BORIS JOHNSON: As Britain becomes a Left-wing tyranny, meet the Argie president with the cojones to take a buzzsaw to big government, fight for freedom – and say he loves Mrs T

You have to admire the man’s pure cojones.

I’m sitting in Buenos Aires, in the strangely darkened office of the president of Argentina. He is Javier Milei, 53, the chainsaw-wielding, rugged wild man of Hayekian free-market thinking – finally giving this beautiful country the economic medicine it needs.

It’s now almost ten months since his election, and he has manically hacked into the excesses of the state, extracting as much as five percent of GDP from government spending. You may remember those images of him, before the elections, standing in front of a huge whiteboard showing the Argentine government.

He shouted ‘Afuera! Afuera!’ or ‘Out! Out!’ – and rip entire departments out of the diagram. Well, he did it.

Of the 23 ministries he inherited, eight have been brutally amputated by his roaring buzzsaw, and their officials dismissed to seek employment in the private sector. He has abolished the insane state subsidies on fuel. He abolishes the crazy Peronist taxes on exports.

He is taking on the state airline unions and waging war with the academics at state-funded universities. Despite his orgy of calculated fiscal chaos, his popularity remains astonishingly high, and for good reason.

Little by little he succeeds. Inflation was 58 percent per month – that’s right, per month. If you buy a beer in one of the nice cafes in this city, you will notice that the prices are constantly adjusted with chalk, to allow for flushes with extra zeros. Thanks to Milei, those price increases have slowed dramatically – to 2 percent per month, and he is determined to reduce them even further.

He knows the damage inflation has done to Argentina: the destruction of the livelihoods of the low-paid, the erosion of confidence and investment. He looks at us with his bright blue eyes and tells us about his plans.

Poverty is now declining, he says; growth will return; and as he talks, I find myself wanting him to succeed, for the sake of Argentina and the world. I believe he will do that because he can say and do things that no Argentine president has done before.

Here we are in Evita Peron’s palace, and just outside is the balcony from which she addressed the masses. We are in the building where President Galtieri and his gold-plated generals plotted the invasion of the Falklands – and yet here is an Argentine president who has the audacity to say he is an admirer of the woman who ruthlessly defeated that junta and recaptured. the islands.

Yes, amigos, he is a fan of Margaret Thatcher – and he says so. That is courage; those are balls.

When an opponent challenged him on this admission and asked how he could find it in himself to praise the woman who sank the Belgrano, he replied simply. It was absurd to despise Thatcher, he said; it was like despising Kylian Mbappé for scoring goals against Argentina.

“We were involved in a war and we lost the war,” he said. He admires Thatcher for the same reason he admires Churchill: because she was a fighter for what he believes is most important in economics, in politics and in life: freedom.

He supports the freedom of the individual to live your life as you wish, provided you do not harm others. He supports your right to smoke whatever you want, to love and marry whomever you want.

He supports the cause of freedom around the world and strongly supports Volodomyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians in their fight against Putin’s neo-imperialist aggression. He strongly supports the Israelis against Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, he is so passionate about the subject that he actually converts to Judaism.

He supports the scientific freedom of animal cloning and has four cloned English bullmastiffs that he calls his “children” and whose privacy he jealously protects.

He seems to be the living embodiment of the libertarianism he espouses, and with every speech and tweet he amplifies his message with a slogan that every Argentine voter has heard by now: “Viva la libertad, carajo!” – which roughly translates as “Long live freedom, you f****r!”

Of course, you might think that this is just the kind of fanaticism that comes from a crisis. You might think that Milei’s libertarianism is a response to Argentina’s unique economic situation, because the country has been so chronically terrible at controlling the political borrowing and spending that fuels inflation.

You might therefore think that Milei’s mission has no relevance to us in Britain – and I’m not so sure. Can we really say that here in Britain we are striking the right balance between the powers of the state and those of the individual?

Can we say that the flame of freedom burns as brightly as before? Look at us under this new Labor government – ​​the entire population cowering for months as we wait for this punitive budget. We all sit blindfolded as we prepare to be beaten up by Rachel Reeves, not knowing what instrument she will use.

Will they hit us with capital gains tax or inheritance tax? Or will she break the Labor manifesto promise and hit us with more national insurance? We have global investors who are holding their hands or abandoning their plans; we have more and more wealthy people fleeing the country – so that emigration is now becoming an economic problem for this country for the first time since the 1970s.

We have a whole bunch of new and totally useless labor legislation, which plans to give workers the right to ‘switch off’ at the weekend, and all sorts of other nonsense; and can we say that the Starmer regime is doing everything it can to protect the freedom of the individual?

Javier Milei brandished a buzzsaw at a political rally last year. He seems to be the living embodiment of the libertarianism he espouses

On the contrary, they scrapped the Tory measure protecting freedom of expression at university; and look at the case of the childminder, 41-year-old Lucy Connolly, who spent almost three years in prison – just because of something she posted on X/Twitter after the Southport murders.

What she said was mean; really terrible. She called for the burning of hostels for immigrants. She certainly deserved to be punished, perhaps with a fine or community service. But she is the mother of a young child and has no previous criminal record, and I can see no evidence that any serious action would be taken on her disgusting comment – ​​which she deleted within three hours.

Was it really right to fuck her for almost three years? In the ringing? When the Starmer government releases all kinds of serious sexual and violent offenders because there is no room in the prisons? You have to wonder.

Milei is right about freedom. It is precious and can be eroded. Under this Labor government, more and more people’s money is being taken from people by the state, to be spent by the government on our behalf, while the state is dictating in ever more detail what we should do and say, and even what we should think.

It will get to the point where one day we will hit the table and cry, enough! Viva la libertad, carajo!