You know how it is. You don’t hear anyone use the word ‘jelly’ as an insult for years, and then the same person uses it twice in a matter of days. Happens all the time.
Boris has used the last few days to bandy about the ‘jelly’ insult as if it was going out of fashion. Firstly, the Mayor used it to have a pop at his coalition partner and deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.
“Lib Dems are wobbling jellies of indecision and vacillation, particularly Clegg,” said Bozza. “His single contribution to politics has been to do a u-turn on tuition fees and make a song about it, that’s all he’s done.”
The Huffington Post called Boris’ comments, made as campaigning got under way at the Eastleigh by-election, ‘a withering, and typically colourful, assessment of his party’s Westminster coalition partners’.
You’d think that bringing back the term ‘jelly’ in a pejorative sense would have been a one-off event. But no. Bozza then decided to take the ‘jelly’ thing to a whole new level of bizarre.
In a startling City Hall meeting, the Mayor reacted angrily after the London Assembly rejected the chance to question him about his budget. Sky reports that Boris ‘had been due to be questioned by Assembly members on his £16.5bn budget for the capital in a session at City Hall.’
However, the Assembly voted in favour of not scrutinising the budget, leaving the Mayor flabbergasted and grasping for the nearest insult he could find: a jelly-based one.
He said: “They have no questions. They don’t want to scrutinise. Are you saying they are abdicating their duty to scrutinise me? Are you saying they haven’t the guts to put questions to me? Great supine proto-plasmic invertebrate jellies.”
Now, we at Boriswatch HQ have heard some insults before. I remember a Christmas party once where Boriswatch’s Features Editor called our London expert a ******g *****d *p ******g but that was nothing compared to this. Even by Bozza’s standards, ‘great supine proto-plasmic invertebrate jellies’ is a humdinger.
Assembly chair Jennette Arnold ‘battled to continue the meeting as Mr Johnson muttered his protests while he gathered his belongings and walked out’, apparently. I’m not surprised.