The Debatable Land #24: Things Fall Apart

Shed no tears for Boris Johnson and none for the Tory party either. They knew what they were doing and they did it anyway.

An unbecoming end

A resignation speech is an easy one to give. Even those folk mightily pleased to see you gone are willing to make some allowances for the circumstances in which the resignation address is given. The requirements for a successful farewell are not exacting: show some humility, a little knowing humour, a nod to history and the great responsibilities of office, and, perhaps above all, depart with a certain stoic grace.

These are by definition moments of failure but also of reckoning. They offer a kind of catharsis, a collective exhalation of breath and a gathering sense that, however much they may have failed in office, departing ministers - and especially departing prime ministers - have at least done their utmost to rise to the challenges of the role they have held. Gordon Brown and David Cameron and Theresa May each passed this test. Boris Johnson, alone amongst recent prime ministers, spectacularly failed it today.

It was all so beastly and so unfair. He had been forced out by “the herd”; his useless colleagues lacked the stomach for the fight; shamefully, his “mandate” was considered dispensable; the whole thing was bloody unnecessary and “eccentric”; considered properly he was the victim here. Even his pro forma thank yous were laced with bitterness: the police, he noted, were the only people who never “leak”. Snakes everywhere; a titan laid low by pygmies.

There was no hint of self-reflection, no sense that Johnson might have in some way contributed to his own demise, no cleansing moment of catharsis. No, the prime minister wasn’t going to give his foes - who by now number most of his parliamentary colleagues - the satisfaction of that. It was a small and small-minded performance. Had the last few days been different, it might have been possible to feel some pang of pity - or at least empathy - for Johnson but his own delusions, his own swaggering sense of his own greatness, squeezed out any space that might ordinarily have been saved for that kind of humanity. He remains big; it is politics which has got small.

He would, of course, support his successor - whomever they may be - “the best I can”. They cannot say they have not been warned.

GUBU-GB

In the summer of 1982, an Irishman named Malcolm MacArthur murdered two people and, following a nationwide search was discovered to be living, temporarily, with the Irish Attorney General, Patrick Connolly, with whom MacArthur was acquainted. This unusual conclusion to a murder hunt prompted Charlie Haughey, then enjoying his second spell as Taoiseach, to describe the entire grisly affair in these terms: “It was a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance.” This verdict was then appropriated by the columnist Conor Cruise O’Brien, who dubbed the affair GUBU, and broadened it to include and encompass the entire range of scandals - which included the illegal tapping of journalists’ phones - bedevilling Haughey’s short-lived government.

Well, GUBU - Grotesque, Unprecedented, Bizarre, Unbelievable - serves as a pretty decent summation of Johnson’s final demise after three hapless, haphazard, hopeless, years in office. The final hours had a Wagnerian quality to them if, that is, you may imagine Wagner rewritten as farce. Götterdämmerung is not normally this jaw-dropping - or this amusing.

Even this morning, word was the prime minister still believed he could survive. Against all the evidence, he clung to the Ceaucescu-like delusion the people remained with him and for so long as he could carry the people, his colleagues could be bashed into submission. But the people left the building long ago and the parliamentary Conservative party - and then the cabinet - was following the public mood, not anticipating it.

Still: hark at all of this. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nadhim Zahawi, accepts the job on Tuesday and calls for the prime minister to resign on Wednesday. The Attorney General, Suella Braverman, suggests the prime minister should resign and then announces her intention to replace him while insisting she can remain in the cabinet despite everything else. Michael Gove is sacked for reasons of “disloyalty” which, coming from Boris Johnson, lies on the laughable side of cheek. (Disloyalty here should be understood as "Telling the Truth”.) People even professional observers of the political scene had never heard of were resigning from positions no-one knew existed (Trade envoy to Morocco!). Government business in the Commons was cancelled because there weren’t enough ministers to represent the government in the House. The new education secretary held her post for 36 hours.

One could go on but, really, is there any need to? Grotesque. Unprecedented. Bizarre. Unbelievable. All of that and all of it simultaneously; a meltdown of a kind none of us have previously experienced and which will take some time to process.

The Arc of Justice Bends

But it was a merited disintegration. Make no mistake about that. The Pincher scandal was merely the confirmatory straw; a deceit too far and too much for even iron-stomached Tory MPs to swallow. The root causes of Johnson’s demise stretch much further back.

Partygate was the moment the end became certain. This was something worse than a mere scandal for it was a breach of faith and trust. It broke the relationship between the government and the people, for it revealed - on ghastly, pitiless, detail - the fundamental reality of the situation in which the British people found themselves. The prime minister - and too many of those close to him - did not consider themselves bound by the rules they imposed upon the rest of the country. No matter how much you might try to make allowances, Johnson’s casual deceits were too much for even the charitably-minded. First there were no parties or social events and if there were the prime minister was furious about them; then there were but the prime minister was neither present nor involved; then he was but these were magically reinterpreted as “work events” and, in such a fashion, within the pale of acceptable behaviour; then it was actually necessary for the prime minister to attend such events; he had done no wrong and, indeed, he would do it all again.

