The Final Act- The Inglorious Denouement of Boris Johnson
We don't yet know how it will end, but like all performances, it must. Comedy or tragedy? That's a matter or perspective and philosophy...
The entire political career of Boris Johnson has been one of performance, a great show. In his mind, as an adherent of the Great Man theory of history he no doubt sees it as a grand biopic, a deep examination of the life and decisions of someone who the long arc of history will vindicate as a thrusting (and I use the term advisedly) and visionary leader who fundamentally changed the country, and the world, for the better. His grandiose ideas and eye permanently on his personal fortunes can leave us in no doubt of that.
Whilst this cannot yet be a historical assessment (anything under thirty years ago is politics, not history and we’re still in the Johnsonian era) stepping back and looking at it from an external perspective, rather than his, it is difficult not to see it instead as two other forms of theatrical art. His political career bears all the markings of a Greek play, though whether comedy or tragedy I think is a matter of both perspective and the observer’s philosophical position. But at its heart and he would no doubt be flattered by this as it’s what he has pursued from the start, is the man himself, the combination of anti-Byronic hero and music-hall clown that is our Prime Minister.
I have had it in the back of my mind for a while that one of the items on my ever-growing list of ‘things I want to write, when I find a free moment’ is a play about the subject. The facts of the situation have everything to produce a sweeping operatic tale with laughter and tears, betrayal and more betrayal, hubris meeting the nemesis of reality, and the destruction of institutions through carelessness, obsession, and sheer unadulterated vanity.
The play has a ready-made three-act structure. It begins with the proto-political career, opening perhaps with the infamous Have I Got News for You appearance which though I tend to think is rather overblown and criticised in a very deterministic manner undeniably was the thing that brought him into the wider public view. His initial Parliamentary career as MP for Henley is unfortunately relatively boring, though it does serve well as a preview of the flaws and foibles for which he has later become both reviled and loved- they’re all already there in embryonic form, the lack of self-awareness and substance, the attempts to handle too many things that even a highly competent person would not be able to do, it’s all in there, and a wonderful thing to trace the evolution of over the course of the play. We shall skip through it relatively quickly however for fear or losing our audience with inanity.
We then move to his career as Mayor of London, the stage where he would first come to the wider world’s attention whiff-whaffing his way through bendy buses and bicycle, culminating in the grandest stage of all, the 2012 Olympics. We will not suspend him on a wire over the audience, to do so would be vulgar and far too pantomimic for this particular examination, instead we shall watch him basking in the adulation of the world, sipping the ambrosia of perhaps the greatest moment of the post-90s consensus, enjoying his moment in the spotlight. He must enjoy it whilst he can- his path will soon change, and the moment will be swept away within a few years on the ever-shifting tides of fate.
The first act ends as is appropriate, with a decision. Two letters. You know to what I refer. For the second act will be one of Brexit. He picks his side, and goes on to continue the quixotic campaign he started as a columnist, decrying the ills of the European Union. Here Johnson is at the peak of his pride, powering through on buses and in full rumbustious campaigning mode. When the campaign is concluded, intangible independence declared and Theresa May takes over as PM, we’ll see Boris at the heart of a maelstrom of indecision and political opportunism, slyly smiling as May’s weakness is exposed, taken advantage of and ultimately becomes fatal. And then, we come to the finale… ah! The finale…
The final act is everything post-the first speech on the steps of Downing Street. 2019 to now. The abortive prorogation and the legal slap-down, the cobbled-together (and quite brilliant doncha’ know) Brexit deal and Northern Ireland Protocol, all of it, all the way through to more recent times, to the deal that turns out to need changing right away, through the lies and foolishness of Covid, and into partygate, corruption and the Gibbon-esque ‘and fall’ of the mos maiorum of public life and office in the UK. At the same time as Boris is on stage bloviating and blustering through this denouement, a second Boris will lie stage left, lying wounded under insipid stage lights, all the while crying piteously out that he is Ozymandias, when in reality he isn’t even Ahkenaten.
It will be an appropriately histrionic way to end it, though it perhaps possesses significantly more subtlety than the subject matter deserves- but then what wouldn’t? As a man of the classics, the Prime Minister might be expected to appreciate the narrative, though like many Tory MPs of a certain mien, I suspect he deploys classical quotations as an attempt to make himself sound noble and knowledgeable, rather than through any actual understanding of what he speaks. It would certainly explain why some of them come across as little more than bizarre non sequiturs.
