So Boris Johnson is a remainer after all. Clinging on in No 10, he has, it turns out, the same view of leaving as he does of the rules: that that’s for little people. The one consistent principle of his career has been cakeism, his ardent belief that he alone should be able to have his cake and eat it. And so, true to that spirit even to the last, he has decided both to resign and to remain in office.
Of course, it’s an outrage that he’s still there. Defenders of the Downing Street squatter say it’s no different from the way David Cameron and Theresa May stayed in post while the Tory party – not the country – handpicked a new prime minister. But this situation is wholly different. Johnson has been rejected because his colleagues decided that he lacked the basic integrity to do the job, that he could not be trusted with the keys to the house. By allowing him to stay there, possibly until October, Conservatism’s most senior figures are required once again to parrot nonsense in public, contradicting the words they had uttered no more than a day earlier, just to accommodate him (literally so). Like a vaudeville hypnotist who can make his subjects launch custard pies into their own faces, Johnson’s ability to mesmerise his subordinates into idiocy – even now – is a spectacle to behold.
If they do come to their senses and eject him sooner, they should let the cameras in so we can have one of those post-toppling-of-the-dictator videos, showing the golden wallpaper and the £3,675 serving trolley. At the very least, his successor’s first act should be to order a deep clean of the premises. And not just physically. Given the way Johnson burned through ethics advisers, there needs to be a full, independent audit of what happened in that building for the three years he lodged there. Leaks and resourceful reporters have revealed much, some of it emerging only now; but there will be more.
And yet I can see the risk here, for Labour especially. The danger is that the malaise is identified with one man, so that his removal is deemed to have solved the problem. Think of it as 1990 syndrome. The Conservatives successfully loaded the unhappiness generated by 11 years of Tory rule on to the back of Margaret Thatcher alone, so that once she had been sent out into the desert the party could present itself as cleansed of its sins – a move so effective that John Major won a majority two years later. Plenty of voters felt they had got a new government, so there was no need to get another one.
Which is why Keir Starmer – now boosted by the decision of Durham police to issue no fine and press no charges over “beergate”, and by the moral standing of having promised to resign if the decision had gone the other way – is right to say the issue is not the past 12 months but the past 12 years. For that reason, the party missed a trick after last month’s confidence vote, when 211 Tories stuck with Johnson. Starmer barely mentioned it in the subsequent prime minister’s questions, but he could have used that moment to drive home that, from then on, all of Johnson’s misdeeds were not his alone but were on all those who had stood by him.
Indeed, if this week’s resignation is to provide more than a brief catharsis, if it is to banish not just Johnson but Johnsonism and the conditions that made it possible, offering wider lessons for our politics, then the reckoning will need to be much broader – and it will have to include the issue that dare not speak its name.
Clearly the Conservative party has most to answer for, choosing this man as its leader in 2019 when everything you needed to know about Johnson was already known. They say that character is destiny. The habitual lying and deceiving that proved his undoing, and ours, were never hidden: their outcome was foretold from the start. Dishonesty is the nature of the man, and the Tories who made him our nation’s leader knew it.
But Labour, too, has a case to answer. In 2019, it put to the electorate an alternative to Johnson who, by every possible data point, was shown losing and losing badly. By sticking with Jeremy Corbyn in the face of all that evidence, Labour flung the door of Downing Street wide open for Johnson and all but ushered him in. As the elections analyst Peter Kellner has written: “Johnson’s victory in 2019 owed less to his popularity than Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity.” Johnson was no electoral wizard, blessed with some kind of magical appeal. He was just lucky to be gifted an opponent who was even more distrusted than he was: Corbyn’s ratings slumped after his response to the Salisbury spy poisoning in 2018 and never recovered. Blame for that rests not with those who pointed out this obvious reality at the time, but with those who refused to heed the warning.
There are other institutions, too, with lessons to learn. A media that indulged a liar, seeing his fraudulence as amusing and roguish rather than disqualifying. A wider political culture that places a very particular notion of charisma above all other qualities, a notion tightly related to class. Johnson’s shtick was bound up with the tics and tropes of the English upper class, insulating him from the consequences of behaviour that would have terminated a career decades ago if it had been committed by someone with a different accent and from a different school.
But the largest, most obvious conclusion is the one spoken of least. Assessing Johnson’s legacy, his admirers put Brexit at the top of the list. They’re right to do that, because it was indeed a transformative act and he was responsible for it, both as the driving force of the Vote Leave campaign and as prime minister. But now he stands condemned as a liar by his own followers, committed Brexiters among them. Surely, a country will lose faith in the product it bought when the man who sold it to them has been exposed as a fraud?
