The fact that he reached for a word and came up with “humbug”...

[BertrandRussell]

.....really says all you need to know.

Elitist, outdated and out of touch. And that’s before all the other things he is!

Virtue signalling means 'the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue'.

The opposite of what Johnson did!!!!

I meant that’s what he was accusing them of- not what he was doing!

Anyway, he is a thoroughly rotten egg!

..and an absolute bounder!

He is a wet and a weed and cannot catch for toffee..

Its the same league as "piffle".
It means "you're talking silly rubbish and I'm not going to give it a second of consideration before dismissing it out-of-hand" with a side-order flavour of "I'm posh".

PT Barnum seemed to be a big fan of the word. Who we know was a violent racist in real life, among other unpleasant traits.

It just means 'load of nonsense'

I thought it basically meant bullshit too. I'm sure a book read in childhood used it in that context, referring to a slippery sort of character with dodgy sales patter as 'an old humbug'.

Interesting. I wonder if the meaning has shifted. I am very old, and I have just asked my brother who is even older and he said it meant “a load of virtue signalling bollocks”

He's right about the bollocks bit.

My brother has just sent me the OED definitions. “Deception, pretence, sham; used interjectionally = ‘stuff and nonsense!’. 2. A thing which is not really what it pretends to be; an imposture, a deception, fraud, sham. A person that practises deception; an impostor, a ‘fraud’.

So I think I can claim to be a bit right!

tbh, in the context he used it I think it meant bollocks.

seem to have cross posted

a white elite man used it to completely dismiss what a female mp was saying about the fear of the violence that his very words stoke up in the minds of sick and twisted individuals.
I despise him - he disgraces the office he holds