I find it phenomenal that people in the U.K. are so caught up in the Johnson narrative - whether you’re for or against him, it seems absolutely everyone is within his thrall - talking about him, thinking about him, to the exclusion of all else.

Now, it’s not about “stick your head in the sand”, so much as it is realising that on both sides of the aisle you’re reading from the same script - the same paradigm, the same dichotomy of stay or go, the same stage and set dressing. Your protests are expected, appreciated, and necessary, as they further the narrative, and deepen his power - because power flows from narrative, from the ideas which you accept as “just is” within the story, as it doesn’t make sense without them - never mind that it’s all a fantastical fabrication.

This is how kings are made. Johnson has been telling a particular story for a while now, in which he becomes king. It gave him vast popularity in the run up to the mayoral election (apt control of narrative is commonly called charisma), and from there, he’s been punting the same can down the road whilst we all chase it like rabid dogs.

This only ends when a better, stronger narrative comes along - and nobody in any position to challenge him has it.

Labour own a narrative in which they stumble onwards, tripping on their scabbard as they scramble up the dusty ramparts of Fort Johnson, and are stuck in it, as they mistake their narrative for their reality.

For instance, they initially approached the antisemitism debacle by treating it as a valid issue - they played whackamole with the press on it, and it kept the story (“Labour are antisemites”) prime in the public mind. The whole thing has been rather quiet lately, because they changed tactics, are are hiding from that narrative and are hoping it will wither away. It might - but it only takes an ember to rekindle a bonfire.

Rather, they should be getting ahead of the story, and should pick on, oh, I don’t know, the greens, kick off a rumour that they’re a Masonic cabal of drag queen drug lords and make them defend it, and drag the Tories into that mess. The crazier and broader the accusations the better - grapeshot gives a lot of holes to patch, and distracts from the one which hit below the waterline. Play it right and you make everyone remember that it was the Tories that started it, as labour smearing the greens makes no sense. Punching up and doing minor damage makes you look weak and petty, punching down and demolishing an innocent makes you look strong. Children understand this - the world is a schoolyard.

I wrote a little while back about narrative control as being the thing which divides the ruling classes from the consumer classes - I went to a similar school to Johnson, and the main thing you’re taught, albeit largely unwittingly (you have to follow the lessons which aren't spoken), is how to dominate narrative.

So, you want Johnson gone, you need either events to run roughshod over his constructed reality, and that would take something very substantial - or you need a greater master of human reality.

Thing is, as long as the techniques of narrative control remain the domain of the elite, passed on to their children through expensive institutions and family neuroses that spread mimetically through the affected population, the leaders will continue to be from the same caste. Occasionally someone from the outside stumbles over the alchemy of mind control, and they do things with it, often involving gas and guillotines, but it’s the exception, not the rule, and from the perspective of the entrenched ruling classes reinforces the need to gatekeep.

So. Johnson will likely one day go, but the disease that allows Johnson will remain until the next revolution.