The fall of Boris Johnson

If you ever doubt the speed or brutality of politics, consider that Boris Johnson resigned just a few weeks ago, and his premiership already feels like a dream. The front pages have shed his policies. His corruption and charisma alike are fading into memory. His unpopularity is now so familiar and entrenched that it is hard to remember the time his party flaunted him like a talisman.

Johnson’s story is both simple and mystifying. At the most basic level, a man endowed with an expensive education and extensive vocabulary deployed enough ambition, humour and charm to convince enough people that their interests aligned with his. Then, when he had grown cocky and complacent and outlived his usefulness – when he had stopped being funny – his sponsors pulled the plug.

But of course there is more to it than the arc of traditional hubris. A man without beliefs or principles, who has spent 30 years in public life parading his narcissism like an imperial gown, somehow presided over Britain’s most ideological period since the height of Margaret Thatcher. That is to say, a man seemingly without politics transformed a nation’s political landscape.

How was an entire country conquered by one man? And what happens to it – to us – once the dream is over?
The story of Johnson’s rise to power is also that of his fall: both resulted entirely from his personality. The inherent flaws that propelled him to the top of the cliff eventually pushed him over it.

For Johnson, public office was about breaking personal records: telling the biggest lie, playing the biggest game, pulling off the biggest con

An after-dinner speaker who concealed his ruthlessness with apparent wit set himself a goal – to become prime minister – and at every stage of his career calculated the steps most likely to take him there. That involved taking risks – backing Brexit, courting nationalists, resigning from Theresa May’s government. In Downing Street, graver, deeper risks followed: unlawfully proroguing parliament, selling out the Democratic Unionists with the Northern Ireland Protocol, lying about the essence of that Protocol during an election campaign entirely predicated on it. When he saw the risks and lies pay off, he embraced more. He dared his party to swallow each new outrage until, eventually, their stomachs were full.

Johnson’s defenestration was strangely predictable from the start. Despite the 80-seat majority after the 2019 election, and his superhuman defiance of political gravity, many of his opponents knew that his premiership would end in disaster. Not even the country’s favourite cartoon character could bound off every cliff and cycle in the air.

The prime minister who led us through the country’s most serious political crisis since the war – Brexit – followed by our most serious domestic emergency – Covid – could not recognise the gravity of either. From “fuck business” to “let the bodies pile high in their thousands”, Johnson substituted words for governance, and chose clever words over good ones. For him, public office was about breaking personal records: telling the biggest lie, playing the biggest game, pulling off the biggest con. This was Greek tragedy played as Carry On film.

In a sense, it didn’t matter that Johnson was powered by contempt. He didn’t like rules, or his colleagues, or a great many voters, and that endeared him to millions of people. Many enjoyed the fact he wasn’t ideological and didn’t take himself seriously. People admired the performance of a man who could transition from 1990s authoritarian, mocking single mothers and gay men, to inclusive liberal running the country’s left-wing capital, to Europhobic nationalist simultaneously promoting tighter borders and freer trade. This was, after all, a performance, and Johnson is a gifted actor. Even as his government leapt upon the culture wars, stifled the right to protest and right to claim asylum, forced ID cards on future voters and neutered the bodies checking his executive power, the myth prevailed that Johnson was somehow a devotee of personal liberty. The English are taught to defer to Etonians but can just as easily enjoy danger. Johnson offered just the right amount of rebellious nihilism, lying and winking at the same time.

Of course Johnson was popular: he always had been. Ever since those early days presenting Have I Got News For You, carefully tousling his hair and spluttering like a Ford Cortina, he merged the knowing mischief of Just William with the explosive chaos of PG Wodehouse. He asked people to love him and they agreed to.

It was not, of course, only about the public. It was also about the Conservative party. They too agreed to love him, but on one condition: that he knew how to win. Johnson advertised neither principle nor aptitude, just the ability to enthuse voters. When that deserted him, he lost his only attribute and had nothing with which to replace it. Then he was worthless.

The extraordinary thing is that his policies and style of governing played such little role in alienating either his party or the public. Until October 2021, opinion polls suggested, if not widespread satisfaction or popularity, enough support to win a general election. And yet those policies were grotesque. Johnson had unlawfully suspended parliament, pursued the most economically damaging version of Brexit available to him short of crashing out with no deal, and launched a sustained class war against the poorest voters, refusing to provide free school meals in the holidays until shamed into a U-turn and reversing the weekly £20 increase in Universal Credit. Despite the repeated boasts about Europe’s fastest vaccine rollout, he had presided over one of the world’s worst Covid death tolls and toughest lockdowns. His failure to heed early warnings about the pandemic, protect care homes or provide adequate equipment to medical staff likely caused tens of thousands of deaths.

And yet none of it seemed to matter. No policy seemed too extreme or grotesque for his backbenchers. In the end, it was that other most purportedly-English of values: fair play. The Owen Paterson affair last November appeared, at first, a pedestrian outrage for the prime minister. One of his friends was in political danger, so he would destroy the body threatening it. It was a tactic he had deployed multiple times in his career, but this time he misjudged the reaction. Whereas other scandals had failed to ignite the public imagination – Johnson’s failure to declare a loan for his flat refurbishment, the conflict of interest arising from his alleged affair with Jennifer Arcuri, the VIP lanes given to Tory donors supplying services during the pandemic – this one “cut through”. He never recovered.

The much more serious scandal that followed, Partygate, gave his premiership the defining puncture. Finally, the dismissal of Chris Pincher’s alleged background of sexual misconduct, with the subsequent attempt to cover it up, delivered the coup de grace. Johnson showed not only that he ignored rules, but that he went out of his way to defy them. Voters, for their part, had long shown that they could take a joke – but not, in the end, when it was so unilaterally directed at them.

Is he really gone forever? Johnson has never believed in his professional mortality and seems unlikely to convert now. And yet the truth is Johnson is not, and never has been, as powerful as either he or many of his enemies believe. The game is over. In the end, his party rejected him not for moral reasons but electoral ones. Voters, in their conclusive judgement, detest him. There is nothing to suggest they will change their minds.

What, then, does Johnson bequeath us? After three years of chaos, stress-testing the constitution to its limit, it seems unlikely that either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak will govern with the same flagrant disregard for probity or democratic norms. And despite Johnson’s personal and political resemblance to Donald Trump – his ego, lack of seriousness and exploitation of people’s worst instincts and fears – they have strongly diverged in their downfall. Allegiance to Trump’s cult and mythos is now a precondition for advancement in the Republican Party. By contrast, the Conservatives have abandoned Johnson almost entirely.

And yet Johnson’s legacy seems plain enough. His successor will retain the policies even if they change the style. It is not simply the cost of living crisis he did almost nothing to alleviate, or the plan for “levelling up” existing in slogans alone. Not just the possible future fragmentation of the UK, a direct result of his contempt both for Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is as the definitive architect of Britain’s new economic, political, social and moral decline. From the international illegality of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill to the inhuman policy of deporting refugees to Rwanda, Johnson has normalised cruelty and trampled respect for the law. In his signature policy, the pursuit of any Brexit at any cost, he has vitiated truth as the basic currency of political discourse. The man may soon pass through our memory. The legacy may never.

Jonathan Lis is a political journalist and commentator. He has written for publications including the Guardian, Prospect and Washington Post, and regularly broadcasts on television and radio