr Radcliffe - after all, this is a man who fled a debate on his government’s increasingly brazen corruption for a photo-op in a hospital. True to form, Johnson went mask-less, endangering patients and frontline NHS workers a mere week after sitting next to the 95 year-old David Attenborough while attending COP 26, without a mask.

Once might be simple mistake, but twice in a week – even after being grilled about it by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour – belies an arrogant lack of empathy and basic lack of respect for others, hardly surprising from a man who seemingly struggles to keep count of how many children he has fathered.

Friends of Radcliffe are growing increasingly concerned for his welfare, and while the thought of a man possibly starving to death on the doorstep of government should be sending chills up ministers spines, one suspects that in private, Johnson probably jokingly identifies with one of Malcom Tucker’s lesser-known quotes: “NOMFuP. N-O-M-F-P. Not my f****** problem. I quite like that. Did you like that? I’ll use that quite a lot today.”

It is to our – and the Ratcliffe’s – ongoing misfortune that such a man as Johnson is Britain’s face to the world, a long running bad joke that even Armando Iannucci couldn’t write.

PoliticsFrancesco Bonfanti