The oaf at Number 10 finally gets his comeuppance
Boris Johnson should never have become PM and those who enabled his rise to power must still face their day of truth
For the last three years, Britain’s top rating show has been a comedy featuring a hapless bumbling toff with an unruly head of straw coloured hair who finds himself the country’s Prime Minister.
The main character is a pathological liar, fraud and cheat who was born into privilege and clawed his way to the top of the political tree through a combination of charm, treachery and cunning, fooling his rivals into thinking there was a brain hidden within that oversized head.
But once ensconced at 10 Downing Street, the protagonist, fondly known as Boris, was found to be completely out of his depth.
It has been non-stop entertainment as the PM has reeled from one self-inflicted disaster to another.
But more recently, the audience has grown restless with a script that never seemed to change, and it was clear the writers were building towards a final denouement when the PM was confronted with a series of resignations by dozens of supporting characters who could no longer tolerate his incompetence and dishonesty.
As ratings plummeted, the writers decided to kill off the main character.
And so ‘Boris’ has come to an end, and frankly not a moment too soon.
THE Tuesday morning we left London, the newspaper front pages were all splashing with yet another development in the latest Boris Johnson scandal as it had emerged that the Prime Minister had lied about his knowledge of serial sex pest Chris Pincher’s past demeanours.
Johnson had even joked about Pincher’s habit of sexual harassment (“Pincher by name, pincher by nature,” he reportedly said) but still appointed him Conservative Party Deputy Whip as a reward for his loyalty.
Yet Johnson and his staff had misled Cabinet Ministers about this prior knowledge, resulting in them inadvertently lying in media interviews when they asserted that the PM knew nothing of Pincher’s previous misbehaviour. This was clearly a bridge too far for many of his remaining supporters.
When we landed in Bangkok 11 and a half hours later, it was to news that two of the most senior members of Cabinet, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and Health Minister Savid Javid had both resigned, no longer able to tolerate working under a Prime Minister so blatantly incompetent and untrustworthy.
Hop onto another flight to Sydney and nine hours later we were back on solid earth to learn that another 40 ministers had quit and Johnson had sacked one of the Tory’s most influential MPs (and erstwhile friend), Michael Gove, after he had urged him to do the right thing and resign. At least two other senior Ministers had also counselled Johnson to go.
Johnson’s position seemed beyond untenable, yet, as I began writing this at midday on Thursday in Australia, he still clung onto his job, seemingly driven by some delusion that equated his situation in staring down the avalanche of scandals engulfing him with his hero, Churchill, during Hitler’s Blitz.
From this distance, it seems inexplicable how Johnson still believed he could hang on in the face of such an onslaught. But that reckons without the man’s ego and arrogance. By drawing this out, he was only adding to the shame and humiliation of his fall from grace, yet he seemed oblivious to the damage he was doing both to himself and his party.
But almost at the exact moment we landed in Melbourne shortly before 7pm, my phone buzzed with breaking news that finally he had seen reason and agreed to resign.
Lightweight and fraud
So now he is gone — or going (the exact timing of his departure still in dispute although it seems the majority of his party want him out sooner rather than later) — but by rights, Johnson should have been ousted months ago. Partygate made his hold on office impossible, but it was only the latest in a series of sleazy scandals that began almost immediately upon him succeeding Theresa May three years ago.
It was always going to end this way. Johnson had risen to the top despite himself through a combination of charm and bluster that has obscured his all-too-obvious weaknesses.
He should have never have been given the keys to 10 Downing Street in the first place, being so patently unfit for the role of Prime Minister. And when he got there, he was a hapless buffoon way out of his depth.
Johnson was always a lightweight and a fraud who relied on a limited quota of wit and charisma to manipulate and swindle his way to the top. A pathological liar and cheat, his adult life and career is a trail of wreckage and failure. He was a failed journalist, and now he is a failed politician.
Everyone in the Conservative Party knew this from years of overwhelming evidence of his many, many character flaws: the lies, the affairs, the treachery, the lack of discipline, the contempt for the rules borne from an upbringing of privilege and entitlement, and the flippant approach to his job, no matter the gravity of the situation. He would use humour and a contrived shabbiness as a disguise for his many shortcomings — and for a long time it worked.
All of those flaws were in show when he had shamelessly used Brexit to raise his profile, fanning the fires of the most divisive issue of our lifetime to boost his ascent to power.
His colleagues knew it, yet they turned a blind eye and helped to paper over the cracks because of pure self-interest when it seemed Johnson was their only chance of winning re-election in 2019.
Perhaps they hoped he would change or somehow grow into the job, despite the lack of a shred of proof previously in his life that he was capable of doing so.
A modern tale of hubris and greed
Johnson’s fall from grace is a very modern and contemporary story of ego, vanity and hubris.
Virtually from day one, his government has reeled from one disaster to another, most of them self-inflicted, and Johnson became more and more entangled in his own fabrications. In the end, he had lost the confidence of so many of his own party, but still believed he could carry on with not the B team, but the Z team behind him.
Even in his resignation speech, there was not an ounce of humility or apology. Instead, it was an exercise in triumphalism, self-aggrandisement and blame shifting. He is refusing entreaties to go quickly and quietly, reportedly insisting on staying on through summer so he can hold his COVID-delayed wedding reception at Chequers later this month.
Australians who lived through the revolving door premierships of Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison are all too familiar with this scenario.
But it is with another loser, Donald Trump, that the similarities are strongest.. Three years ago, when Johnson first launched his bid to be PM, I wrote about the dangers of succumbing to the superficially attractive populism of celebrity politicians, so it is no surprise it has finished this way with Johnson shunned by his own party, and Trump facing the real threat of criminal charges for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but eventually they will wisen up.
Johnson and Trump have more in common than a repellent political ideology. For both of them, it has always been about themselves first and foremost, and everything and everyone else a distant second, including the political parties that they supposedly represent.
Their calling card was corruption. Trump was openly corrupt, shamelessly seeking to use the trappings of office to enhance his personal wealth. Johnson’s corruption was less obvious and more subtle, a form of moral rather than financial corruption, but no less damaging.
They now share an unwanted title as the two worst individuals to lead their respective countries in history.
In both cases, they could not have risen to the top without the aid of enablers and sycophants.
Of course, now that Johnson’s fall from grace is a reality, the toadies are thin on the ground as they desperately seek to avoid being mired in the wreckage and tainted by his period in office. The same happened with Trump when Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham deserted him at the last moment, but we all remember how they paved the way for his rise in the first place and their cowardly acquiescence during his reign.
Lessons must be learnt
Both men have left behind no legacy apart from trashing any remaining vestiges of trust in politics and democracy.
Perhaps they have done us a favour by showing how frail our political institutions are in the face of megalomaniacs with a fascistic bent. Perhaps this will lead to new resolve to strengthen our political infrastructure to prevent a recurrence of this type of demagoguery.
You would hope we would learn from this and spurn future right wing populists but with Trump acolyte Ron DeSantis now firming as front runner for the nomination to be the Republican candidate for President in 2024, that seems unlikely.
In the UK, the only possible circuit breaker would be a general election and a new Labour government. But that also seems unlikely as whoever replaces Johnson in the Tory Party will be unwilling to face voters when the polls show Labour now well ahead.
But it is an election, a chance to press reset and to kick out a truly terrible government, that Britain needs more than anything so the Tories who are culpable for inflicting Johnson upon the nation face their day of truth from the voters.
