January 13, 2022 49
‘Arum Arum Araaaaaagh’
Fintan O’TooleIn his opening address to the UN Cli-
mate Change Conference in Glasgow
at the beginning of November, Boris
Johnson evoked the end of a James
Bond movie in which the hero is
“strapped to a doomsday device, des-
perately trying to work out which col-
ored wire to pull to turn it off, while a
red digital clock ticks down remorse-
lessly to a detonation.” His audience of
politicians and diplomats from around
the world responded to the analogy
with the same excruciating silence that
met all his bad jokes. But Johnson’s do-
mestic allies in the Conservative Party
surely appreciated its ironic humor. It
was they who strapped their country
to the doomsday device that is Boris
Johnson. Like anyone who has even
the most cursory knowledge of his ca-
reer, they have been waiting for the big
red clock to tick down to his inevitable
detonation.
One way to get a flavor of Johnson’s
current situation is to consider two
meanings of the word “knowing.” It
suggests, at its simplest level, compre-
hension, understanding, recognition.
But in another guise it hints at a kind of
private collusion, a shared agreement
to pretend not to be aware of what is
really going on. In Johnson’s case, both
of these meanings have long worked
together. Everyone recognized that
he was never remotely fit to be prime
minister. But a very wide group of peo-
ple—those most strongly in favor of
Brexit—enjoyed that feeling of com-
plicity, of being in on the Boris joke.
In the last two months, however,
these two meanings have gradually
drifted away from each other. The
subtle game of knowingness doesn’t
work anymore. There is only the flat
knowledge that England chose to be
governed by a man who lies about ev-
erything, who has no principles and no
care for other people, and who cannot
govern himself, let alone a large and
complex country.
I remember watching a film on Brit-
ain’s Channel 4 of a focus group made
up of former supporters of the Labour
Party in so- called Red Wall constit-
uencies, in the Midlands, shortly be-
fore the general election of December
- Those taking part were asked
what they thought of Johnson. They
said things like “If he can lie to the
queen, he can lie to anybody,” and
called him “a buffoon to some extent,
but... a lovable buffoon.” And they all
said they were going to vote for him.
The election results would suggest that
they did—Johnson’s victory was won
largely in these working- class areas. It
would be misleading, and falsely com-
forting, to say the voters were fooled by
him, that they thought he was a man of
steely integrity and cool competence.
The knowingness was not just an elite
indulgence. It went deep.
When and why did it vanish? How
does a lovable buffoon become merely
a buffoon? Johnson’s discombobula-
tion in recent weeks is not unreason-
able—the change has come quickly
and, from his point of view, without
warning. There is a song, “Station
Approach” by the British rock band
Elbow, about wanting to “be in the
town where they know what I’m like
and don’t mind.” Johnson has always
lived in that town, always had news-
paper editors and magazine owners
who know he lies to their readers but
pay him a lavish salary anyway, lovers
who know he is serially unfaithful but
choose to believe his protestations of
devotion, political allies who know that
he is wildly incompetent but don’t mind
so long as he can win elections. Why
should all this change now?Consider the things that did not seem
to damage Johnson very much, if at all.
In mid- October two House of Com-
mons all- party committees issued a
joint report describing Johnson’s slow
and muddled response to the begin-
nings of the pandemic in March 2020
as “one of the most important public
health failures the United Kingdom
has ever experienced.” That did him
no harm. Nor did the revelations that
hugely expensive contracts for the
procurement of medical devices and
personal protective equipment for the
National Health Service were awarded
to Tory cronies who had no experience
in supplying them. Nor the direct evi-
dence of his former lover Jennifer Ar-
curi that Johnson, when he was mayor
of London, offered to advance her busi-
ness interests. Nor his flagrant abuse of
patronage in appointing more cronies,
including his own brother and the son
of a Russian oligarch, to the House of
Lords. He shrugged these things off, as
he has always done, with the tacit, and
perfectly reasonable, question: Well,
what did you expect?
It’s actually quite funny that it all
started to unravel for Johnson when he
tried his hand at something that is pa-
tently out of character for him: loyalty.
