Boris Johnson has brought down three successive prime ministers. First, David Cameron, whom he beat in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Then Theresa May, whose cold fingers he pried off the Downing Street door handle in 2019. Now Boris Johnson.
His character flaws did for him. Everyone knew Boris’s strengths and weaknesses when he was elected. He was sharp, witty, undisciplined, egotistical, generous, licentious, optimistic, unreliable, and incapable of bearing a grudge.
The norms that bound the rest of us somehow never applied to him. He seemed like one of Homer’s heroes, or perhaps Nietzsche’s “magnificent blond beast, hungry for plunder and victory.” His Wikipedia entry is unclear on how many children he has. He came to office after a string of gaffes and misadventures that would have destroyed another politician. Yet he won the greatest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s in 1987.
At first, his contempt for convention was just what the country needed. No one else could have broken the deadlock that set in after 2017, when a pro-EU majority in Parliament refused to allow Brexit but also blocked fresh elections. It was bold, bombastic Boris who beat Corbyn, delivered Brexit, and, again defying all procedures, procured the fastest vaccine rollout in the world.
But, as I kept lamenting in these pages at the time, the lockdown altered people’s psychology. A mood of grim and prissy self-denial settled on Britain. Boris’s jokes began to fall flat. All his life, he had been forgiven his failings by a nation that saw them as part of his Falstaffian character. Suddenly, the smallest infractions began to enrage voters.
The issues that ended his premiership seem unbelievably petty when set down on the page. He thanked staff in the Downing Street garden at what later turned out to have been billed as a party. He was presented with a cake (which apparently stayed in its box) on his birthday, a technical violation of the lockdown rules. He denied having been warned about the behavior of a Conservative MP who turned out to have a history of making unwelcome sexual advances to young men.
There is, I suppose, a certain irony in Boris being brought down by a sex scandal that didn’t involve him. But what really did for him was the shift in the national mood. He was, to switch Shakespeare references, Toby Belch in a country suddenly full of Malvolios.
Boris was a hero brought down by his elemental flaws. The cake and the fibs might not have mattered had voters believed that their prime minister had a clear sense of how to make them richer. But it became clear, as time passed, that he had an aversion to unpopularity, which made him sacrifice long-term prosperity to short-term headlines. Spending, taxes, and inflation rose as he struggled to screw shut the faucets that he had cheerfully spun open during the lockdown. Prince Hal failed to grow into Henry V. The iron never entered his soul.
Boris was made for easy times. His breezy, unspecific optimism was unsuited to the pandemic and the consequent cutbacks. Even so, things might have been different.
His short book on Churchill, written when he was mayor of London, was ridiculed at the time as thinly disguised autobiography. Churchill, in Boris’s telling, was a witty after-dinner speaker and journalist who was cruelly passed over for promotion until a crisis forced the Tories to recognize his talents. Yet Boris was plainly awe-struck by the way in which, once he achieved the highest office, Churchill put aside frivolity and acted as if his life had been a preparation for that challenge.
There was a moment, immediately after his election victory in December 2019 (he took the Conservative Party from 9% seven months earlier to 44% and an 80-seat majority) when it seemed as if Boris was rising to events. Brexit would, it appeared, lead to a more competitive Britain, a Britain guided by the principles espoused over decades in Boris’s witty columns, above all a dislike of being told what to do.
It was not to be. Boris bowed to the authoritarian mood ushered in by COVID and his unwillingness to say no led, paradoxically, to greater unpopularity.
His opponents are exulting in the overthrow of the man they blame for Brexit. They should be careful what they wish for. Brexit is a done deal. But when it comes to deregulation, sound money, and spending, the next leader can hardly fail to be further to the right.
Boris will always be the man who stopped Corbyn, delivered Brexit, and stepped up to help Ukraine. How tragic, in the exact sense, that he was not more.
