24 Britain The Economist January 29th 2022
Wreckingball
T
hings arenever dull around Boris Johnson. Since 2019 the
prime minister has led the Conservatives to their biggest vote
share since 1979, shaken up politics, taken Britain out of the Euro
pean Union, endured a pandemic, nearly died, had a child, struck
a trade deal with the eu, got married, had another child, and seen
his net approval rating swing from +40 to 51 after revelations
about potentially illegal parties in 10 Downing Street. His repeated
dishonesty—and a police investigation into the high jinks,
launched on January 25th—make them the most damaging in a se
ries of scandals. Others include scrounging £53,000 ($72,000)
from donors to redecorate his residence and trying to prorogue
Parliament illegally. If Napoleon was history on horseback, Mr
Johnson is history on a pantomime horse.
With Mr Johnson holding the reins, politics is exhausting and
voters are tired. Little wonder that they are telling pollsters they
want a change. Nearly dying tends to win widespread sympathy;
attending illegal parties in an unprecedented lockdown and being
investigated by the police tend to lose it. The prime minister is to
blame for his many errors. But he is also the victim of a supercycle
in British politics, in which voters’ taste in leaders swings between
the charismatic and the boring.
This alternating pattern has lasted for four decades. Margaret
Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, was replaced by Sir
John Major—a man who, as wags like to note, ran away from the
circus to become an accountant (his father was a trapeze artist). Sir
John, a modest man, handed over to Sir Tony Blair, a messianic
one. The theatrical Sir Tony was replaced by the dour Gordon
Brown, who was succeeded by the slick, selfconfident David Cam
eron. Theresa May, surely one of the shyest politicians ever to hold
high office, was replaced by Mr Johnson, a showoff.
The great German sociologist Max Weber saw such charismatic
authority as a “revolutionary force”. It rests on the performance of
miracles. Thatcher healed the sick man of Europe, breaking mili
tant unions and modernising the British economy. Sir Tony con
verted Middle England’s “smallc” conservatives into Labour vot
ers. Mr Johnson struck a Brexit deal when that seemed all but im
possible (admittedly, at the cost of hiving off Northern Ireland).
He won “red wall” constituencies in central and northern Englandthatlookeddemographically Tory but had stuck stubbornly with
Labour until 2019. His party hailed him as its saviour. Its election
manifesto was decorated with pictures of men in boiler suits wav
ing placards reading: “we love boris”.
But charisma cannot last. It requires frequent demonstrations
that the leader still has the magic touch. There is little evidence
that Mr Johnson does. His government’s announcement that the
Royal Navy would help stop migrants crossing the Channel largely
served as a reminder that the flow had not yet been stemmed.
Picking a fight with the bbc, which voters like, won few friends.
Unpopular populism is of no use to anyone. Britons are succumb
ing to drama fatigue. The Tories were elected on a promise to “Get
Brexit Done”—and then, implicitly, to make politics go away
again. Instead politics has become impossible to ignore. Mr John
son’s tenure increasingly resembles the grim years of Mrs May:
stasis, parliamentary plots and a government unable to govern.
And so Labour is deploying boredom as its secret weapon. Sir
Keir Starmer, a former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, rev
els in the reputation of lawyercumbureaucrat. He likes fivea
side football, the Union flag and the Pineapple, a pub in Kentish
Town; he dislikes crime and people who leave football matches
early. Under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, the party fizzed with
audacious schemes—or madcap ones: free broadband for every
one! Sir Keir specialises in policyfree speeches that amount to lit
tle more than an hour of looking presentable in front of a flag.
The Conservatives jostling to replace Mr Johnson are also try
ing to look as dull as possible. Mr Johnson’s road to Number 10 was
chaotic; Rishi Sunak, the favourite to succeed him, glided from
backbencher to chancellor in only five years. A teetotaller, he cele
brated the reopening of the pubs after the most recent lockdown
by posing outside an electrical store. Jeremy Hunt, a former health
secretary and a contender for the leadership, contrasted his own
seriousness with Mr Johnson’s silliness in the party’s most recent
leadership contest. Longshot candidates for the next one, such as
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, are nerdy types. Only Liz Truss,
the foreign secretary and one of a handful of frontrunners, bucks
the trend. She likes to look dashing, using a recent trip to Estonia
to be photographed beaming out from a tank turret, even if her ad
visers would rather she showed off her wellbriefed side.I just closed my eyes and swung
Mr Johnson’s combination of excitement with ineptitude is hardly
ideal. But dull people can be failures, too. At a time when the top
job required charisma and salesmanship, it was held by Mrs May,
who possessed neither. Mr Johnson would have been in his ele
ment in 2016, avoiding all talk of Brexit’s drawbacks by simply in
sisting there were none. Mrs May, for her part, might have thrived
in lockdown. It is easy to imagine her shutting every pub in the
country before ever asking an aide: “Now, what’s all this about a vi
rus in Wuhan?” The charisma cycle of British politics gives voters
what they want, but not always what the times need.
The big difficulty for boring leaders is that they can struggle to
sell their vision. Charismatic ones, by contrast, get the chance to
create a new political reality before voters tire of them. Thatcher
reshaped the country for the foreseeable future; Sir Tony domin
ated it for a decade. By pressing ahead with Brexit, Mr Johnson has
already set the course of British history for a generation. Whoever
replaces him may do little more than tidy upafterthat upheaval—
and give Britons time to catch their breath beforethe pendulum
swings and politics becomes interesting again.nBagehot
Britain’s political pendulum is due a swing away from excitement and towards boredom