50 The New York Reviewsqualor and sordidness. And it retains
something of its etymological origins:
thin or flimsy in texture; having little
substance. Neither of these meanings
is good for Johnson, who is peculiarly
vulnerable to both.
This is why it was especially idiotic
for Johnson to identify himself so
closely with Paterson’s moonlighting
and greed. Anyone with any sense of
British political history knows that
the word “sleaze” acted like a curse
on John Major’s Tory government of
the 1990s, a malediction that, once ut-
tered, cast a spell of doom that could
never be broken. This was in spite of
the fact that Major’s personal integrity
was never questioned. Even more per-
tinent, though, is the scandal of 2009,
when the details of expenses paid to
MPs from the public purse (most mem-
orably Sir Peter Viggers’s claim for the
cost of installing a house for the ducks
in his garden pond) were leaked, deep-
ening an existing sense of disgust with
the political system.
That sense of alienation from “the
elites” in Westminster fed into the
great rebellion of 2016: Brexit. If any-
one should understand this, it is the
embodiment and beneficiary of that
project, Johnson himself. It is a mark
of his strategic, as opposed to merely
managerial, incompetence that he in-
vited the casting upon himself of the
hex of sleaze. Under the influence of
that dis- enchantment, telling lies about
how you begged for money to fund your
dream interior does not look roguish. It
looks slimy.All of this still had, however, some
degree of abstraction. It was Westmin-
ster business: donors, lobbyists, funny
money. What made Johnson’s person-
ality disorder explosive was the way
it became, for most voters, personal,
through two things that almost ev-
eryone in Britain cares deeply about:
Covid- 19 and Christmas. For most peo-
ple in 2020, the most important family
holiday of the year was a time of sad-
ness, because many of their familiar
gatherings and visits had to be canceled
in the interest of public health. Johnson
himself summed it up on December 19,
2020, when he warned people against
the usual seasonal socializing: “We’re
sacrificing the chance to see loved ones
so we have a better chance of protect-
ing their lives.”
The government- issued rules were
clear: “You must not socialize with
anyone you do not live with or who is
not in your support bubble in any in-
door setting.” There was an exception
for work that was “reasonably neces-
sary.” That did not mean office parties.
Yet there were parties, lots of parties:
in the fabulously refurbished Downing
Street flat on November 13 (apparently
to celebrate the departure of Johnson’s
chief adviser Dominic Cummings), a
small gathering with drinks in Down-
ing Street at which Johnson made a
short speech on November 27, a Christ-
mas quiz for staff at which Johnson ap-
peared virtually on December 15, and
a larger and more raucous party down-
stairs in Downing Street on December
18 that Johnson did not attend but of
which he must have been aware. In the
unfolding of this story, two of John-
son’s most potent weapons—the power
of the joke and his ability to hover be-
tween the real and the unreal—have
turned against him.There is, firstly, something almost too
neat in the fact that what has accelerated
Johnson’s appointment with doomsday
is a laugh. It is, to be more precise, a
leaked video of Allegra Stratton, the
journalist brought into Johnson’s inner
circle in October 2020 to impose some
order on its chaotic communications. In
the video, shot on December 22, 2020,
she is rehearsing for Downing Street’s
planned daily televised briefings (a plan
soon abandoned). Other staffers are
playing the roles of journalists. John-
son’s adviser Ed Oldfield asks her, “I’ve
just seen reports on Twitter that there
was a Downing Street Christmas party
on Friday night. Do you recognize
those reports?” And she laughs, the
first of three warm, charming chuckles.
The third comes when she says, “This
fictional party was a business meet-
ing, and it was not socially distanced.”
These are not evil cackles or villainous
guffaws. They are friendly laughs of
knowingness, the signals that we here
are all in on the joke. The problem is
that considering the real sorrows that
ordinary people were enduring, this
idea too has crossed the invisible line
between being in on the joke and being
the butt of the joke, between having a
laugh and feeling that you are being
laughed at.
