Boris and the sharks

Before he became our most glorious leader Boris Johnson used to give speeches for money to, well, pretty much anyone that would pay.

His favourite speech is about Jaws and the Mayor who keeps the beaches open even while the shark chomps swimmers.

Mayor Larry Vaughn was the “real hero” of Jaws, he liked to say.

As a metaphor for everything that is wrong with him this is hard to top.

Central to the plot of Jaws is that the Mayor can’t close the beaches because he is in hock to the mafia. The mob fear closing the beaches will hit their property interests and lean on him, hard.

The shark in the water is not alone is the point; there are sharks onshore too.
This is explicit in the book and alluded to in the film.

That Johnson doesn’t know this and hasn’t bothered to check seems typical.
The Mayor isn’t a freedom loving guy; he’s making terrible choices against the public interest because his donors demand it. (Yes, I know!).

And so to the Downing Street Xmas party which was “fictional”, or it was a “business meeting” or it was only “cheese and wine”.

The assumption about Johnson is always that he gets away with it because there are so many blunders it would seem pointless to single out just the one, hence the title of his biography “Just Boris”.

Questions: were there any political reporters at this party and can you tell which they were by their relative silence on this issue?

Can you tell which papers had their own Christmas party at about the same time?
(You can, but do your own maths.)

Even for our Teflon PM this one seems serious. Sharks are circling.