A less self-deluding man might now conclude that having won a vote of no-confidence by his own MPs by a margin narrow enough that it means that he no longer has the personal confidence of the House as a whole (even if the Government does), despite a huge majority, his time is rapidly approaching an end by hook or by crook. For Boris however, this is beyond his meagre abilities. Instead, he will persist in pretending that he still has the strength to continue through the next election and beyond, convinced that something will happen to change the public’s now overwhelmingly poor view of him, and help him reclaim the old magic.
It is a fool’s hope. There is no great triumph round the corner. Only a cost-of-living crisis, and a Government that has no new ideas, nor the wit to know where to find them. The truth is he leads a zombie government, lurching from artificially confected culture war issue, to artificially confect culture war issue. It’s not even worth distinguishing between them at this point. This week it’s refugees and the increasingly near-annual proposals to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. The time really does come round earlier every year. But a Government that creates policy with the primary intent of stirring up opposition anger, rather than to make good policy, is playing a dangerous game for both the public and itself, particularly in times such as this.
Whilst his MPs may not immediately vote to stop it, there are now enough of them who are discontent to cause as much trouble as they like until he is gone. The opposition must manage this carefully to capitalise on the discord (and not, as the Lib Dems foolishly did last week, call pointless votes of no confidence in Parliament). Few are likely to drink the kool aid, to borrow a term from our transatlantic cousins, and decide that actually that Boris bloke is alright and it was all a big mistake.
I don’t know yet how it will all end. My guess is that after at least one more by-election defeat (quite possibly two), a failed attempt to reset a government programme, the failure of six or seven more policies, and an anticlimactic party conference in the Autumn, the 1922 Committee will allow for a rule change and permit a second vote of no-confidence. Given how many job offers seem to have flown around to buy safety from the first one (not all of which can actually be realistically fulfilled), it will be more difficult to shore up support a second time and continue in office
His attempts to pretend otherwise are increasingly ringing more and more hollow. His mouthpieces have been reduced to constant choruses of ‘getting the big calls right’, without any evidence of how this is in any way true. They have even, in a truly repulsive display of immorality and lost standards been using the tragedy of the Ukraine invasion as a nakedly political reason for him to stay, despite the fact that almost any of our politicians would have provided a similar degree of support. This I find one of the most offensive and tragically predictable elements of the whole sorry saga. The thing that perhaps renders this Government most worthy of contempt.
No, it is time for Boris Johnson to look to his legacy. He will attempt to prove, though lord knows how given where we are, that he has risen to meet his obligations as a foetal Great Man, and he can claim his place alongside his hero Churchill as a saviour figure. It will no doubt not have passed him by that Churchill was also a controversial figure, though he is never likely to understand the core differences between them and the reasons that Churchill is both admired and controversial, whereas he himself is likely to find himself ever in the middle-low ranks of ‘Best UK Prime Minister’ tables, being spoken about in underwhelmed or contemptuous tones by talking-head historians.
He has, in my view, failed almost every test that has been presented to him. He failed on Brexit by taking the most divisive and troubling route, a route which has led to multiple threats to break international law, and pandering to the worst and most thoughtless elements of his own party. He failed on Covid by indecision and enabling a culture that has left public faith in Government and public office broken and perverted. And where he might finally have claimed some sort of success with support to Ukraine, he has corrupted that by capitalising on the tragedy of others, a tragedy he will never experience, to save his own skin.
The ultimate consequences of this may reach beyond him personally. Even were he to resign now, it may be too late to save the party from disappointment at the next election. It’d be a challenge (albeit a not insurmountable one) for a new leader to undertake a full reset and disassociate themselves from the sins of the past. Doubly so for any potential leader who served in the cabinet, and will have to explain how they could let everything happen the way that it has. It has been mooted that even if he lost a 1922 vote of no confidence, Boris might not step down, instead attempting to call a general election, to bind his fate to that of the party, and hope that his old charm can cut through the cynical population.
