How Boris Johnson's "model bus hobby" non sequitur manipulated the public discourse and his search results

Boris Johnson is a racist, sexist, homophobic lying buffoon who has been repeatedly caught out using lies to sway public opinion, and that's why he's likely to lead the UK Conservative party and become the country's Prime Minister.

Johnson is a master of media manipulation (right down to his bufoonish public persona), but his powers were taxed by the police responding to a seeming incident of domestic violence at his home, after which Johnson went into hiding, refusing to talk to the media. This silence was a major impediment to Johnson's ability to campaign for leadership of the Conservatives and the country, so eventually he was going to have to talk to a reporter and answer questions about what had gone on at his home that night.

Finally, on June 25, Johnson gave a bizarre interview with Talkradio in which he announced, apropos of nothing, that he liked to turn wine-crates into models of buses: "I have a thing where I make models of buses. What I make is, I get old, I don't know, wooden crates, and I paint them. It's a box that's been used to contain two wine bottles, right, and it will have a dividing thing. And I turn it into a bus."

As Glyn Moody writes, the derision and satire that followed might well have been a deliberate strategy. First, it downshifted the Boris Johnson scandal: instead of asking "Did Boris Johnson beat up his wife?" the press started asking "Does Boris Johnson really make buses out of old wine-crates?" The former is (presumably) a disqualifier in a campaign to be Prime Minister; the latter is merely faintly absurd. Read the rest