Genius School Librarian Sends Not So Subtle Message to Boris Johnson

Today Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom gave a speech to a group of school children where he swerved responsibility for his role in the school grades fiasco by blaming a ‘mutant algorithm’, which would actually suggest it didn’t do exactly as it was programmed to do.

The Prime Minister also told the children that it is fine to sing Rule Britannia, and that Harry Potter isn’t sexist (we’re only glad he’s the authority on these things), but what caught our eye was the work of a very clever school librarian who managed to very subtly give Boris Johnson a piece of his or her mind, without saying a single word.

It didn’t take long before keen eyed Twitter users noticed the books the librarian had propped up behind the PM, including titles such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, Kristin Cast’s Betrayed, and even The Twits by Roald Dahl. The bookshelf behind the PM was teeming with strategically placed titles as we also saw The Resistance by Gemma Malley, Exodus, a book about a climate crisis by Julie Bertagna, The Toll by Neal Shusterman, Crisis Point by Andy Briggs, and even Pratchett’s Guards, Guards! A novel about a plot by a secret brotherhood to overthrow a corrupt patrician and install a puppet king.

Naturally Twitter users soon realised the titles were no coincidence:

Noticing that the shelf had clearly been carefully curated:

And lots of people were quick to point out that librarians are generally a rebellious lot!

What’s odd, or maybe now not so surprising, is the complete lack of imagination from the UK government. It seems that Eton School beats the imagination right out of you, if the PM or his team could not imagine that a librarian would be subversive. Yet again he has been caught unawares by the strength of opinion against him, publicly displayed in another embarrassing incident for the Prime Minister.