If James Spader and Donald Trump were British and could somehow procreate (crikey, what am I saying here), their male offspring would be the spit and image of Boris Johnson. Johnson is the Mayor of London. I will spare you the details of Johnson’s resume but it is broad and deep but it hardly gives you any sense of the man. If one said that Boris Johnson is quirky, it would be akin to saying Usain Bolt is speedy. Usain Bolt? He’s really fast.  Boris, and he hates being called by his surname because he doesn’t want to be perceived as likeable,  was in the news this week. As usual, he was in the news because the man just doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut and for Johnson, political correctness never applies.

Johnson, a former journalist, still likes to write though he is a busy mayor of one of the world’s largest cities. He always has something to say and he still likes to memorialize it. On Tuesday, Johnson scribed a piece for the (London) Telegraph about the financial crisis. On one hand, his words look commonsensical, on other hand he misses the point that we are in the soup because we spent our way into it. The consumer cannot get us out of this problem given what has happened to real estate, retirement plans et al. But this is Boris at his best.

I don’t want to seem indifferent to suffering, and I don’t want anyone to accuse me of minimising the likely effect of the recession, because the coming months will very probably be a lot tougher – for millions of people – than the boom times we have all recently enjoyed.

But after reading the BBC’s special market crisis website, complete with its jagged red arrow pointing at the floor, and after hearing the pornographic glee with which we are told that another small country has gone up the spout, and after Mr Bean, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, has informed us that this could be the worst financial crisis in history, I am afraid I want to thrash my FT on the table and shout, Whoa! Come off it, folks! This isn’t the Black Death. Pinch yourself. Are you still there? Got a pulse? Thought so. Look out of the window. Those aren’t zombies. They are men and women engaged in the normal business of getting and spending.

This isn’t some disaster movie about a virus from Mars. It’s a recession, a downturn, a correction of a kind that is indispensable to any kind of human activity, and it does not require that we all go around under a special kind of credit-crunch pall. It does not mean we have to cancel all parties and talk in hushed credit-crunch tones. It doesn’t mean we have to line our rooms with newspaper, get in the foetal position and live on tins: in fact, it means the opposite.

Classic Boris.  Have a read of the rest of Johnson’s bylined story here.

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