OK, it’s not quite blocking the sun over all of London but it did for a short moment just where this photographer happened to be standing.
The inflatable “Boris Blimp” has been launched in Parliament Square on Saturday morning by anti-Brexit protesters.
With the tagline “No to Boris. Yes to Europe”, the March for Change group is hoping for a large turnout to protest what it has declared a “national emergency”.
The group’s website states:
We can’t fix Britain by fixating on Brexit.
Days before he is sworn in as Prime Minister, let’s make it clear to Boris Johnson that we want to stop the Brexit chaos.
This is a national emergency. We won’t put up with a hard Brexit PM being imposed on the country and hurtling us towards the cliff edge.
We can only solve the big global challenges - from climate change to terrorism - by working with Europe and the rest of the World.
We can build that better tomorrow through the most successful peace project in history.
Boris Johnson is widely expected to be named as winner of the Tory leadership contest on Tuesday, and is the protest’s main political target.
The “No to Boris, Yes to Europe” demonstration will proceed from Mayfair’s Park Lane to Parliament Square in Westminster, the Press Association reports.
The balloon is inspired by the “Baby Trump” blimp that mocked US President Donald Trump during his visit to the UK last month.
The inflatable version of the former foreign secretary is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a red bus and the figure “£350m” – a reference to Johnson’s Brexit referendum promise of clawing back funding for the NHS.
It’s not the only embarrassing stunt involving Johnson this week – he brought the curtain down on his Tory leadership campaign by holding aloft a kipper and having a characteristic pop at the European Union.
“I want you to consider this kipper,” the would-be prime minister boomed at the the final Conservative hustings on Wednesday night, before launching into a diatribe about the EU’s “pointless, expensive, environmentally damaging health and safety” rules.
Addressing the crowd in east London, Johnson went on that an “utterly furious” kipper smoker in the Isle of Man has faced “massively increased” costs from sending his produce through the post because it requires “a plastic ice pillow”. And “Brussels bureaucrats” are to blame.
However, the EU says that’s not true. A spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that the rules for Isle of Man kipper sellers are in fact set in the UK and are not part of EU legislation.