Boris and that 'special relationship'

Boris Johnson, it turns out, isn’t overly fond of the phrase “special relationship”.

There’s no accounting for tastes and Mr Johnson’s career as a wordsmith means it’s worth paying some attention to why he doesn’t like the phrase.

As a journalist out in the field — Brussels, headquarters of the European Union — Mr Johnson regularly filed despatches that were heavy with creative embroidery and rather light on the facts. As a newspaper columnist, he wrote amusing pieces, rich in felicitous turns of phrase that evoked vivid visual images. They skipped blithely over the need to actually make an argument because Mr Johnson’s signature style is to try and win an argument without marshalling the evidence to support it. It’s fair to say that he rarely did something George Orwell deplored, which is to say writing in “ a lifeless, imitative style “.

His political brand is much the same. Boris “boosterism” is a unique form of sloganeering — fact-free, tilting at reality, reassuring for the moment, …