Why Boris Johnson Failed

©UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor (see more at https://twitter.com/jess__taylor__?lang=en)

‘I’m always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don’t even take what I am seriously.’

David Bowie

‘Far from complete and comprehensible… fall well short of its expectations… widely criticised and often mistrusted’.

UK Statistics Authority on Boris Johnson’s government’s data on testing

Almost every prediction I’ve ever made about politics has been wrong. There’s only one thing I’ve been consistently unwrong about, and that’s Boris Johnson. Johnson, I argued long ago, would be a truly terrible prime minister.

Even I didn’t think he’d be this terrible. All the worsts pile up around the government. The worst death rate, the longest lockdown and now the worst economic hit. As the questions and inquiries start to stack up, we need to keep our eye on what really went wrong.

Amid all the bewildering gyrations and U-turns, Johnson’s two great failures stand out. His two Munich moments, if you’ll let me do that, were not locking down quickly enough and not protecting care homes. His non-lockdown decision-and it was his and his alone- may have cost 25,000 lives. His failure to protect care homes meant residents were ‘thrown to the wolves’, as the Public Accounts Committee put it. Italy bought the time for its fellow European countries to prepare. Johnson squandered it. This not a question of hindsight, as these problems were known at the time.

The tragedy is that COVID-19 has only revealed a great deal that we already know about Johnson. You can tell a lot about people, I think Harry Hill once said, from the way they are. Everything anyone ever wanted or needed to know about our prime minister was already on display and has been for years and years-Boris Johnson would probably say ‘aeons’. Johnson’s failures have been hiding in plain sight, like an illegally parked car.

As I wrote, back in June 2019

In 2011, when Boris took part in a police drugs raid, complete with TV cameras and a stab vest, the suspect greeted his appearance with the words “what the X are you doing here”? We may well all shout that, collectively, when he walks into Downing Street.

I’ve read more than is healthy about Johnson, two whole biographies from Sonia Purnell and Andrew Gimson (both very good, by the way). One Falstaffian reading of his life story is that he has capered nimbly from one disaster to the next, carried through crisis after crisis by his charm, wit and (undefined) brilliance. Bluffing his way through the lead role as Richard III at school, by making up the lines, sums up his life, his career and points the way to Britain’s fate.

Bluff is, indeed, the key. Reading between and under the lines we see, like Trump, that Johnson was allowed, appeased, and enabled. I’ve got two working theories. Theory (1) is that some of our biggest journalists deceived themselves into thinking Johnson was some sort of mythical genius, then were entranced by their own myth while Theory (2) is that public school Oxbridge chums look after each other, and they all love a public school rogue. Neither theory is mutually exclusive. It’s testament to our political and media culture that Johnson got so far with so little.

Only when regional journalists get involved does he come unstuck, when they hit him with difficult questions like ‘What is the R in your constituency?’ Thatcher always used to know the price of milk because, she said, ‘people would expect me to know’.

Yet why, exactly did Johnson do so badly? Why, in the face of a need for urgent decisions, with obvious answers, did he do so little? Countries around us locked down and protected the vulnerable while Johnson did nothing. To ask the most dangerous question in politics: ‘why’?

The fear of unpopularity

Ken Livingstone observed that Johnson’s greatest weakness was his craving for popularity. Of course, who wants to be unpopular? Yet political leadership is, at root, an exercise in making yourself unrelentingly unpopular. Almost everything you do will upset someone, and nothing you do will make anyone happy for long. My favourite definition of political leadership is that it is about ‘disappointing people at a rate they can stand’.

There’s a pattern of unpopularity avoidance in everything Johnson has done. Every time a decision appeared Johnson fudged it or tried to muddy it enough to confuse.

Take Heathrow. Every time the issue of Heathrow appeared, up popped Johnson’s plan for ‘Boris Island’, which sounds like some horrific, dark take on Love Island that I don’t want to follow to its logical conclusion. The great thing about Boris island was that it wasn’t his plan-and wasn’t really a plan. It was a smokescreen, a feint. Even his one truly divisive decision, to back Brexit, was very fudgy-and he ended up promising everything to everyone.

