THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 19
liament for more than three hundred
years. Seventy-four per cent of M.P.s,
along with the Bank of England, the
Confederation of British Industry, Da-
vid Beckham, Stephen Hawking, and
J. K. Rowling—“the establishment,” “the
machine,” in the words of Leavers—
opposed Brexit. The referendum did
not specify what Brexit would look like.
The constitution stretched and strained.
The government struggled to cope.
May’s attempts to contain the oppos-
ing forces in the country—the politi-
cal imperative to leave and the fright-
ening economic consequences of doing
so—did not work. She ended up losing
her majority in Parliament and craft-
ing a compromise with the E.U., which
satisfied nobody.
Since taking office, Johnson has
sought to channel the nationalist im-
pulses that brought about the Brexit
vote. Unlike May, who quietly cam-
paigned for Remain, Johnson head-
lined pro-Brexit rallies and spoke of
looking forward to Britain’s “Indepen-
dence Day.” He talks winningly about
the country’s future outside the dead-
ening regulations and pooled sover-
eignty of the E.U. “The people who bet
against Britain are going to lose their
shirts,” he has said.
But Johnson’s political career has
been marked by lies and evasions. “He
is genuinely a bad person. Not an un-
likable person but a bad person, as in
he has no morals, no principles and be-
liefs,” a former close colleague told me.
“He would be whatever Prime Minister
was necessary to maximize the chances
of gaining and then maintaining power.”
Between 2008 and 2016, Johnson was
a liberal mayor of London. During his
campaign, earlier this year, to become
the leader of the Conservative Party,
he veered between promises to leave
the E.U. on October 31st, “do or die,”
and strange, chummy disquisitions on
his hobby of making model buses and
painting the passengers inside.
It is hard to know how much he
makes up as he goes along. Two days
before Johnson took office, he hired
as his senior adviser Dominic Cum-
mings, the former campaign director
of Vote Leave, the main pro-Brexit
organization in 2016. Cummings had
almost total control over the messag-
ing of Vote Leave, which became no-
torious for its brazenness and its suc-
cess with digital targeting. “Dom is
obsessed with propaganda,” a former
Vote Leave staffer told me. “He will
build an army that is programmed to
think like him.”
This fall, Johnson’s high-risk ap-
proach to Brexit has been defined by
martial imagery and language that sum-
mons memories of the Second World
War. He said that attempts to block
his plans amounted to “collaboration”
with Brussels. He described the law
passed by Parliament to stop Britain
from leaving the E.U. without a deal
as the “Surrender Bill,” and expelled
twenty-one Conservative M.P.s who
voted for it from the Party. On Sep-
tember 5th, Johnson answered questions
about Brexit in front of an unsettling
backdrop of black-uniformed police
officers. When asked whether he would,
if necessary, request an extension to
the Brexit talks, he replied, “I’d rather
be dead in a ditch.”
The government amplified its prep-
arations for a no-deal Brexit, collec-
tively known as Operation Yellow-
hammer. Opposition M.P.s forced the
release of an internal report warning
of interruptions to the supply of fresh
food, fuel, and medicine, as well as po-
tential job losses, nursing-home clo-
sures, and clashes between fishing boats
at sea. “Protests and counter-protests
will take place across the UK,” the re-
port cautioned. The poor would suffer
the most. The “Get Ready for Brexit”
ads rolled on. “I’ve never experienced
politics like it,” Dominic Grieve, one of
the purged Conservative M.P.s, told
me. “It’s a complete departure from U.K.
norms, and I’m afraid it will leave a trail
of damage.”
The fury infected all sides. “We are
now irreconcilably split for a genera-
tion,” Roland Rudd, the chairman of
the People’s Vote campaign, which ad-
vocates for a new referendum, told me.
“I don’t pretend that reversing this mad-
ness is going to bring us together. Hon-
estly, it won’t.”
Until Johnson came to power, it had
been possible to believe that there was
a middle way on Brexit, or to be in de-
nial that a decisive moment would ever
come. That was no longer the case. A
year before the referendum, Cummings
wrote a blog post outlining what theLeave campaign might look like. He
quoted Otto von Bismarck: “If revolu-
tion there is to be, better to undertake
it than undergo it.”I
n December, 2015, about one per cent
of British people believed that Brit-
ain’s membership in the European
Union was the most important issue
facing the country. This summer, a poll
of members of the Conservative Party—
whose hundred and sixty thousand vot-
ers elected Johnson as the Party’s leader
by a huge margin—showed that six-
ty-one per cent would accept signifi-
cant damage to the British economy
in order to get out of the E.U. Fifty-
four per cent were willing to see the
Conservative Party destroyed. “It is a
complete mystery how something that
was not a high-priority issue can be-
come in three years your defining po-
litical identity,” the M.P. Rory Stewart
told me. During the spring, Stewart,
who served as a minister under John-
son in the Foreign Office, stood as a
moderate candidate in the Conserva-
tive-leadership contest. Three months
later, he was among those thrown out
of the Party. “It is peculiar. It is fasci-
nating,” Stewart said. “We are all sit-
ting in the center with nothing.”
Each fall, Britain’s political parties
hold conferences—jamborees to raise
money, rally the faithful, and grab a few
days of media attention. At the end of
September, the Conservative Party gath-
ered for four days in Manchester, in a
convention center that used to be one
of the city’s main railway stations. Above
the entrance, next to the old station
clock, a large blue banner read “Get
Brexit Done.”
In a darkened auditorium, members
of Johnson’s government took turns
giving speeches on a low stage, and
taking questions from fellow-Conser-
vatives through an app. Matt Hancock,
who is in charge of the National Health
Service, announced a new hospital-
building program. Hancock wore a
sharp suit and spoke without notes, in
short, uncomplicated sentences. He de-
scribed visiting a cramped hospital in
the city the previous day, parts of which
dated from the nineteenth century,
when it served as a workhouse. “Know
this,” Hancock told the conference.
“We won’t just fix the roof. We’re going