It should, but few are yet keen to press the point. Naomi Smith of the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain has observed from focus groups that telling leave voters they were lied to plays badly: “You can see a stiffening of the back. People say, ‘I’m not an idiot, I wasn’t fooled.’”
It might be wiser to proceed gently. Smith suspects that Tory leadership contenders, even pro-Brexit ones, will be newly wary of Johnson’s Northern Ireland protocol bill, for example, with its cavalier breaking of international agreements: they’ll talk instead of the need to respect the rules and to restore Britain’s reputation. That’s a start. Meanwhile, reality is doing the heavy lifting of discrediting Brexit, in the form of lost growth, rising bills, increasing hassle and the absence of any concrete benefit not expressible through abstract nouns such as “freedom” or “sovereignty”.
The dots are all there. Voters are already beginning to join them, even as Starmer insists that the subject is essentially closed. The politicians might not want to say it, but this week is a milestone in the fate of Brexit. The prime author of Britain’s exit from the EU has fallen: the standing of his calamitous project is heading the same way.
Never gonna happen…
Smartest thing to do would be to negotiate a return to the transition period as the country is clearly not done transitioning, if NIP, Dover woes, and all around moaning about the economy are any indicator. May as well stay with what works while transitioning to some unicorn working Brexit scenario. Only once that scenario is implemented and proven to work would it be safe to leave. That’s what a transition period is for after all. All that is required is to follow EU Single Market and Customs Union rules as the country has done for decades.
Yes! we should undo Brexit, however this is as utterly naive as believing we could make some sort of deal in the first place with the EU.
Honestly I would love to turn the clock back but it’s just not possible.
We can change the policies we have in dealing with the EU in terms of NI, trade, science, industry or what ever, but as the EU have said repeatedly since the referendum was first suggested, there is no deal to be had and they are bound by their own rules. We need to accommodate them.
There is no fucking way the EU will let the UK back in for at least a generation. It simply can’t be trusted.
Bit too late to undo the entire conservative party amd everything they stand for these days.
Agree, but try convincing a under educated electorate who listened to the Tories last time out! The Gammonati is still strong.
Oh, so now it’s *his* Brexit. How lame is that?
Seems to me, more than half of the UK were for Brexit. NI and Scotland voted to remain, but their vote was not honored or respected. No democracy for them.
We really need to take a long hard look at how someone like Johnson could possibly be voted in as PM, and with a massive majority.
I’ll admit I was completely taken in by him back in the days when he was on HIGNFY. But by 2019 surely most of us knew exactly what he fucking was, even if some of us might still have been surprised by his shamelessness.
The people who voted for him, of course, must take most of the blame. I hope at least some of them will have learnt their lesson.
As the article says, Labour must share a chunk of the blame for putting up one unelectable leader after another. Regardless of the policies and integrity of Brown, Miliband, or Corbyn, they were never going to win an election.
But also, the number of people who didn’t vote in 2019 was larger than the number of people who voted Tory. Why didn’t they vote? The most common reason I’ve heard is that it was a waste of time because of FPTP.
Firstly, so what? It takes 10 minutes, usually once every 4 years. Do it anyway.
Secondly, no it wouldn’t have been a waste of time. If a significant proportion of non-voters would have voted Labour (as seems likely) then at the very least it would have given Labour more votes than the Tories.
That would either have given Labour a majority of seats, or else it would have left us with the outrageous situation of the party with least votes getting a majority.
Best case Labour would have won, worst case it would have been undeniable proof of the massive injustice of FPTP. Either has to be worth voting for, surely?
his brexit can’t be undone. we lost all of our special privileges and will never get them back even if we rejoin. at this point, even as an avid remainer in the referendum, i wouldn’t vote back in because of that. if we got back everything we had before, sure i’d vote back in, but that’s not going to happen. i wish we’d remained but what’s done is done
I feel sorry for the people still seemingly upset by Brexit.
I doubt the UK folks want to rejoin the EU. You’d be a net payer that is have to finance other countries constantly, including the Ukraine as the latter will become a part of the EU eventually – so more money that will go to non-UK folks. That’s simply how it is. Rich countries such as Norway or Switzerland know exactly why they do not join (I am aware that they are paying money to the EU as well, but they do so primarily to access the common market – it’s a bit like a mafia how the EU operates. Either you pay, or you are not allowed from delivering to the market.)
Guardian la la land.
We would have to purge Johnson’s Tories from the party first. The EU won’t give us the time of day while any trace of his leadership remains close to power. Rejoining would also see us join under a different deal to what we had before we left, we will not be able to get our own way like we did before and we will join more in the way of equal partners. People may think Brexit was a mistake but will they want to rejoin the EU if it means we have to be in Schengen?
