Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
London Mayor Boris Johnson -- an eccentric politician, born to wealthy parents in New York City, known for the outrageous things he says and his odd, blondish hairdo (if you can imagine such a thing) -- welcomed President Obama to his city in an unusual way: By dredging up old conspiracy theories about how Obama secretly hates Britain.
In an essay for the conservative paper The Sun, Johnson encouraged Obama to help make the two countries "better friends than ever."
But he starts in a not-terribly friendly way.
He wrote:
Something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009.
Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why.
It was a bust of Winston Churchill – the great British war time leader. It was a fine goggle-eyed object, done by the brilliant sculptor Jacob Epstein, and it had sat there for almost ten years.
But then it was returned to Britain. That's part one of Johnson's eyebrow-raising. He continued:
Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.
The rest of the essay excoriates Obama for having encouraged the United kingdom to remain a part of the European Union -- a position that Johnson opposes. (The Brits are voting on the so-called "Brexit" on June 23.)
Let's set that aside, and instead focus on Johnson's rhetoric. His goal is clear: He wants readers to come into the essay remembering this incident from early in Obama's term so that they are more inclined to dismiss Obama's argument about the Brexit. He liberally employs the old "some people say" technique for distancing himself from the conspiracy theory about Kenya and masks the bust thing in an air of mystery.
There's no mystery to the bust. In January 2015, fact-checker Glenn Kessler explained what happened with the bust. "No one could quite explain why," Johnson writes -- except people that bothered to look.
From Kessler's analysis:
The Winston Churchill bust in question was originally provided in July 2001 by then Prime Minister Tony Blair as a loan to President George W. Bush. The bust, now almost 70 years old, was made by English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and Bush said he would keep it in the Oval Office. Various news reports at the time said the bust will be returned once Bush left office.
When Obama took office, the Epstein bust loaned by Blair was returned to the British government, and the U.K. ambassador installed it in his residence. According to a 2010 interview with White House curator William Allman, the decision to return the bust had been made even before Obama arrived, as the loan was only scheduled to last as long as Bush’s presidency.
So ... that's that. Kessler also notes that, at the time, conservative media in the U.K. tried to make the return of the bust into something it wasn't. This Telegraph article from February 2009 plays up the return -- and introduces the Kenyan conspiracy theory.
We looked at that argument separately last year. It has a life of its own among American conservatives, thanks in large part to conservative writer Dinesh D'Souza raising it in a 2010 book (and Newt Gingrich parroting that in the 2012 election).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/22/londons-mayor-just-rehashed-the-old-obama-churchill-kenya-conspiracy-theory/