As his government hangs from its cuff links, the tale of Prime Minister Boris Johnson has become a cautionary one, vividly illustrating the adage, “Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.”
How different his world looked in January 2020. He had won a historic triumph against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, in the process of which he had smashed the “red wall” of traditional left-wing strongholds. He had signed a trade deal with the European Union, against the expectations of his critics (this author included). He had been through a divorce, which cannot have been fun, but was living with his pretty, young fiancee Carrie Symonds, who was pregnant with their first child. Alongside him was his adviser, Dominic Cummings, who was generally held to be the brains behind Brexit.
He had taken a long and winding path to power. Behind him were the ruins of two marriages, having tried and failed to outrun his many affairs, as well as his share of colorful controversies, from manufacturing quotes as a Times columnist to endangering the life of a British prisoner in Iran as secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs by saying she was there to train journalists, something the Iranians considered akin to espionage.
Then, finally, he’d reached the mountain top. In a photo published on Twitter, Johnson smiled, gave the camera two thumbs up, and said, “This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.”
Fade to black. Mournful music. January 2022. Britain has lost more than 150,000 people to COVID. Lockdowns have ruined businesses, wrecked young people’s educations, and depressed us all. Reports that Johnson and his staff were holding drinks parties while Britons were prohibited from having any kind of social gathering have been a focal point of the nation’s ire. An investigation has condemned “failures of leadership and judgment,” and the police are making inquiries about lockdown lawbreaking.
Johnson married Symonds and they now have two children, but his wife has been a thorn in his side politically. Her interest in using her status to advance her environmentalist and animal rights hobbyhorses reportedly has the prime minister stumbling into government meetings asking what should be done about the badgers. Her expensive tastes, meanwhile, gave the PM problems when he was charged with taking funds from a Conservative Party donor to fatten his budget for redecorating their 10 Downing Street flat. Symonds allegedly claimed the flat had been a “John Lewis nightmare,” a snobbish reference to a furniture department store, which is almost as good a way of seeming out of touch in England as saying you would never be seen dead in a diner would be in the United States.
Johnson and Cummings, meanwhile, have fallen out in truly Shakespearean style. Johnson stood by his smart and cold chief adviser when he was accused of breaking lockdown rules while suffering from COVID but allegedly ordered him to leave Downing Street in November 2020. Cummings reacted in a very modern fashion. He opened a Substack blog and began to trash his former boss with florid glee. Johnson, according to Cummings, is weak, irresponsible, and selfish. “I regarded him as unfit for the job,” Cummings told the Commons Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee in 2021, “and I was trying to create a structure around him to try and stop what I thought would have been bad decisions.”
What happened? COVID happened, of course, and one can hardly blame Johnson for that. One can, however, evaluate his government’s response. A comprehensive analysis can be done elsewhere, but its lethargic efforts to protect the elderly at the beginning of the pandemic and its later failure to abolish draconian restrictions that had proved worthless were both serious mistakes. It might seem odd that Britons are so angry about the prime minister and his staff having a few drinks in the 10 Downing Street garden in May 2020, until you realize that many of them are expressing displaced anger toward the regulations that once prohibited them from doing so much as meeting their friends outside.
Perhaps the boozy atmosphere in Downing Street was influenced by Johnson’s bacchanalian tendencies. Old habits of Oxford and Fleet Street die hard. That would be fine if it were not for the joylessness that others were enduring, under the threat of police prosecution.
What has been more depressing has been the cowardly and self-interested attitude of a Conservative government that is interested in power for its own sake. A small but illuminating pre-pandemic example came when the government failed to support Dominic Cummings’s talented young adviser Andrew Sabisky when he was monstered in the press over un-PC comments that he had made online. Uh oh, I thought. If they have so little backbone immediately after their electoral triumph, how will they act when faced with signs of trouble?
Not well. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, had come dangerously close to handing Jeremy Corbyn victory in the 2017 general election when her so-called “dementia tax” had turned off older voters. Johnson was determined not to annoy his demographic base. As his government has struggled to balance its books amid all of the losses and expenses of the pandemic, it raided the futures of young people, jacking up national insurance costs and neglecting reforms intended to lower the cost of housing. From a cynical perspective, this makes short-term sense, but it is ruinous for anyone who cares about the future.
Perhaps this was inevitable from a prime minister whose taste for self-advancement is matched by an almost beatific freedom from ideas. This is a man who campaigned for Turkish accession to the European Union and then turned around and campaigned for Brexit in part on the basis that Turkey might end up joining the EU. Drifting in the no man’s land between ideology and principle, his government has talked tough on immigration and done little about it and beat its chest about “woke” ideas without touching the laws and institutions that sustain them.
At times, especially since Johnson’s own dangerous struggle against COVID-19, we have had to ask ourselves how much influence Johnson has. James Forsyth, who is not only political editor of the Spectator but is married to one of Johnson’s former spokespeople, has described him as sitting in his study as people come in and out making demands. He repeats slogans about “leveling up” and “building back better” without displaying much sign of knowing what they mean. Watching him try to talk enthusiastically about how we “can’t rest until 50% of MPs are women” feels a bit like watching a hostage video. (Blink twice, Boris. Blink twice.)
Yet even if it dies tomorrow, it would be unfair to claim that Johnson’s government has had no successes. Its swift and efficient distribution of vaccines has saved many lives among the elderly and vulnerable, and without as many of the strict mandates that have been doing so little to contain COVID infections across continental Europe. Defying structurally pessimistic expert advice to introduce new restrictions to combat the “omicron” variant, meanwhile, was validated as it passed through Britain and caused far fewer deaths and hospitalizations than previous waves.
Whether or not Johnson clings to power, though, it seems improbable that this will be remembered. COVID hawks believe that he was never firm enough. Lockdown skeptics think that he was too firm by half. Both camps are disgusted by his reckless hypocrisy. It all makes Johnson a good scapegoat for the COVID years, beyond the extent to which he is responsible.
So, why is he still in office? That the Tories have not taken him behind the woodshed speaks to an embarrassing lack of potential replacements. The likes of Liz Truss, foreign secretary, and Rishi Sunak, chancellor of the exchequer, have neither the charisma nor the vision for the role. Nice as they seem, to imagine either of them going up against the beige-bland Keir Starmer of the Labour Party at Prime Minister’s Questions is to imagine an innovative new cure for insomnia.
So Johnson endures, besieged by critics and abandoned by friends. Isolated in Downing Street, he has to find enough grit within his Wodehousian charm to go threat for threat with Vladimir Putin. Perhaps even visiting Ukraine will be a blessed escape from the atmosphere in London.
There is rough justice here. Johnson walked over a lot of people, and evaded a lot of responsibilities, to reach the highest office in the U.K. Now, it might feel more like a cell. When he occupied lesser posts, he could wriggle out of scandals with a smile and a joke and the assumption that if an issue was not simply dropped, then somebody else could take the blame. Now, as the prime minister, he faces grievances too deep to joke into irrelevance, and he must accept final responsibility. All of the disasters of 2020 and 2021 must have sucked all of the joy out of the job, and even a few drinks with his colleagues have become a headache. Was it all worthwhile, or would he have been happier writing popular history books and prolifically flirting? Be careful what you wish for, you might end up being the prime minister.
Ben Sixsmith is a writer living in Poland.