This would be a problem, a big one, as it might force the determination of who actually has the right to request the Queen to exercise the Royal Prerogative and call a general election. It’s always been traditionally the Government, through the person of the Prime Minister- but would this apply if the Prime Minister personally clearly no longer had the confidence of the House of Commons? That argument could be made now, in light of last Monday’s vote, that the PM personally no longer has the confidence of the House (428 members out of 650 have declared no confidence in the PM either by way of the VONC or by being members of opposition parties), whilst the Government collectively does. What complicates this even further is that the legislation that repealed the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 and attempted to reimpose the previous system of calling elections also purports to oust the court’s jurisdiction to consider such things.
Constitutional issue notwithstanding, the Conservative party itself might be approaching a perfect storm of problems. Not only are they starting to show all the signs of ‘being in power too long’ syndrome but they have lost a lot of the credible top-level talent that could provide them with the intellectual basis for a proper party reset. In this they are blessed that the Corbyn-years had a similar effect on the Labour Party, though the fact that for many of the more intellectual Labourites it was an involuntary exile, whereas it became practically a party policy for the Conservatives is likely to return to bite them.
Whilst there are still a few independently minded Conservatives, too many now do not have the mental bona fides to form a proper idea base for a new way. Many of the 2019 bunch were brought on for their loyalties to Brexit, rather than any capacity to do the job, a statement which goes doubly for the Cabinet, who must be one of the most sorry and incapable Governments for a century at least. Culture wars (on which I will be writing more in the not-too-distant future), whilst they are meat to the modern party-base do not form an adequate basis for policy that solves the problems of the general public, and with those problems ever-growing it will not be long until the public notices.
When they do, the Government will no doubt scout around for someone to blame, but the list of plausible candidates is not nearly as long as it used to be. The EU is now useful for only the issues directly connected to it, and even then less so as the general population come to terms with what being a third party really means. This week’s whipping boy, the ECHR, is less useful as the public tend to still lump it in with the EU. The old favourite, Labour, becomes less and less plausible with each month now that the Tories have been in power for approaching a decade and a half.
But they have also, in their inaction, betrayed the values that they once held to be core principles. The party that still claims to be that of law and order now routinely threatens to break the law. International law, certainly, but despite intimations that this is somehow less important than our law, it is this law that shapes the views of other states. The leader of the party is a law breaker, and rules have been rewritten to make transgressions of law and the public morals less important. Not only have they broken the legalism principle, but they also regularly flout constitutional ones. It appears to be the view of much of the modern Conservative party that we have a presidential system, and not a parliamentary one, where the public’s trust (as demonstrated in general elections) is vested in the Prime Minister personally, rather than in the Government as a whole. The courts and the justice system are regularly slandered when they dare to act independent of the Government as they should. The media suffers the same thing.
It might be argued that the public as a whole doesn’t care too much about these things, but I would aver that actually, to the average voter, they do matter. But this Government has sufficiently backed itself into a corner that they can now only rely on their own core voters, so it is them they try to appease. Gone are the Cameronian attempts to broaden the appeal beyond the core, a core which has now immutably changed. Now, the core is all that matters, as they are the ones that cheer the loudest, and can stand the erosion of the norms of public life.
Come an election though, it is not the core that matter. They’ll vote for you anyway. More is still in play at the next election than it should be, because despite Keir Starmer’s excellent job of repairing the reputation of the Labour party, their policy programme remains somewhat vague and uninspiring, but were they to seize the moment and start thinking seriously about how they’re going to win, the Government should be worried. A few new policy ideas that could win over the floating voters, in seats where majorities are small, and a listless, idealess Government like this one could suffer a colossal defeat, especially with the Lib Dem’s sweeping up the older school centrist Tories who still remember when things like ‘morality’ and ‘respect for office’ were not just hollow words to spout to save a man who ill-deserves it.
I fear though that the election will be beyond the scope of our grand performance, because by then we will have seen potentially another year and a half of shuffling, inert government. So how then might we end our play? I think we’ll need a little more time after the first vote of no confidence to truly enjoy nemesis, so maybe a second? I don’t really want to keep it going until he actually resigns, that would be far too neat an ending for my liking. As I write, Lord Geidt, Boris Johnson’s second Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, charged with upholding the ministerial code and standards in Government, has just submitted his resignation, after a grilling by the Public Administration and Constitution Committee the day before which once again exposed the fact that only the PM can determine if there is to be any punishment if standards are breached. Perhaps that might be a good point to end it. Just another in the death by a thousand cuts.