Rumours that Daily Mail executives have asked Boris Johnson to deliver more bang for their £1m-a-year bucks in his hopeless weekly column seemed to be confirmed when the latest was headlined: “Adolescence is tosh.. What’s doing REAL damage to teenagers is Starmer’s spiteful Pol Pot hatred of anything aspirational or that requires effort.”
And yes, amid rubbishing the streaming hit of the year for the same reasons all the hard right are (“the victims and perpetrators are disproportionately young black males”), Johnson was genuinely comparing the prime minister to one of the most brutal despots in history, thought to be responsible for anywhere between one and a half and three million deaths.
And how much does Starmer hate aspiration? Born in a lower middle-class family with a toolmaker father and severely disabled mother, he rose to become the country’s most senior lawyer, then PM. Johnson, of course, has never worked for anything in his life…