Had the pandemic occurred at a happier moment in the nation’s political history it might have been more easily borne. But it did not. Brexit divided the country in two and if ardent Remainers overplayed a weak hand - not least in thirsting for the impossible dream of a second referendum - the primary fault still lies with those who sold Brexit in impossible terms while making no attempt whatsoever to bring reasonably-minded sceptics with them. Johnson and those of his ilk crippled Theresa May’s premiership, sold themselves as the only people who could “Get Brexit Done” and then reneged on details of the “oven ready” deal they themselves negotiated. The sense they were “at it” was inescapable and, worse than this, it seemed they didn’t care a damn. A politics of tiresome posing ensued; never mind the detail, feel the attitude.

And to what end? Precious little, save winning headlines, “owning the libs” and asserting entitlement. Countless folk wasted many hours searching for this government’s meaning, failing to recognise that beyond its own survival there was no coherent philosophy or meaning or purpose to be discovered. It was a government of being, not doing.

That was consistent with the long-suspected possibility that whereas Johnson spent many years looking forward to being prime minister and will enjoy many more of having been prime minister the actual business of doing the job was less attractive than he’d imagined it would be. Granted, they all tire of questions in the end - look at Nicola Sturgeon’s imperial phase - but it usually takes them some time. With Johnson it was almost immediate.

Beware the Rewriting of History

We may expect history to be revised very quickly. Indeed it is already happening. To wit (or rather, to twit):

Unaccountably, Hannan forgets to include “And he gave me a peerage”. An oversight, doubtless.

“Incapable of malice” is a common refrain amongst Johnson’s supporters and an extraordinary one. Even if we ignore the long trail of wives and mistresses discarded as soon as they ceased to be useful or interesting - or, in at least one instance, once they cruelly decided Johnson could no longer be put up with - even a casual glance at Johnson’s biography is sufficient to convict him of malice aplenty. There was, after all, the time he conspired - or appeared to conspire - with a friend to have an impertinent journalist beaten up.

Still, among the first things Johnson did as prime minister was recast the Tory party in his image. One Nation sceptics were not so much eased out as brutally jettisoned. It was Boris’s way or no way at all. You could build a better cabinet from those Johnson effectively expelled - Clarke, Grieve, Hammond, Stewart et al - than from those he kept. Like many superficially strong moves this one actually revealed an essential weakness - and a smallness - at the core of Johnson’s government. It was a purge and these are rarely conducted without malice. No amount of smiling or joshing or buffoonery may disguise that.

Johnson didn’t throw it all away because he didn’t have it in the first place.

What was the point?

This is a gloomy question but Johnson’s government did not end with a melancholy sense of squandered promise. It was, typically, all style and no substance. No surprise, really, since this has been Johnson’s operational default his entire career. The heavy lifting has been done by other people. At The Spectator, for instance, almost all the work of actually editing the magazine was done by Johnson’s long-suffering deputy, Stuart Reid. Johnson was a figurehead editor and while a weekly magazine may cope with that, running the country needs just a little more commitment.

(As a columnist, meanwhile, it would be ungenerous to deny that Johnson had talent in a show-boating sense but his copy, colourful as it might be and entertaining to some, nonetheless had a curiously weightless quality to it. Yes, fine, but what’s the real point of it? And for all that folk liked to use the term “Wodehousian” in connection with Boris the journalist, there was one vital difference: Wodehouse would throw out a joke if it interrupted or got in the way of the plot. Johnson, by contrast, could never resist the gag, even at the cost of undermining all else. The gag, in fact, was the point. I do not mean this unkindly: newspapers are by their nature ephemeral, but it is wise to at least be aware of their limitations. One other small, but revealing, note: Johnson was notorious for filing his copy late, no matter how much this might inconvenience other, rather less well-paid, people. Just Boris being Boris, of course, but other people had to cope with or clear up the mess.)

Of course they knew

Tory MPs knew what they were getting which is why so many of them had previously been so reluctant to hand Johnson the keys to Downing Street. So why did they do it? In part, of course, because they were desperate. Spooked on the one hand by Jeremy Corbyn’s better-than-expected election result in 2017 and by the grinding miseries of trying - but failing - to Get Brexit Done. That this latter was, at least in part, made more difficult by Johnson’s own actions and ambitions was deemed not quite the point.