Johnson betrays people, causes, and
allies whenever it suits him. For somestrange reason, however, he decided to
be faithful to Owen Paterson, a Tory
member of Parliament, former cabinet
minister, and fervent Brexiteer. While
continuing to work as an MP, Paterson
was receiving large payments from two
private companies. This, remarkably
enough, was within the rules. But the
parliamentary commissioner for stan-
dards, Kathryn Stone, found that he
had directly lobbied ministers on be-
half of these companies, which is not.
The commissioner recommended that
Paterson be suspended from Parlia-
ment for thirty days.
Johnson, however, decided to come
to Paterson’s rescue by instructing all
To r y MPs to vote to overturn this find-
ing and to weaken the whole system of
ethical oversight by allowing MPs to
appeal adverse rulings. This provoked
a large- scale backlash from many of
those MPs, forcing Johnson into igno-
minious retreat. Many of them were
baffled that Johnson had squandered
so much political capital merely to pro-
tect an ally from the consequences of
his own breach of the most basic ethical
standards. But the strong probability is
that Johnson was also thinking of him-
self. There is an expectation that Stone
will investigate the strange saga of the
lavish refurbishment, by Johnson and
his wife Carrie, of their private flat in
Downing Street. Overturning Stone’s
ruling on Paterson would, conveniently,
have rendered her patently powerless
or even forced her to resign.
The reason Johnson wanted to do
this became obvious in mid- December
when the Electoral Commission pub-
lished a report on the failure of the
Conservative Party to declare a dona-
tion from the Tory peer Lord Brown-
low toward the cost of the designer
upgrade. The report made it prettyclear that Johnson had lied about this
too. Back in May, Johnson’s indepen-
dent adviser on standards, Lord Geidt,
cleared him of a conflict of interest
over the donation from Brownlow, on
the grounds that he appeared not to be
aware of the arrangement. But the new
report cites a WhatsApp message from
Johnson to Brownlow in November
2020 asking directly for extra money
for the redecoration.Another lie—so what? Yet there’s
something in this whole business that
is particularly dangerous for Johnson.
It touches the raw nerve of English
society: social class. Johnson’s great
strength, and the reason he was so
crucial to Brexit, is that he managed
somehow to transcend class. As a jour-
nalist in the 1990s, he drew snobbish
caricatures of British working- class
men as (to quote one of his Spectator
columns) “likely to be drunk, crimi-
nal, aimless, feckless and hopeless.”
But as a politician, he has had an ex-
traordinary ability to project himself
as both a toff (and thus to engage the
old instincts of class deference) and an
honorary member of the proletariat, a
bit of a lad whose carefully arranged
dishevelment could be interpreted as
“not putting on airs and graces.”
The problem with spending £200,000
on rattan chairs and Lulu Lytle sofa
covers for the Downing Street flat is
that it pulls this fusion apart from both
ends. The expenditure exceeds the av-
erage price of an entire house in a Red
Wall area like Stoke- on- Trent, which
reminds working- class voters that John-
son really is not one of them. But that
might be okay if he did not have to beg
donors for the money; that makes him
not a toff, either. (True toffs don’t buy
furniture—they inherit it.) It makes
Johnson seem what he actually is—a
middle- class opportunist on the make,
very much putting on airs and graces.
It negates the impulse toward deference
among his voters while simultaneously
scraping off the carapace of authentic-
ity that Johnson built around himself by
seeming not to care about appearances.
There’s another trick of language at
work here. Playing fast and loose with
money can be regarded as an aristo-
cratic virtue, an expression of devil-
may- care insouciance. But an invisible
line divides devil- may- care and its dark
and politically dangerous twin, sleaze.
That word has a peculiar potency in
British politics. It is a six- letter corro-
sive that strips the sheen of glamour
from bad- boy antics. In recent years
it seemed to have lost its currency,
perhaps because it had sexual conno-
tations that have been complicated by
shifting attitudes. A search of Hansard,
the record of parliamentary debates at
Westminster, shows that it was used
just five times in 2016, not at all in 2017,
once each year in 2018 and 2019, and
five times in 2020. But it has been ut-
tered 131 times in 2021.
Those who deploy the word are, of
course, Johnson’s political enemies,
mostly in the Labour Party and the
Scottish National Party, but it is telling
that opponents feel suddenly embold-
ened to use it so often. Sleaze is a great
reducer. It deflates sprezzatura intoBoris Johnson; illustration by Tom Bachtell