All roads lead to 10 Downing Street if you keep turning right. This was the lesson that Margaret Thatcher taught when she dismissed Tory centrists with the immortal words “The lady’s not for turning”—as in turning back, turning around, or turning left. This was the lesson that David Cameron, a man of the squishy center, learned too late, and that Theresa May, an unscrupulously quick and glib study, reaffirmed when she said, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”
No one in Britain now believes what May says, but everyone sees that, from duty if not the urge to avoid embarrassment, the prime minister is determined to hang on in 10 Downing Street. But do the British believe what Boris Johnson says, and that he has got what it takes to displace May? They know that Johnson is a man to whom embarrassment is as water to the duck’s back. They know he is “good for a laugh,” and they enjoy his slapstick bumbling and verbose P. G. Wodehouse routines—all serious compliments in a land where no joke goes uncracked, and quite possibly sufficient to win him the highest office in British politics.
But the British don’t really know what Boris believes, other than that, being destined for glory, he is the right chap to have his hands on the tiller in this our hour of need, et cetera. And what does Boris himself believe, beyond the imperatives of attracting attention and obtaining power?
It depends which Boris you ask. For there are two Borises, and their interaction is part of what makes him by far the most interesting person in British politics. One is a Berlusconi-style burlesquer of media-driven politics, the comedian who, halfway through his eight years as mayor, pulled off the London Olympics of 2012. The other is an old-style conservative, an elitist for whom charisma is a license to govern behind closed doors, a calculating pol who stirred up anti-EU feeling for decades but who, before becoming the most popular face of the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum, wrote two op-eds, one for Remain and the other for Leave.
Ken Livingstone, the only other postwar mayor of London to have made a mark on the city, suspected that Johnson was “the most hardline right-wing ideologue since Thatcher” but concluded he was “a fairly lazy tosser,” more interested in reclining on laurels than winning them. Livingstone was wrong on both counts.
Johnson’s ideological direction resembles the EKG of a man having a heart attack. Bursts of erratic zigzagging are followed by short periods of flatlining. And while David Cameron was said to have preferred “chillaxing” on the weekends instead of reading government briefings, Johnson works very hard at being “Boris,” or “BoJo,” as he is believed to call himself.
Referring to oneself in the third person can be a sign of delusional vanity, but in Johnson’s case the vanity seems calculated. He was christened Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and his family call him “Al”—neither quite does it as a brand. The Boris persona, with its tousled hair, Latin tags, and façade of harmless eccentricity, cohered at Eton, a school that has sent more tousle-haired, Latin-tagging harmless eccentrics to 10 Downing Street than any other.
Johnson is now closer to 10 Downing Street than at any point since the summer of 2016. He was pretty close then, right on the doorstep, in fact, until Michael Gove, his fellow conspirator in the Brexit campaign, tripped him up by launching his own candidacy, announcing that Johnson “cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead.”
Boris landed on his face, in Theresa May’s cabinet as her foreign secretary. Now, having resigned in mid-July over May’s drift away from Brexit, Johnson is polling ahead of any other Conservative as her successor. The polls also show that Johnson is the party’s safest bet for averting the nightmare scenario of a Jeremy Corbyn government.
Johnson’s resignation speech in mid-July was measured and thoughtful and therefore quite unlike either of the known Borises. So no one was surprised when, in early August, the old Borises bounced back into the public eye. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do next. The big prize was in sight; screw the courage to the sticking point, carpe diem, and all that. The moment called for a right turn. The surprise was not so much how sharp it was when it came as its adroitness.
Writing in his regular Daily Telegraph column, Johnson addressed the banning of the burka and niqab in Denmark. “If you tell me that the burka is oppressive, then I am with you,” he wrote. “If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree—and I would add that I can find no scriptural authority for the practice in the Koran. I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.”
He added that if a constituent came to his office covered, he would ask her to show her face: “It’s how we work.” The same goes for a female student who turns up to school or university “looking like a bank robber.”
The jocular tone guaranteed protests from the usual suspects, but also brought some surprising ones. The Muslim Council of Britain, a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, denounced Johnson, and a Labour MP threatened to report Johnson to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. But Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a past chair of the Conservative party who in 2012 became the first Muslim woman to serve in a cabinet, also attacked Johnson for “dog whistle” politicking. Brandon Lewis, chairman of the Conservative party, requested that Johnson apologize. So did Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who called the remarks “gratuitously offensive.” Dominic Grieve, attorney general in David Cameron’s government, told the BBC that Johnson was not a “fit and proper person to lead a political party.”
It’s no coincidence that all of Johnson’s Conservative critics also supported Remain in 2016. Baroness Warsi said Johnson was using “indefensible” and “alt-right” strategies in order to “stake out a leadership bid.” Grieve entertained the same prospect and promised “without the slightest doubt” that he would resign from the Conservatives if Johnson became their leader.
The issue of Islamic face-covering is sensitive, but not as sensitive as Brexit. On this much, Baroness Warsi was not wrong. Johnson was using the burka and niqab as bait to force a crisis in the parliamentary Conservative party. He knows that the party members back him. He knows that the public likes him, not least for his ostentatious refusal to be politically correct and dodge the issue of Islam in British society. It’s the parliamentary party who dislike him as an intriguer and a Brexiter.
Johnson’s Telegraph article offered two Borises for the price of one, the populist jester and the Westminster strategist. In all the fuss about his tone, not much attention was given to his argument. After his big wind-up, Johnson didn’t deliver a punch. France, Belgium, and Denmark have banned the burka and niqab, but he concluded that it was not the British way to “tell a free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear, in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business.”
The dog-whistling was in the jokes, not the argument. Humor is central to British life. In public life, mockery to the point of nihilism is not just accepted but applauded. There is an Islamic threat to British traditions of free speech, but it doesn’t come from Muslim women who cover their faces. It comes from the Muslim men who tell them to cover up. Johnson went for the cheap shot and the big laugh. That is also the British way, and so, these days, is open hostility to Muslims, whether British-born or not.
As the May government spirals, the Conservatives are once again losing support to a revitalized U.K. Independence party (UKIP). In the days after the Telegraph article, a mass of uninvited comments appeared on Johnson’s Facebook page, all supportive and some openly bigoted. Johnson distanced himself from them—though he had of course invited them. He also made a propitiatory visit to a mosque, where he was photographed wearing a skullcap and the facial expression of a naughty schoolboy. All very British, all very populist, and all very commonsensical small-“c” conservative. Call him Edmund Burka.
Johnson appears incapable of making an on-the-cuff remark, but appearances usually deceive in politics, and rhetoric is the accomplice of deception. The two Borises are value for money, and their mixed signals bring a high-wire excitement to his every public statement. He is clever, and hard to pin down, because one Boris can always deny what the other Boris has said. This time, he got caught out, because his two Borises were speaking in harmony, the Conservative politician picking the strategy, the media populist picking the vocabulary.
Or did Johnson only want to give the appearance of being caught out, to smoke out the opposition in his party before he makes a run at 10 Downing Street? Someone should ask Al what he thinks of BoJo’s hard-right turn.