Johnson has always walked that line
like a political Philippe Petit. His high
wire has been strung between the poles
of outrageous insult (almost always of
people weaker and more vulnerable
than him) and “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it
was only a joke.” The idea of humor has
been utterly essential to his success—it
is the solvent in which a lie is merely
an exaggeration, and a racist slur is
merely a merry jape. Emmanuel Ma-
cron has reportedly described Johnson
as “a clown,” and he was by no means
the first to use the term. But successful
clowns are very smart people, acutely
aware that if they do not stay within the
fuzzy boundaries of what the audience
is finding funny, they become embar-
rassing and even frightening.
This fate was already creeping up
on Johnson before the Stratton video
emerged in December. The style that
worked in front of already drunk corpo-
rate audiences when he was practicing
his lucrative sideline as an after- dinner
speaker does not impress when his lis-
teners are sober and serious. The melt-
down in November when he lost his
place in a speech to the Confederation
of British Industry, rambled into a long
diversion about Peppa Pig World, a
theme park based on the children’s car-
toon character, and imitated the sound
of an accelerating car with grunts
that the official Downing Street press
release transcribed as “arum arum
araaaaaagh,” dramatized the moment
at which the clown became both mor-
tifyingly infantile and, for those who
have to live in the pandemic- stricken
country he governs, quite scary. When
that happens, the collusive atmosphere
that Johnson has been so good at cre-
ating—what does it matter so long as
we’re all having fun?—rapidly evap-
orates. Johnson keeps playacting but
his public (both within and outside of
Westminster) stops playing along.The other skill that Johnson wielded
so deftly and effectively was the con-
juring of what we might call nonreal-
ity. His career was built on his talent,
as Brussels correspondent of The DailyTe l eg ra ph, for inventing stories about
the madness of the European Union.
These were not mere lies—Johnson
had the ability to keep them suspended
somewhere between existence and non-
existence, real enough to help shape
his country’s fate yet always held up in
the air by invisible quotation marks of
knowing irony.
This way of shaping stories has now
come back to haunt him. His tale about
the Christmas bash is a classic Johnson
narrative: the party, he claims, was not
a party because all the Covid- related
rules were obeyed, and since the rules
said there could be no party, it wasn’t
a party. This fits perfectly into John-
son’s familiar mode in which the rela-
tionship between the signifier and the
signified is always fluid, always up for
grabs. But his past success at pulling
off this trick has entirely misled him
this time. The right answer for his own
survival was the simple one: there was
a party, I wasn’t at it but I should have
stopped it, and I’m very sorry. Instead
he could only make things worse by of-
fering people who were hurt and angry
a stale rehash from his old repertoire of
absurdities.
Shaping these responses to specific
scandals is the slow waning of the glow
from Brexit. Johnson’s little lies were
folded into a bigger lie: that Britain
could leave the EU without any real
consequences. So long as he could
hold that great deception aloft, John-
son’s petty deceptions were, for those
who support Brexit, of minor account.
Getting Brexit done—the slogan that
won him the 2019 election—was a
great test of honesty. As Brexit sup-
porters saw it, they had made a con-
tract in that referendum, and Johnson
was the only man who would honor it.
This made him, oddly, an honest man,
even one they knew with certainty
would “lie to anyone.” The problem,
though, is that the contract was bogus.
The pain- free Brexit it promised could
not be delivered. The clearer this be-
comes, the more naked Johnson must
appear.
Johnson’s behavior has made a mock-
ery of his ability to tell the English pub-
lic how they should behave in the face
of the Omicron variant of Covid- 19.
His dithering and posturing cost many
lives in 2020, and his undercutting of
official advice and rules will undoubt-
edly do the same in 2022. His loss of
authority on the management of the
pandemic was evident on December 14,
when almost a hundred of his own Tory
MPs voted against his proposals for
Covid passports for entry into night-
clubs and other venues. (The proposal
passed only with votes from the Labour
opposition.) As Covid fatigue deepens,
the evidence that their leader does not
himself believe anything he says will
make it ever more dif ficult for people in
England to separate the vital messages
from the wildly implausible messenger.
Johnson’s last hope lies in the par-
adox that he is a liar but no deceiver.
Those who have the ability to bring
him down—the powers that be in the
Conservative Party—are those who
raised him up, in full consciousness
of what that meant for their country.
It was they who set the big red digital
clock ticking down toward the chaotic
finale. Only their reluctance to ac-
knowledge this responsibility is delay-
ing the approach of zero hour for Boris
Johnson. Q
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