Boris the Weak

By Ed West

Thursday, February 03, 2022

 

Perhaps no one in British his­tory has suffered such a swift downfall as Boris Johnson. The prime minister, just months ago comfortably sailing to a second election victory, is now possibly the most hated man in the country outside of the prison system. The reversal in fortune is unprecedented: Richard III suffered a pretty sharp drop in the polls after murdering his nephews, but there aren’t many other examples. And all Johnson did was to have some wine-and-cheese parties.

 

It’s the absurd comic ending perfectly suited to a slapstick career. Johnson laughed his way to Downing Street, charming the public via a career in television, and got through the two biggest challenges to face post-war Britain — Brexit and Covid — only to be sunk by a cake. He was a funny man who first be­came a celebrity via a comedy news quiz, yet his downfall appears unusually tragic and lonely.

 

He was always a contradiction, an act. He was the most libertarian of rulers who was forced to close the pubs and ban casual sex, a comedian who ruled during the most serious of times.  He was an entertainer, and just wanted to be loved. The biggest contradiction was that, despite seeming to have all the trappings of Britain’s old aristocracy, he was born into the purple of the liberal elite — yet found himself running the Conservative Party.

 

British commentators, obsessed with the schools and universities they at­tended and the status and moral weight this grants them, are acutely attuned to the old trappings of class. For this reason much is made of Johnson’s membership in Britain’s old elite. He is the 20th prime minister to have been educated at Eton (whereas just ten attended Britain’s 20,000 non-fee-paying schools). He read classics at Oxford, like fellow Brexiteer and 19th-century throwback Jacob Rees-Mogg, and was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club, an elitist society for upper-class hooligans who like to smash up restaurants. The images of the Bullingdon boys in their evening dress used to fascinate the British public: the very picture of Tory arrogance and contempt (think Draco Malfoy, foil of Harry Potter).

 

Yet what is less remarked on is how enmeshed within Britain’s liberal elite Johnson truly is. He was born into the new establishment in a way unlike any other PM, even his Labour rivals. His father was a pro-Brussels member of the European Parliament and an environmentalist. His brother Jo is married to a crusading Guardian journalist who exposed the Windrush scandal of Caribbean-born British residents being illegally deported. His sister Rachel is a high-profile “Remainer” who stood for the comically unpopular Change UK party — one of the many pro-EU parties that appeared after the referendum offering a platform of self-consciously upper-middle-class social liberalism that appealed to a minuscule percentage of the British electorate.

 

During his time as mayor of London, Johnson wrote books and made documentaries comparing the city to ancient Rome, proclaiming that its diversity and multiculturalism made it strong. He is a creation of that diversity, “the esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation,” as Rod Liddle beautifully put it in the Spectator. His great-grandfather Ali Kemal was a liberal Turkish politician, killed by irate na­tionalists, while his great-great-great-grandmother was a Circassian slave, which as far as social mobility goes is as good as it gets.

 

Before being kicked out by wife number two for his countless infidelities, Johnson lived in Islington, the center of Britain’s liberal elite, north London being home to four of Labour’s last five leaders, whereas most Conservative politicians live in west London, the urban residence of the landed gentry and the city’s vanishing number of Tory voters.

 

Johnson is instinctively, culturally, a liberal, one who ended up at Eton because of his family’s relentless ambition. He’s not just a liberal, but a liberal with a desperate urge to be liked and loved. This is his downfall, and partly explains why his government, faced with its first real PR crisis, has crumbled.

 

Boris Johnson’s fall in popularity has been spectacular and unprecedented. Just weeks ago, he was unassailably ahead in the polls, as he had been since his huge election victory in December 2019. There seemed to be no question of his cruising to victory in 2024, too, against nice-but-dull Labour leader Keir Starmer. Despite the government’s various mishandlings of the pandemic, most people were forgiving — and it seemed that Johnson’s famously Faustian luck had held off.

 

Yet today he is not just wildly unpopular; he is seen as incompetent. His once biggest supporters now hate him, and reports of elites in Westminster partying while the people endured lockdown have cut through to even the least attentive voter.

 

It all started to go wrong in October with the Owen Paterson case. The Shropshire member of Parliament had been suspended by the House of Commons standards committee for taking money from a private health-care company, in a country where the state health-care system is essentially sacred (despite being not very good). The prime minister, showing incredibly poor judgment, forced his MPs to overturn the suspension; outrage ensued, Paterson ended up resigning, and the Tories lost his once safe seat in a by-election. Tory sleaze — that powerful 1990s trope about greedy, out-of-touch elites — was back.

 

Then came the parties. A photograph was released showing Johnson and his circle enjoying some wine and cheese in the back garden of 10 Downing Street — at the height of lockdown in 2020. It soon transpired that, at a time when ordinary people were not allowed to attend the funerals of loved ones and women could not be accompanied by their husbands when giving birth, the Johnson clique was partying nonstop. Sixteen parties have been investigated, twelve of them by the police. In one instance Johnson enjoyed a birthday cake, which the prime minister denied was “premeditated”; a loyal backbencher argued that he had been “am­bushed” by the cake in question.

