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Created: Jun 14, 2023 07:59 AM
Boris Johnson arrives for a press conference at Vote Leave headquarters in London. He was the mayor who revelled in the glory of hosting the 2012 London Olympics, and the man who led the Conservatives to a whopping election victory on the back of his mission to “get Brexit done”. But his time as prime minister was marred by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and a steady stream of ethics allegations (File photograph by Mary Turner/Pool/AP)
Boris Johnson once claimed that he was leaving journalism for politics because no one erects statues to journalists. He is now leaving politics for journalism again, or at least for a life of writing and speechifying, but the country is no more likely to erect a statue to him than it is to Liz Truss.
The British establishment hates Johnson as intensely as it has hated anyone since Oswald Mosley. Rishi Sunak’s Tory Party hopes vainly that the former prime minister will ride into the sunset. Sunak returned from his bilateral meeting with Joe Biden — a British PM’s idea of heaven — only to find his predecessor yet again seizing the headlines. The first part of Friday was spent talking about Johnson’s scandalous honours list, which awarded peerages and knighthoods to gargoyles and cronies. Then in the evening, politics went into meltdown when he released a bitter jeremiad saying that he is standing down as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip with immediate effect.
The Tory Party now faces more nightmares: three by-elections that it is likely to lose (two Boris “ultras”, Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams, also resigned in sympathy); fevered speculation about Johnson’s plans to get revenge on Sunak (his resignation letter accused the PM of betraying the Brexit legacy); and a renewed debate about Britain’s soiled honours system. This at a time when the Tories are trailing Labour by double digits in the opinion polls, when the Conservative Party’s pet newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, is being put up for sale, and when the country is racked by strikes and slow growth!
What are we to make of the man who resigned in such a huff on Friday? However much you loathe Johnson, it is important to recognise that he was one of the most consequential politicians of the postwar era. Britain would never have left the European Union had it not been for Johnson’s charisma and ambition. Before he threw his weight behind Vote Leave, “Brexit” had been the cause of Tory obsessives such as Bill Cash and angry populists such as Nigel Farage. Between them, the obsessives and the populists had no chance of mobilising more than a third of the population.
Johnson knew how to speak to the broad mass of the British people. It is easy to forget, given his present unpopularity, that he was a popular Mayor of London — Britain’s most progressive and multicultural city — as well as a consummate public performer. He was also widely regarded in Tory circles as the coming man. His decision to back “Leave” transformed Brexit in Tory circles from the cause of the old bores, where Cameron believed he had consigned it, to the passion of the Young Turks. Britain’s establishment hates him with a cold fury: if Margaret Thatcher destroyed the postwar Keynesian consensus, Boris Johnson destroyed the Europhile consensus.
Yet Johnson is also one of the most insubstantial historical figures in the annals. A colossus not so much with feet of clay but with nothing behind the façade. Britain’s entry into the EU was the result of years of preparation. Its architect — Johnson’s fellow Balliol man Edward Heath — thought deeply about what joining meant. Johnson looked shell-shocked when the referendum result was announced on the morning of June 24, 2016. He had no idea what to do with it.
The Brexiteers were sharply divided between protectionists, who wanted to put up barriers to a globalised world, and free-traders, who wanted to get rid of all trade barriers. Johnson tried to please both sides — he would negotiate free-trade deals with everyone and build 40 new hospitals all in the blink of an eye — and ended up achieving nothing.
How did such an insubstantial figure rise to the top of British politics? Johnson was perhaps the first all-celebrity politician. All successful elected officials have a taste for theatrics. But Boris was a celebrity pure and simple.
From his school days at Eton, he turned himself into a brand — a P.G. Wodehouse character who hid himself behind a mask of bumbling incompetence. He attracted public attention by writing amusing columns in The Daily Telegraph and appearing on popular television satires such as Have I Got News for You. He didn’t do any of the regular spadework of politics — running government departments, cultivating allies, making consequential parliamentary speeches — because his currency was celebrity rather than achievement. Even his time as Mayor of London was something of an illusion because he got everyone else to do the hard work while he marched in parades and took the credit.
Johnson was also extraordinary in his lack of ideological commitments. The Conservative Party is famously a pragmatic party that is all about holding power rather than pushing through a set of ideas. But Johnson took this ideological flexibility to extremes. He is a chameleon who not only shape-shifted over the years — he was a liberal Mayor of London who once appeared in a gay pride march wearing a pink Stetson before he became a fire-breathing populist — but also reflects the opinions of anyone he is talking to. This is a bad recipe for government at the best of times — to govern is to choose. It is particularly bad at a time when you are trying to shape a new governing consensus in the wake of a shock such as Brexit.
There is a tragic element to Johnson’s fall. The former MP’s greatest aim in life is to be loved by everyone. If he wanted to be king of the world from the nursery onward, as family lore says, he wanted to be king by popular acclamation rather than coup. His desire for universal acclaim was particularly powerful when it came to the liberal establishment. While he was foreign secretary, Johnson was invited by his uncle, Edmund Fawcett, the author of a first-class book on liberalism, to address a salon attended by leading journalists, academics and other worthies. Johnson presented a good-faith defence of Brexit, as if the force of his argument and eloquence would convert the heathen, and seemed taken aback by the hostility of the reaction. Donald Trump clearly relishes the contempt of the liberal elite. Johnson is hurt by it.
Yet it is hard to feel sorry for the clown. Johnson has spent his life using people only to discard them — women obviously (he has two ex-wives and a string of former mistresses), but also colleagues in journalism and politics. The striking thing about the Conservative Party’s reaction to his resignation is how few MPs have come forward to support him. For Johnson, loyalty has always been a one-way deal.
The man who wants to be loved by everyone has also acquired a harder edge in recent years. His resignation statement is dipped in bitterness and bile. He has morphed from a popular celebrity into “Britain Trump”, in the strange phraseology of the 45th president. He has learnt to accept that his political career is now bound up with division and demonisation. His dream of a post-Brexit healing, with the Remainers repenting of their foolish ways and the Tory party consolidating its hold over the North, has evaporated. Brexit has made the country poorer, and the North is returning to a reviving Labour Party.
Johnson now faces a harsh choice as he approaches his 59th birthday. Either retire from politics with nothing to show for his long career: no enduring political realignment, no band of disciplined followers, no successful renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe. Or return to politics by the only way that remains to him: overturning the establishment once again by whipping up popular resentment — destroy because you cannot create. Given what we know of Johnson, the second is the most likely option.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author, most recently, of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
• Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author, most recently, of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
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