On JANUARY, 1779, Captain Cook’s ship the Resolution arrived in Hawaii for the first time and some 10,000 native people greeted him as a god. “They saw a fair man with bright eyes, a high-bridged nose, light hair and handsome features.”
Thousands of native people fell to their knees as Cook passed on his way to the Hawaiian temple, where a small pig was sacrificed to him.
When Boris Johnson visited our own dear stateen on Monday of this week, there were no reports of porcine sacrifices or of people doing double genuflections as he passed. First Minister Michelle O’Neill nipped down to Dublin for a word with An Taoiseach Micheál Martin, then hurried back in time for her and Mary Lou McDonald and Conor Murphy to have a chat with the fair-haired man with the, um, handsome features.
What did An Taoiseach tell the First Minister that might have helped her in that meeting? Nothing she didn’t know already. That this Tory demi-god is an incurable liar, that a pig’s tail is of more value than any promises he might make, and that Jeffrey Donaldson says he’ll judge the British Prime Minister by his actions, not his words.
Johnson and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss have said they will this week introduce legislation that tears up unwanted bits of the Protocol. They say this is not so much breaking their written commitment in a signed international treaty as protecting the Good Friday Agreement.
So here’s the question you gotta ask yourself: Is Johnson willing to sacrifice the withdrawal deal in its totality, which would probably lead to a UK-EU trade war, to keep the good knight Jeffrey and his party happy? The answer, alas, is No. Johnson couldn’t give a fiddler’s fandango about Sir Jeff, the DUP or our dear stateen. Except that in some way they match up with the Tories’ game plan.
Then there’s Sir Jeff’s action-not-words demand. The brutal reality is that even if Liz Truss does introduce legislation that would, under British law, allow the DUP and everyone else to ignore the international treaty signed with the EU, even if that were to happen, it could take up to a year for the legislation to be passed.
Before that – long, long before that – the EU and the US will have acted. The EU will have fired its opening shots of a trade war, and the US will tell Johnson to look elsewhere for a trade deal.
The Bank of England this week said Brexit is costing the British economy over £400 million per week; a trade war with the EU and a cold shoulder from the US would hammer the British economy, which is already struggling with inflation rates last seen back in the 1980s.
On Monday, Mary Lou McDonald accused Johnson of siding with the DUPers. Certainly the good knight Jeffrey had that smug little look back on his face. I suspect he’s so overwhelmed with the visit of the demi-god Johnson to Hillsborough he’s forgotten that when Bojo promises something, there’s a high chance he’ll do the opposite.
But sooner or later the DUP must waken from their Tory-worship trance and see Johnson for what he is: An incurable liar.
A few weeks after greeting Captain Cook as a god, back in the eighteenth century, the Hawaiians decided he was mortal after all. So when Cook paid them a return visit, hundreds of native warriors fell upon him with daggers and clubs and killed him. His corpse was dismembered, his flesh roasted and his bones separated and divided out to different parties.
When people have been taken for fools once too often, they can turn very, very nasty.
