Talking to Nick Ferrari on LBC this Tuesday, London mayor Boris Johnson weighed in with yet another insult for deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. He is, Johnson informed Ferrari, a condom. “Nick Clegg is to serve a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron’s lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device for all the difficult things that David Cameron has to do that cheese off the rest,” he said.
“I don’t think I want to hear what you mean,” said Ferrari. Johnson explained anyway: “[Clegg] is a kind of shield. He’s a lapdog who’s been skinned and turned into a shield.” Right so … he was a dog, and now he’s a condom. Got it.
In the same interview, Boris also described Clegg as a “wobbling jelly of indecision and vacillation”.
Johnson is known for his somewhat surreal outbursts. So what else has he said?
• Talking about “poor old Cleggers” before Christmas, Johnson called him a “yellow albatross” around the collective Tory neck. The London mayor also described him as little more than a “very, very decorative part of the constitution”. Who knew Boris considered Clegg so “very, very decorative”?
• Last year, when the London assembly voted not to debate Johnson’s budget amendment and requested that he leave the hearing, he berated them as “great supine, protoplasmic invertebrate jellies”. Once again choosing jelly (see Clegg, above) as his insulting noun of choice, he qualified it with no less than four adjectives. Great, meaning large; invertebrate, meaning spineless (not like those spine-riddled jellies you get nowadays); supine, meaning inactive (again, not to be confused with those jellies you see hard at work, doing press-ups and the like) and protoplasmic – an especially odd choice of adjective for a jelly, as protoplasm is the colloidal liquid from which cells are formed.
So, the London assembly members are large, inactive, cell-forming jellies without spines. Understood, Guardian informs.