Or look at his racism, something that could make him seriously unpopular. It seems rather brutal to call the prime minister a racist, and my definition is admittedly a crude one: has he said racist things? This article lists the 10 most racist things he’s said. Not, note, the 10 racist things but the 10 most (is there a rating system?). His defence was that he wrote them, so we shouldn’t take them seriously. I’ll repeat that. He wrote them, so we shouldn’t take them seriously. ‘Extraordinary’ as Tony Blair once said.

Of course, he’s not the first or most racist PM. Andrew Roberts, no woke warrior, recorded that Churchill, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, shocked his Cabinet colleagues with his racist language. I’m horrified and fascinated as to what exactly you needed to say in the 1920s that was so upsetting it would shock a Conservative Cabinet Minister.

Yet Johnson muddied the waters just enough as Mayor of London. He tried to make Londoners think he was a liberal pretending, sometimes, to be a bit of a racist. Actually, he was a racist pretending, sometimes, to be a bit liberal. I can prove it. Sorry to get all science on you but check out my little flow thingy:

Before Mayor RACIST →Mayor BIT LIBERAL→ After Mayor RACIST

It’s like Donald Trump supporting Nazis and confused commentators asking plaintively ‘he’s praising Nazis-what could he mean by that?’

If you can’t grasp how much Johnson fears unpopularity, please try to explain to someone, anyone, why you should prioritise pub openings over schools.

The fear of scrutiny

This then links naturally to Johnson’s fear of scrutiny. Even a passing glance at Johnson’s long and un-illustrious career shows he doesn’t do responsibility and accountability. Johnson hates scrutiny in all its forms. He has turned avoidance of it into a kind of performance art. Even the Daily Star has noticed.

One classic Johnsonian way to avoid scrutiny is to hide. He hid away in 2011 during the London riots, as the ever astute Caravan Times reports here. In 2016, having won the Leave vote, he hid away all weekend. He somehow manged, in the rolling crisis that was Brexit before Christmas 2019, to hide in plain sight, refusing interviews, proroguing parliament, and deciding not to appear before the Liaison committee. He even hid in a fridge. Never waste a crisis said Rahm Emmanuel. Never face one replied Boris Johnson.

When he really can’t hide, he blames someone else. It’s very convenient that the SAGE committee advice in March chimed with what Johnson would want to do, which was nowt. If the SAGE committee really did feel that lock-down was unacceptable in March, they were only working towards what Johnson wanted (and that, by the way, is a political decision not a scientific one). It took until September for SAGE to split from Johnson, and realise they were being set up.

Fear of reality

This then leads to his largest fear, of reality. His failure to embrace reality in the COVID pandemic can be pinpointed exactly to the press conference of 12 March, when he began with his Churchillian flourish that people we loved would die and ended by advising the elderly not to go on cruises.

You can sympathise, of course, with leaders unable to absorb or fully grasp what they see. The history books are bulging with them. If you fancy a bit of a dissonance dip, have a read of Chamberlain’s really rather upbeat report of his first meeting with Hitler . Contrast this with what Hitler reportedly said, that if Chamberlain visited him again he would kick him down the stairs.

While we are on the subject of Hitler, it is in his flights from reality that Johnson most resembles the neo-fascist gangster in the White House. Like Trump, Johnson’s fear of reality leads to weird, warping double think. To take a minor example, in the same week Johnson ‘intervened’ to defend everyone’s favourite Boer war sing-along ‘Rule Britannia’, the government was considering replacing all its tanks with German ones. Now, it seems from my limited research that the Leopard 2 is a very fine tank or, should I say, panzerkampfwagen. Military today totally backs me up. But could you imagine what would happen if Corbyn had suggested getting in some nice GERMAN TANKS? We should also be careful about being lectured on history by Johnson, a man who believed that the Germans captured Stalingrad (they didn’t, dear reader, that was the whole point).

Then, whenever such contradictions become too obvious, up pops some grand Johnsonian idea. Let me tell you a story about a bridge. Just like Berlusconi, Johnson often retreats to talk of bridges when in trouble. Bridges to France, or to Northern Ireland. Unbuilt garden bridges. This is, as psychotherapists would say, ‘interesting’. A foray on ‘dream meaning.net’reveals that bridges signal transition and change. Even more ‘interesting’ is that unbuilt bridges ‘suggests that the transition or upcoming journey will be an emotional one’. Though there’s no explanation of how to interpret an imaginary bridge built over what could be a million tons of World War Two munitions. Bit bespoke, that one, even for dream meanings.net.

