ppoliticians, journalists and a variety of hangers-on have been regaling each other with their risqué Boris Johnson anecdotes for as long as I can remember. “Boris” this, “BoJo” that. Even his detractors used his first name. The swagger, the enjoyment of seeing his rise, peaked during his tenure as Mayor of London. Commentators, even those on the left, joked about how funny it was to have a Tory in charge of the capital zip line.
Bonhomie suddenly turned to buyer’s remorse when he embraced the Brexit cause in 2016. What, I ask now, as I asked then, took people so long? From the moment I met him (he and I were foreign correspondents at the same time for the Telegraph) it was very clear to me that Johnson was a charlatan. While covering the collapse of communism from Moscow, he was in Brussels making up stories about straight bananas.
It is not the ideology that bothers (you can always respectfully agree to disagree), but the opportunism. His only star was his ego. to leave? stay? Oh my god, which one will I go to? Let’s ask those pesky Europeans; let’s make up a few happy lines about the Turks and the NHS; At the end of the day, we won’t win, but it will be a laugh and help train my old friends Dave and George. And so it was. The clown-in-chief was surprised by his own success, and the rest is British ignominy.
Johnson was not the cause of this country’s malaise or the main reason he is despised in many chancelleries around the world. It is a symptom of a wider failure of political culture. It was invented and nurtured by people who should have known better, but were just acting like everyone else.
When I joined the lobby as a political correspondent for the Financial Times in the mid-1990s, I was struck by the curiosities, lackeys and parochialism of it all. Few journalists had international experience or points of reference beyond this island. They saw politics as a game, reaching their weekly high (or nadir) with the pantomime of Prime Minister’s Questions. They might sometimes denounce what they called “yah-boo” politics, but they were willing accomplices in the spectacle.
In the early 2000s, an adviser to Tony Blair, while rightly chiding me for a cheap comment, said that his own government often managed to get away with its mistakes because journalists did not dig deep enough to uncover the facts How many hospitals were actually built? What happened to the last housing promise? Drama is easy to write because it doesn’t involve much work.
The laziness of that period is magnified many times now. Twitter has rewarded an army of Johnson wannabes, with their public school lines and fake fury. Public broadcasters believe they are fulfilling their duty of impartiality by taking the most “liked” exponents at both ends as representatives of public opinion.
Britain can only be expected to bottom out during last autumn’s double defenestration. While Liz Truss’s 49 days in office were the subject of derision, how much serious analysis was there at the time of Johnson’s actual delivery? An example: regional inequalities are greater between the North and the South than between the former communist East Germany and the more affluent West. Stepping up might have been a good sound for its time, but its delivery has been lackluster.
As for Brexit, it is only now that a growing number of its advocates are admitting that their fantastic project has failed that it is beginning to take stock. It’s taken a while, but explaining complicated business figures isn’t sexy or easy.
For now, British politics is once again in the hands of two representatives of a more sober trend. Rishi Sunak can please Suella Braverman and others on his far right; he may show a combination of weakness and ideological zeal in other areas, but to the outside world he is giving the impression that Britain is being run with some common sense for the first time in years. It is true that the bar is low. Its most important attribute is that it does not indulge in frills.
As for Keir Starmer, he must be enjoying the chaos around him as he watches the Tories and Scottish Nationalists self-immolate. Meanwhile, his preparations for the government intensify. However, much of the coverage of the Labor leader remains superficial, focusing on labels about his personality. Much more important is a detailed analysis of the direction the country plans to take. Will it really remain as shy as it is now in Europe? Has he lost his appetite for radical measures to combat the climate emergency?
Politics is a serious business that must be run by serious people. Leave the clowns to the circus, the entertainers to comedy shows. The next generation of MPs should be rewarded for their deliberate attention to work in committees and theirs in interventions in the chamber of the House of Commons, not for their performances on Have I Got News For You or I’m a Celebrity. Programs like Question Time, clickbait for our shrill and shallow times, should start looking for some original thinkers.
With Johnson gone, a country mired in economic malaise and social division finally has a chance to grow up and abandon politics as theater. If he fails to capitalize on the opportunity that the last year of chaos has produced, a younger clone of Johnson will be procured. And he will only have himself to blame.
John Kampfner is the author of Why The Germans Do It Better, published by Atlantic
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