But they knew he was not likely to be a good or effective prime minister and they voted for him anyway. It is a bit late to be choked with remorse about this now. So spare us these self-pitying resignation letters, stuffed with the suggestion It Could All Have Been So Very Different.

For it was baked-in - all of it - from the very beginning. A prime minister incapable of doing detail is a prime minister utterly ill-equipped for the post they hold. Johnson’s graveyard appearance before the Liason committee yesterday - it was only yesterday! - confirmed, once again, he was utterly, cluelessly, out of his depth. All he had to offer was waffling generalisation. Why should he be expected to know this stuff? What is the bloody point of being prime minister if you must immerse yourself in numbing detail? The truth is that Boris Johnson found the actual job of being prime minister both boring and beneath him.

Tory MPs - or at lest a sufficient number of them - persuaded themselves otherwise. How? And why?

The Mental Reservation

Of all the horrors made public during the years of the Irish clerical abuse scandal, not the least of these was the slow, painful, unavoidable, realisation that senior figures with the catholic church’s hierarchy not only knew about the activities of their “rogue” priests but wilfully and willingly shielded them from discovery. The reputation of the institution was more important than justice for the victims and their families. The church knew but it contrived to pretend it did not.

It did this by creating a special category of thought. A bishop might attach a “mental reservation” to the character and conduct of a given priest. They would know about it and, knowing the truth, they would not be required to repeat that truth to anyone else. It is a way, in practice, of lying - or at least of misleading people - without being forced to admit you are lying.

There is, of course, something of this in politics too and there are times when the perceived risks of the truth are greater than the dangers of an untruth. In the end, however, these become self-serving excuses.

Such was the case with Boris Johnson. Many Tory MPs knew the truth about him but lied to themselves - and then to others - about the man they chose to be their leader. By such means could some vestige of their own dignity - or their evaluation of that dignity - be preserved. They both knew and did not know simultaneously.

Hence the pitiful and recurring spectacle of MPs suggesting that all Downing Street needed was a new set of advisors, a new chief of staff, a keener sense of direction and grip, and all would be fine. All of which was just a means of disguising the fatal truth: the prime minister was not up to the job and the people who put him there knew it.

What next?

The idea Johnson can remain in post until the autumn is plainly preposterous. The late Alan Clarke was fond of noting that “Anything can happen at backgammon” and this is Johnson’s approach to life too. Something might miraculously turn up to salvage his position; events elsewhere might offer him a stay of execution. Stranger, weirder, things have happened.

In its bones the Tory party appreciates this, hence the speed at which a new leadership contest is being organised on an accelerated timetable. New rules will be put in place, the better to have the task at least half-completed by the end of the month.

But there are problems. In the first place, few of the available candidates are obviously compelling. The Johnsonians have no interest in making life easy for anyone else. The Blue-on-Blue action has already begun (according to Jacob Ress-Mogg, Rishi Sunak “was not a good chancellor; he was a high-tax chancellor). The case against each of them is more easily summarised than the case for them.

The Runners

Rishi Sunak - mistrusted by much of the parliamentary party; career disconcertingly reminiscent of Icarus. What is his second act?

Liz Truss - could win amongst the party membership and so is mistrusted by her colleagues because of that popularity, not in spite of it.

Sajid Javid - more experience than most but a charisma-free-zone.

Ben Wallace - an obvious, safe-hands, possibility but untested outside his defence comfort zone. And does he even really want it?

Penny Mordaunt - a clean skin, of sorts, but who does she really represent? Largely unknown.

Jeremy Hunt - hated by Team Johnson and not obviously loved or even demanded by the public either.

Nadhim Zahawi - less plausible than he was before he became chancellor. Also largely unknown.

Tom Tugendhat - has only been an MP for seven years and has never served in government. Intelligent, but a novice.

Suella Braverman - a bona fide lunatic.

Steve Baker - Come off it.

This is not a field to lift the spirits and it does not help that a truncated contest - however necessary the circumstances make it - will make it harder, not easier, to have the kinds of conversations the Conservative party rather badly needs to have.

There is no need to feel too sorry for the Tories, however. This is not just a mess of their own making, it was one wholly predictable - and predicted - from the moment the party made the choices it did. In that respect it is an earned disaster and one from which recovery should really take place on the opposition benches.

Someone must run the government however and while this has been a ghastly and chaotic week there remains some consolation to be drawn from the fact that Boris Johnson will no longer be entrusted with a job he was manifestly unfit to hold.

Repairing norms and standards and trust in British politics will be among the next prime minister’s most urgent tasks. Johnson was not a British Trump - he was much closer to being a British Berlusconi - but the wounds he has left will require plenty of attention before they can be healed. If that means choosing a prime minister who puts the national interest ahead of the Conservative party’s interest - a prime minister, then, who may appreciate the distinction between these things - then so be it.