By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
U.S. presidents get to do one big thing — if they’re
lucky.
Some of those one big things are bigger than others:
Barack Obama signed a health-insurance bill, but Abraham Lincoln saved the
Union. Richard Nixon ended the American involvement in Vietnam. A few really
extraordinary presidents get to do two big things: Franklin Roosevelt did the
New Deal and rallied the whole of American power to save — the world,
really. (So, a mixed record.) Ronald Reagan, in a similar way, got one big win
at home by overseeing a major reform of economic policy and one big win abroad
by setting up the kill shot on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, though
the hammer-and-sickle flag didn’t come down at the Kremlin until Christmas of
1991, when Reagan was enjoying his retirement in Bel-Air. Some presidents make
a great noise but don’t actually get much done: Bill Clinton had the great good
fortune to be president when the first big technology boom was reaching its
height but long before #MeToo. Clinton did not shape events but was carried
forward by them: the post–Cold War restructuring of the global economic and
diplomatic environment, the Internet, the Bosnian War, the ascendance of a new
kind of Republican power in 1994. Clinton was a slacker, but some eminently
capable and experienced men end up accomplishing relatively little as
president: Ulysses Grant was one such, and George H. W. Bush another. James
Garfield, who died from an assassin’s wounds six months into his
administration, had too little time in the office to achieve anything, while
Andrew Jackson had two full terms to prove that he never should have been
elected to the office in the first place.
Prime ministers of the United Kingdom are different from
American presidents in that they occupy a relatively large office — wielding
both executive and legislative power — in a much-less-consequential country.
And so Boris Johnson’s one big thing at home was Brexit, an issue that aside
from being an inspiration to right-wing populist movements around the world was
of little importance outside of the European Union and the United Kingdom,
while his blue-ribbon foreign-policy achievement — getting the Russian war on
Ukraine just right — was of limited practical value. Big fish, small pond.
The differences are significant, but the performance of
the eccentric gentleman representing Uxbridge and South Ruislip (born on the
Upper East Side of Manhattan) as prime minister of the United Kingdom does shed
some light on a subject of urgent and immediate importance to the very
different office of the U.S. presidency: the role of character.
I can hear you rolling your eyes. It’s a kind of squeaky
sound.
Conservatives are a little bit embarrassed by the
word character just now, for obvious reasons. But the
character of both private and public figures, and especially the character of
the president, used to be a very big deal to conservatives. There were some
good books about the character of presidents (Peggy Noonan wrote one) and whole sprawling business
empires built on virtue. In retrospect, it is clear that at least some of us
were not all that serious about that.
But the issue of character is worth
thinking about — not as an abstract philosophical and ethical concern (though
such inquiries are of interest, too) but as a practical issue.
As I have been arguing for some years now, character and all those virtues we
used to talk about are not mere accoutrements to a political career — nice if
you can get them, but not necessary — or issues of concern only to history and
the afterlife. Forget, for our purposes here, the confessional: The character
of elected leaders has immediate practical importance — which begins with their
importance for the workaday concerns of the careers of those leaders.
Boris Johnson was not undone by bad ideas or bad policy,
though he had some bad ideas and bad policies. Neither was he undone by some
unforeseeable shift in public opinion, nor by factional plotting within the
Conservative Party, though that party is famously a nest of vipers. Boris
Johnson was undone mainly by the fact that he is a habitual liar, and to a
lesser degree by the fact that he is lazy and does not seem to actually believe
in much of anything. There is much to like and to admire about Johnson, and it
is not difficult to understand why those who supported him did so with
enthusiasm right up until the moment they stopped. But admirable men have their
defects and deficiencies, too, and sometimes these are more than they can
overcome, as in the case of Johnson.
There is a legend about Boris Johnson (generally treated
as fact) that as the United Kingdom headed for a referendum on leaving the
European Union, he prepared two speeches — one in favor of Brexit and one in
favor of remaining — and waited to see which direction the political winds
would blow, hoping to use the issue to unseat and replace the sitting prime
minister, David Cameron. He managed to get Cameron thrown out but had to sit
through Theresa May’s time as PM before finally getting into the office
himself.
Once he got there, he did his one big thing — taking
Brexit from referendum to reality. And then he didn’t quite know what to do
with himself. He had no interest in fiscal discipline or long-term economic
thinking, which is not entirely out of character for a national leader who —
this is probably the most droll modern English political scandal — skipped out
on important Covid-19 planning meetings because he was in a rush to finish
writing a biography of William Shakespeare in order to raise money to pay for a
divorce then in progress, and who got in trouble for spending £240,000 to
renovate his residence (with 32 meters of silk curtains and a £3,675 bar cart)
with no authorization and no means to pay for it, handing the bill, illegally,
to a sympathetic party donor.
(The Shakespeare biography remains unfinished.)
Johnson’s leadership and his government were
disorganized, chaotic, mercurial, and — in all but that one big thing —
generally ineffective.
As Guardian columnist Martin Kettle puts
it, “Johnson’s Conservatism is highly unusual, a rag-bag of high spending,
government intervention and English nationalism. It has little connection with
the low-tax, small-state, globally liberal Toryism that preceded it and which
the party cast aside when it rushed to embrace Johnson as the answer to its
problems.” Republican heads in the United States should be nodding along with
that.
But it was, finally, the lies that undid Johnson. He lied
about big things and about little things, and he even lied about things that he
didn’t need to lie about, as though he were only keeping in practice,
Clinton-style. The U.K. parliament is unlike our Congress in that it actually
makes some effort to participate in the governance of the country, and, for
that reason, it continues to have a few shreds of institutional self-respect,
which Congress happily gave up long ago. Johnson got away with lying to his
constituents from time to time, just as he had once got away with periodically
lying to his readers in the Telegraph, but Parliament took being
lied to seriously. Johnson was subjected to a humiliating no-confidence vote
that left him wounded and weak enough to be knocked off by the exposure of yet
another lie, in this case about his appointing a political ally accused of
sexual misconduct, Chris Pincher, to a party leadership position with
foreknowledge of the allegations. Johnson probably didn’t really need to lie
about that affair: Pincher already had resigned from Johnson’s government, and
Johnson might as easily have told the truth — that he knew about Pincher’s
behavior, was confident that he would not do it again, and wanted to give him a
second chance. (Assuming that is more or less the truth.) But instead of
sharing a little in the pain and taking responsibility for his own decision, he
tried to insulate himself entirely from the situation.
That was dishonesty, true, but it was also cowardice.
The practical problem with habitual liars such as Boris
Johnson is not that we are offended by their dishonesty (although we should be)
but that they end up being impossible to work with. There aren’t a lot of
contracts and ironclad deals in real-life politics, which is a game of
negotiation and understanding that ultimately is based on trust. That is true
for relations between rival politicians and rival parties, but it also is true
for people who are on the same side and trying to cooperate.
The institutions of the free world run on trust, and
Boris Johnson, in spite of his many excellent qualities, is a man not to be
trusted.
That is a lesson that we Americans would benefit from
learning.
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