Where are we now?

Let me show you how this all works together. I’ve argued before that Johnson’s inconsistency is a strength not a weakness, especially when played against a media who can’t or won’t attack. This means he can get away with a whole rolling sludge of dangerous blather, even on extraordinarily serious subjects, with a fantasy world preserved, scrutiny denied and blame avoided. He creates a whirl of reality retreating, gas lighting smokescreens.

Let’s take this care homes answer from his first appearance at the Liaison committee. He tried to explain that he hadn’t dangerously expose care homes:

Do not forget that, as Chris Hopson of NHS Providers has said, every discharge from the NHS into care homes was made by clinicians, and in no case was that done when people were suspected of being coronavirus victims. Actually, the number of discharges from the NHS into care homes went down by 40% from January to March, so it is just not true that there was some concerted effort to move people out of NHS beds into care homes. That is just not right.

Well, with a deft use of the internet and 15 minutes of spare time, I looked into this, using these stats from the NHS and an ITV investigation. Here is the quote again. The parts in brackets are my additions, though you could imagine them as his conscience:

Do not forget that, as Chris Hopson of NHS Providers has said [blame him], every discharge from the NHS into care homes was made by clinicians [who couldn’t test], and in no case was that done when people were suspected of being coronavirus victims [because there were no tests to know, so it was a guess]. Actually, the number of discharges from the NHS into care homes went down by 40% from January to March [though 4 in every 20 people discharged went to a care home, making up around 25,000 people] so it is just not true that there was some concerted effort to move people out of NHS beds into care homes[but it looks like untested, possibly asymptomatic, patients were sent to care homes with inadequate PPE].That is just not right [it is. I just proved it].

This paragraph from a report by the National Audit Office calmly demolishes Johnson’s claim. Here’s the key section:

On 17 March, hospitals were advised to discharge urgently all in-patients medically fit to leave in order to increase capacity to support those with acute healthcare needs. Between 17 March and 15 April, around 25,000 people were discharged from hospitals into care homes, compared with around 35,000 people in the same period in 2019. Due to government policy at the time, not all patients were tested for COVID-19 before discharge, with priority given to patients with symptoms.

If, and it’s a big IF, someone picked him up on this, it could be extraordinarily problematic. I’ll say that again for everyone at the back. If, and it’s a big IF, someone picked him up on this, it could be extraordinarily problematic. Government policy meant in just under a month they discharged 25,000 vulnerable potential COVID patients back to care homes already left defenceless and vulnerable. Thrown to the wolves. ‘Why’ every journalist should be asking ‘are so many people dead?’

So, what next?

Johnson has failed. He has failed at the only task a Prime Minister truly has, which is to keep their country safe. Whether he hangs on, lingers around, or bounces back, please remember all the responsibility is his, and he has failed. In a perfect world, his name would now rest with Chamberlain in the graveyard of reputations where none is saved.

For a man supposedly writing a book about Shakespeare, he has failed to foresee how the tide in the affairs of people can turn so quickly, or how those that plot and bluff their way to power find that hubris gives way to nemesis. I wish I could recommend some plays that deal with that kind of thing. Interestingly, his not yet existent book has already been reviewed by ‘Dave M’

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 April 2020

‘Working my way through this book proved to be an ideal distraction from the mundane aspects of modern life such as attending COBRA meetings.’

Even better ‘9 people found this helpful’.

It’s not the end for Johnson, but it feels curiously like the beginning of the end. We are not there yet. But Prime Ministers’ survival rests on the views of two groups: their own MPs and the ‘great’ and ‘British’ public. I have, of course, very little sympathy for these MPs, praising ‘Boris’ for their victory a few months ago, now suddenly discovering, to their horror, what has been extraordinarily obvious to everyone else. Johnson is (i) no good (ii) doesn’t care what they think and (iii) will betray them. The public too are (finally) doubting Johnson. His own ratings, while not falling off a cliff, have fallen off a badly built bridge into a World war Two munitions dump. Johnson has been ‘weighed in the balance and found wanting’.

Boris Johnson’s premiership rests on two irreconcilable facts. These are that (a) his bluff filled, reality free, and responsibility free leadership style will not (and probably cannot) change (b) his leadership style is utterly unsuited to a deep crisis that has killed more of his citizens than the blitz. We shall now see which fact prevails, and at what cost.