Last week, the Political Society welcomed Stanley Johnson to speak to Etonians and students from partner schools about his activism and living life as Boris Johnson’s father.
Mr Johnson focused on the need to reduce the rate at which climate change is taking place, as well as protecting the welfare of animals. He spoke about his time working to implement environmental frameworks for the EU and how it was a privilege to do so, a privilege that after Brexit may no longer be possible.
Ruminating on Brexit, he stressed the need to maintain and adhere to the European Union’s environment initiatives and not throw all the good work away. Recently, Mr Johnson has spoken in support of Extinction Rebellion. On reflection he said that “whilst the means might not be there, with disruption as people climb on top of the tube”, he completely agrees with the ends, that underlying motivation to resolve this global issue should be at the forefront of the debate.
The post-talk questions enabled Mr Johnson to delight the audience with humorous anecdotes of his time on Celebrity Hunted and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, even predicting the winner of this year’s competition. His insistence on action against climate change, however, remained the central message of this talk. As he reminisced about his gap year travels and time in South America, where he managed to “hitchhike by plane”, he noted that with large areas of the Amazon now cleared for soya plantations, it would look completely different were he to go back.
