In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly
King Boris #KingBoris
Instead of a cabinet, Britain has courtiers. In place of a prime minister, there is a potentate. The traditional structures still exist, but as tributes to an obsolescent way of governing. There are still secretaries of state. But their place in the formal, constitutional hierarchy has little bearing on real power, which swirls in an unstable vortex of advisers and officials vying for proximity to Boris Johnson’s throne.
The product of this arrangement is the acrid stew of scandal leaking out of Downing Street – a mixture of financial irregularities, reckless statecraft and vendetta, some of it involving the prime minister’s fiancee, just to complete the impression of Byzantine intrigue.
No 10 has always had informal cliques and “kitchen cabinets”. Prime ministers have commonly trusted advisers more than ministers. Alastair Campbell was a mythic enforcer of Tony Blair’s will when Dominic Cummings was splashing around at the political shallow end, advising (and inevitably betraying) Iain Duncan Smith. But the current situation is unprecedented for three reasons.
First, Brexit. There might have been a way to disengage Britain from the EU without defining the task as a project of total rupture from the past, requiring elimination of dissenting opinion. But that way was not chosen. Johnson embraced the revolutionary ethos, according to which institutional norms are dispensable. Compromise is weakness; victory is secure only when all the bridges are burnt.
Second, the pandemic. Lockdown involved parliament surrendering power on a scale unknown outside wartime. The government took quasi-authoritarian control, offering MPs only cursory debate in exchange. The strictures of social distancing denuded the Commons. Whips wield MPs’ proxy votes by the bucketload. The claim that urgency trumps scrutiny might have been justified at the start of the emergency, but it became elastic, stretching across the full range of government business. Expediency morphed into a presumption that due diligence was optional and unnecessary when so much business could be done casually, in the VIP contacts lane.
Third, Johnson’s character. The prime minister approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there. Everyone who has worked with him in journalism and politics describes a pattern of selfishness and unreliability. He craves affection and demands loyalty, but lacks the qualities that would cultivate proper friendship. The public bonhomie hides a private streak of brooding paranoia. Being incapable of faithfulness, he presumes others are just as ready to betray him, which they duly do, provoked by his duplicity.
Video: Jen Psaki press briefing interrupted by curious creaking sounds (The Independent)
Jen Psaki press briefing interrupted by curious creaking sounds
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Johnson is driven by a restless sense of his own entitlement to be at the apex of power and a conviction, supported by evidence gathered on his journey to the top, that rules are a trap to catch weaker men and honour is a plastic trophy that losers award themselves in consolation for unfulfilled ambition.
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Having such a personality at the heart of government makes a nonsense of unwritten protocol. Much of British politics proceeds by the observance of invisible rails guarding against the tyrannical caprices that formal constitutions explicitly prohibit. There is an accrued cultural expectation of democratic propriety, a self-policing code of conduct summarised by historian Peter Hennessy as the “good chap” theory of government.
It was never rigorous. All manner of hypocrisies flourish when a self-selecting elite chooses the boundaries of legitimate behaviour. But there were boundaries. Johnsonism has none. He does, however, meet the traditional ethnographic criteria for a good chap: white, Eton-educated, male. It is a camouflage of repute perfect for a pattern of fraud that would never have been tolerated so long by so many if it hadn’t been perpetrated in the style, accent and idiom of England’s ruling class.
Conservative MPs are not under any illusions about the man who leads them. They appointed a rogue as their king because they craved the success that his methods bring. It was inevitable that evidence of his unsuitability for the job would leak into the public domain, even if it takes a while for misrule to have an electoral consequence. The question pinging around Tory WhatsApp groups is how far the current furore reaches beyond Westminster. Do voters care about loans to do up the Downing Street flat? Do they believe that Johnson said he would rather see bodies “pile high” than impose a third lockdown?
Most are reserving judgment pending next week’s local and devolved elections. If Tories poll well, the conclusion will be that Johnson’s system still works. Whether it is a good system – whether a prime minister’s popularity should erase qualms about his ethics – is a question that will be deferred until the next crisis.
That will come along soon enough. Downing Street is now a machine for generating vindictive enmity. Energies that should be spent on policy are consumed settling scores and lighting new fires to fight old ones. This is not a phase, nor is it an accident. It is a new mode of government being improvised because events flattened the old way. The court of King Boris combines the zealotry of a revolution with the conceit of an empire and the probity of gangsters. It is hard to predict how long such a regime can last, but two things can be forecast with confidence: the fall will be messy, and few who cheer Johnson today will boast of having done so once he is gone.