the times | Saturday June 11 2022 23
NewsNews
those associated with the campaign
are gone too. Still, the candidates to
replace him will almost certainly
promise to maintain all of the major
planks of his agenda.
Indeed, some already have. Each
will pledge to remain outside the EU
and its economic zone; to stay
hawkish in their support for Ukraine;
and to revisit the Northern Ireland
protocol that is the rot underlying
Britain’s troubled relationship with
Europe.
Each will promise to pursue new
trade deals with countries around the
world rather than prioritise one with
the EU, to make the economy more
competitive. Each will insist that they
rebalance the economy to make
northern England wealthier and to
protect the “red wall” seats that
Johnson won from Labour in 2019.
The reality is that if Johnson goes,
Johnsonism will survive in large part
until the Labour Party manages to
win an election. And even then, if
Labour wins power under Sir Keir
Starmer, Brexit itself will not be
reversed.
But just as much as Johnsonism will
remain independent of Johnson, so
too will all the problems that Johnson
either was elected to address — and
has failed to — or has actively
exacerbated, and in some senses even
created.
Britain’s long-term competitive
decline continues, as
does the shame of its
internal border
between Britain and
Northern Ireland,
and the appallingly
uneven frontier now
operating with
France. The forces of
nationalism pulling
the country apart are
not going away, a
reality no party seems
able to address in any
serious fashion, while
the endemic north-
south divide that
Johnson promised to
resolve looks set only
to get worse. And, of
course, there is still Brexit.
Britain today is a country where
religion has been replaced with a kind
of state Shintoism in which the
monarch is raised in exaltation while
her chief ministers are ritually
sacrificed to cleanse the nation of its
sins.
And all the while, nothing ever
really changes. Deep-seated problems
go unaddressed, are left to fester,
passed from one prime minister to the
next, none of whom seems capable of
even seeing the scale of the
challenges they face, let alone
addressing them. Johnson is just the
latest prime minister to fail
spectacularly at the job, though in his
case, in uniquely grubby
circumstances. He won’t be the last.Tom McTague is a London-based staff
writer at The Atlanticthe image was terminal for Johnson,
proof he had lost the crowd. This fact
remains, the elemental source of all of
his problems that is not going away.
Johnson has become a tribune of the
people, without a people.
It is worth pausing to reflect that
Johnson is far from unique in being
loathed. In fact, he is just the latest
British prime minister to be hated by
the public with a vehemence that
does not seem particularly healthy.
Sir Tony Blair remains a virtual
pariah to this day, David Cameron a
figure of open disdain, and Thatcher a
source of such continuing hostility
that a statue honouring her is egged
by protesters. It is a strange quirk that
Britain’s worst prime ministers are
now its most popular: Major, May,
and Gordon Brown. Yet each was
driven from office in a wave of public
hatred, horribly warped and
disfigured in the process.
Where Johnson somewhat differs
from his predecessors is that he has
always seemed so open and sanguine
about his fate and, in a sense, his own
smallness. “Politics is a constant
repetition,” he once wrote. “How we
make kings for our societies, and how
after a while we kill them to achieve a
kind of rebirth.” Politics is not about
grand plans and ideologies in
Johnson’s mind; it is a cynical ritual
used by societies to keep on some
kind of even keel, a ceremony ofhypocrisy in which everyone is able to
feel better about themselves by
raising and then slaying the avatars of
their hopes and fears. Politics, like life,
drifts in and out of cycles — not in a
forward sweep. Problems remain;
histories consume; leaders rise and
fall.
The irony for Johnson is that this is
now the fate he is battling to delay,
while being fully aware that it will
consume him in the end. Today, a
sense of national unease and
unhappiness, disunity and trouble
hangs in the air alongside the very
opposite feelings that were on display
during the jubilee.
The Conservative Party is now
trapped between those who have
concluded that they need to kill the
king to achieve the requisite rebirth
and those who think that it has not
come to that yet. The risk for the
party is that it achieves the worst of
all worlds, leaving Britain to drift on
in the doldrums, without a fair wind
to propel it or a captain with the
power to sail it.
The strange reality is that there is
no real policy problem for Tory MPs
at the core of this crisis. The ritual
blood-letting we are going through
once again is not being pursued in
order to change anything other than
the guy at the top. The music has
stopped and Johnson is battling to
stay perched on the
throne, but little more
than that.
Of course, the
personality here is
important, particularly
so with Johnson.
As the prime
minister’s fiercest
critics have long
warned, his character
flaws are baked into
who he is. What made
him the popular
choice for his party
and the public in 2019
are the same flaws
that make him so
unpopular today: He
is a mocking,
disdainful observer
of the serious and their codes of
honour, someone who believes in the
fleeting, cosmically tragic and darkly
comic reality of life — and the power
of Johnson to rise above the rest, to
poke his nose out of the celestial
cloud even for a millisecond in the
grand sweep of time. This makes him
formidable and careless, historically
minded and short-sighted, endlessly
jovial but melancholy, useful for
smashing through old orders but less
good at imposing new ones.
Still, should Johnson lose this battle
to survive over the coming weeks or
months, the fundamental problems
that Britain faces will remain. It is
true that character matters. The
simple fact of Johnson remaining in
power makes some diplomatic
relationships in Europe harder to fix.
Perhaps the country will be able to
move on from Brexit only once allwatch their demise. “There was
something prurient about the way he
wanted to read about his own
destruction,” the protagonist says.
“Just as there was something weird
about the way he had been impelled
down the course he had followed.”
Why did Johnson write this, if not to
tell us something about himself?
Johnson’s political life once
appeared to be a sweeping epic, an
unending rise to power that would
ultimately reshape Britain and secure
his place as one of the country’s most
important postwar leaders. Instead,
this episode — even though he has
survived — makes clear that his time
in office now risks being more of a
tragic novella, unless he can find even
more dramatic ways to escape the
bind he has put himself in.
The past few days have
encapsulated both Johnson and
Britain, highlighting inner truths
about both, illustrating their deepest
flaws, ones that will not go away
whatever Johnson’s fate.
Confirmation that Johnson would
face a vote of confidence came as
Britons returned to work with
something of a groggy head after four
days of celebrating the Queen’s
Platinum Jubilee. Some Conservative
members of parliament, it now
appears, submitted letters of no
confidence in Johnson before the
festivities had drawn to a close, but
postdated them to ensure that
nothing sullied the royal occasion.
This little detail neatly sums up a
moment in 21st-century Britain that
was both bonkers and brilliant, joyful
and ludicrous, unifying and absurd —
an event that revealed something of
the country’s spirit while providing a
vent for it. This was a festival in which
a giant drone display above
Buckingham Palace beamed images
of corgis and handbags to a cheering
crowd of thousands while Diana Rosswarbled away onstage, and where
street parties up and down the
country created a rare and uplifting
sense of national unity — but one of
the defining images of the weekend
was the prime minister being booed
as he walked up the steps of St Paul’s
Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving
service in honour of the Queen.
Here was the extraordinary
spectacle of a Conservative prime
minister being jeered by a crowd of
flag-waving monarchists. For some,“
The past few days have
encapsulated Johnson
and Britain, illustrating
their deepest flawsPHIL NOBLE/APpageant on Sunday, when he learnt of the confidence vote. In his 2004 novel, right, he wrote of political self-destruction
The vote’s results have not lessened anger over the parties scandal, below leftd i b N a u o F n t n r a s t s J r tth is