What went wrong for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson? Less than two years ago, he won the greatest election victory of the 21st century, taking the Conservative Party from 8.8% in the European elections of May 2019 to 42.4% in the general election of December that year. The consensus was that he would be in office for a decade or more.
Today, the prime minister is clinging on by his fingernails, his personal ratings in free fall and his party 10 points behind in the polls.
What changed? The short answer is that he was accused of breaking lockdown rules, first by thanking Downing Street staff at what later turned out to have been advertised as a party in the building’s garden and then by accepting a birthday cake from his team. Stated like that, it sounds trivial. But Britain in early 2020 was subject to all manner of petty prohibitions. People who had to miss relatives’ funerals are angry to think of officials swigging wine in the sunshine. Parents who had to cancel their children’s birthday parties seethe at the idea of Johnson’s staff singing “Happy Birthday” to him.
Behind these complaints is an emotion that, while not strictly rational, is immensely powerful, namely a resentment at the idea of frivolity in high places. No one objects to Downing Street employees remaining at their posts through the pandemic, nor to their having lunch together, nor to their pausing for coffee. But throw in alcohol or cakes and everything changes. How dare politicians not be miserable during a crisis?
Johnson’s misfortune is to be a Cavalier in what has become a nation of Roundheads. The Cavaliers and the Roundheads were rivals in the civil wars of the 1640s. In popular imagination, Cavaliers, who fought for the king, were dashing, jovial, and licentious, while Roundheads, who championed Parliament, were dour, moralizing, and puritanical. In what became a popular phrase, the Cavaliers were said to be “wrong but wromantic,” while the Roundheads were “right but repulsive.”
The reality, naturally, was a lot more complicated, but the archetypes still exert a powerful pull on the British imagination. Johnson was elected as the ultimate Cavalier — a disruptor, impatient with bureaucracy, charming, funny, and (in the sense of being casual about the rules) literally cavalier. At first, these attributes seemed to be exactly what was needed. It was his Cavalier disregard for propriety that broke the deadlock in Parliament, delivered Brexit, won the 2019 election, and ensured that Britain stayed out of the European Union’s vaccine procurement scheme, thus winning the inoculation race. His opponents, repeatedly wrong-footed, writhed with rage, which, naturally, made them even less appealing.
But then came the lockdown, and the mood changed. Plagues or other shared privations always make people more tribal, keener on rules, less tolerant of eccentrics. A common crisis makes us neighborly and considerate but also bossy and priggish.
Johnson suddenly found that his persona was out of sync with the times. No one has a more expansive personality, a more capacious spirit, a more obvious disdain for convention. No one is less able to resist a joke. Even as he appeared in Parliament for the first time following the revelations, he wallowed in what he evidently saw as the enjoyable absurdity of the situation. As he announced new rules for unemployed people, he laughed at the idea that he might soon lose his own job. When the leader of the Scottish National Party in the House of Commons, a rotund former banker called Ian Blackford, hauled himself to his feet to complain that the country was facing all manner of ills while people in Downing Street “were eating cake,” the prime minister cheerfully replied, “I don’t know who’s been eating more cake,” prompting furious complaints by Scottish separatists about “body shaming.”
Two years ago, the country would have cheered uncomplicatedly for Johnson. He was the Merrie Monarch, reopening the taverns and the theaters, while Blackford stood for Cromwellian sanctimony. But after two years of intermittent lockdowns, we are all Puritans.
It is impossible not to feel sorry for Johnson. Just as he won his famous victory, just as he was finally able to govern with a majority, news arrived of a virus in Wuhan. The whole of his premiership has been dominated by the pandemic. No one has been in the mood for his jokes.
In Shakespearean terms, the prime minister is Sir Toby Belch in a nation of Malvolios. “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” asks the dissolute knight. In Shakespeare’s day, the audience was on Sir Toby’s side. Not anymore.
