Tuesday, July 12, 2022

The Fault in Our Boris

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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