 

In normal times such parties would have been beyond innocuous — just a few colleagues having some drinks in the office — but when people were making huge, often traumatic personal sacrifices, some of them handed huge fines by the police for violating rules, it showed an officer class not willing to share the sacrifices of the troops.

 

In a spectacular turnaround, John­son is now the least popular member of the cabinet among Tory members, with some competition. He is a liability within the party, and Conservative MPs, infamously faithless and ruthless, will remove him if he threatens their jobs.

 

The British public fell in love with Johnson the entertainer, and now that the spell has lifted, all those little im­perfections that charmed during the blossoming romance suddenly appear as serious character flaws.

 

We all know about those flaws; a journalist before entering Parliament, Johnson was sacked from two different jobs for lying, before his relentless ambition propelled him to the editorship of the Spectator.

 

In his personal life, “BoJo” is rather famously not one of life’s puritans; no one knows how many children the prime minister actually has, although he has fathered at least one out of wedlock in addition to six through marriage. At the time of his appointment, his Wikipedia page listed his de jure and de facto spouses, making him Britain’s first polygamous leader since the Viking king Canute. The British public were happy to indulge all of this in their modern-day Merry Monarch.

 

More damning, though, is the fact that he is notoriously unable to chair a meeting because he cannot focus and does not read ministerial papers. As the Covid crisis unfolded in January 2020, he failed to attend several national-security meetings, distracted by a Shakespeare biography he needed to write to pay off his second divorce, according to former chief adviser Dominic Cummings. It was reported last month that the prime minister was in such crisis mode that he was actually reading his ministerial papers — that is, doing the basics of his job. He’s slapdash and unprepared, unable to get anything done unless there is a loom­ing deadline — but then, that’s what happens when you put journalists in charge.

 

This is part of a wider problem: a lack of talent in British politics and government, in a country where the hugely well-paid financial sector sucks up the brightest. It was telling that the only success story in Britain’s Covid response was its vaccine acquisition, a task that was handed over to venture capitalist Kate Bingham. In London that’s where the talented, competent people head; it’s the dunces we let run the country.

 

But the alternative at the last election was Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, a man leading a potential government so left-wing that his shadow chancellor would regularly appear at May Day parades next to pictures of Stalin and Mao and has cited Trotsky and Lenin as his biggest influences.

 

For all Johnson’s flaws, then, we can hail this as his biggest contribution to British life — preventing Corbyn from becoming prime minister. For that alone he probably deserves a funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a spot in Poets’ Corner, maybe a couple of statues.

 

His other major contribution was Brexit, a bold and reckless leap into the dark that drastically changed the me­dian Conservative Party voter, finalizing the same realignment that had already begun in the United States. As the British political axis shifted from class to values, the Tories needed to convince many former Labour voters that they were not the heartless toffs of old, but the real people’s party. The “partygate” scandal has wiped away all that hard work, all those images of Boris posing with smiling truckers and steelworkers now a thing of the past. The repeated message now being heard is they’re laughing at us.

 

But the government is also crumbling because it has no aim or purpose. It got Brexit done, it stopped Corbyn. Now what?

 

Thatcher and Blair reshaped Britain in their image, for good or ill. The Tories, in one form or another, have been in power for twelve years and — aside from Brexit and Michael Gove’s education reforms — have made almost no mark on the country. You might have awoken from a long coma and had no idea who had been in power all this time. The Tories have drifted inertly as the institutions running the country have become ever more tightly controlled by progressives, often using equality laws passed by Labour to tighten their grip. Government departments fly the trans flag and sex education is dictated by Stonewall, the taxpayer-funded campaigning charity, while schools promote diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs imported whole from the U.S.

 

Homelessness has become chronic and crime has risen, with fatal stabbings of London teenagers peaking last year. Prisons need building but nothing happens, partly because so many of the country’s real rulers don’t believe in jailing criminals, and partly because of the Treasury-led inertia that stops anything getting built, including millions of houses and several nuclear-power stations.

 

The U.K. itself is falling apart amid a general feeling of drift and aimless­ness, its worst manifestation seen with il­legal immigration. On November 11, Remembrance Day, a mentally unstable Jordanian man detonated a bomb in Liverpool, luckily killing only himself; he had lied about his nationality, been convicted of a knife crime and committed to a mental hospital, had his claim for asylum rejected, and yet eight years later was still here, at liberty. We were lucky that, unlike with the Manchester Arena attack by an Islamist suicide bomber, others didn’t pay the price for the British state’s inability to do its most basic function. Whenever this happens, out comes the sarcastic comment — if only we had a Conserva­tive government with a huge majority.

 

The Tories win elections, but because of who runs the British state, Labour is effectively always in power.

 

None of these problems is insurmountable, and governments of previous times overcame far greater hurdles with far less in the way of resources. But it would mean upsetting the liberal establishment, and those are Johnson’s people, the people he wants to love him. That weakness, for all the personal scandal around Downing Street, is the gravest of all his sins.