Move on already
We’ll become a bit more Scandinavian (often voted as happiest places on earth) by joining the single market. 100% of businesses owned by people aged 50 n under want to join the EU again.-Business morning free paper in London.
18 comments
So Boris Johnson is a remainer after all. Clinging on in No 10, he has, it turns out, the same view of leaving as he does of the rules: that that’s for little people. The one consistent principle of his career has been cakeism, his ardent belief that he alone should be able to have his cake and eat it. And so, true to that spirit even to the last, he has decided both to resign and to remain in office.
Of course, it’s an outrage that he’s still there. Defenders of the Downing Street squatter say it’s no different from the way David Cameron and Theresa May stayed in post while the Tory party – not the country – handpicked a new prime minister. But this situation is wholly different. Johnson has been rejected because his colleagues decided that he lacked the basic integrity to do the job, that he could not be trusted with the keys to the house. By allowing him to stay there, possibly until October, Conservatism’s most senior figures are required once again to parrot nonsense in public, contradicting the words they had uttered no more than a day earlier, just to accommodate him (literally so). Like a vaudeville hypnotist who can make his subjects launch custard pies into their own faces, Johnson’s ability to mesmerise his subordinates into idiocy – even now – is a spectacle to behold.
If they do come to their senses and eject him sooner, they should let the cameras in so we can have one of those post-toppling-of-the-dictator videos, showing the golden wallpaper and the £3,675 serving trolley. At the very least, his successor’s first act should be to order a deep clean of the premises. And not just physically. Given the way Johnson burned through ethics advisers, there needs to be a full, independent audit of what happened in that building for the three years he lodged there. Leaks and resourceful reporters have revealed much, some of it emerging only now; but there will be more.
And yet I can see the risk here, for Labour especially. The danger is that the malaise is identified with one man, so that his removal is deemed to have solved the problem. Think of it as 1990 syndrome. The Conservatives successfully loaded the unhappiness generated by 11 years of Tory rule on to the back of Margaret Thatcher alone, so that once she had been sent out into the desert the party could present itself as cleansed of its sins – a move so effective that John Major won a majority two years later. Plenty of voters felt they had got a new government, so there was no need to get another one.
Which is why Keir Starmer – now boosted by the decision of Durham police to issue no fine and press no charges over “beergate”, and by the moral standing of having promised to resign if the decision had gone the other way – is right to say the issue is not the past 12 months but the past 12 years. For that reason, the party missed a trick after last month’s confidence vote, when 211 Tories stuck with Johnson. Starmer barely mentioned it in the subsequent prime minister’s questions, but he could have used that moment to drive home that, from then on, all of Johnson’s misdeeds were not his alone but were on all those who had stood by him.
Indeed, if this week’s resignation is to provide more than a brief catharsis, if it is to banish not just Johnson but Johnsonism and the conditions that made it possible, offering wider lessons for our politics, then the reckoning will need to be much broader – and it will have to include the issue that dare not speak its name.
Clearly the Conservative party has most to answer for, choosing this man as its leader in 2019 when everything you needed to know about Johnson was already known. They say that character is destiny. The habitual lying and deceiving that proved his undoing, and ours, were never hidden: their outcome was foretold from the start. Dishonesty is the nature of the man, and the Tories who made him our nation’s leader knew it.
But Labour, too, has a case to answer. In 2019, it put to the electorate an alternative to Johnson who, by every possible data point, was shown losing and losing badly. By sticking with Jeremy Corbyn in the face of all that evidence, Labour flung the door of Downing Street wide open for Johnson and all but ushered him in. As the elections analyst Peter Kellner has written: “Johnson’s victory in 2019 owed less to his popularity than Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity.” Johnson was no electoral wizard, blessed with some kind of magical appeal. He was just lucky to be gifted an opponent who was even more distrusted than he was: Corbyn’s ratings slumped after his response to the Salisbury spy poisoning in 2018 and never recovered. Blame for that rests not with those who pointed out this obvious reality at the time, but with those who refused to heed the warning.
There are other institutions, too, with lessons to learn. A media that indulged a liar, seeing his fraudulence as amusing and roguish rather than disqualifying. A wider political culture that places a very particular notion of charisma above all other qualities, a notion tightly related to class. Johnson’s shtick was bound up with the tics and tropes of the English upper class, insulating him from the consequences of behaviour that would have terminated a career decades ago if it had been committed by someone with a different accent and from a different school.
But the largest, most obvious conclusion is the one spoken of least. Assessing Johnson’s legacy, his admirers put Brexit at the top of the list. They’re right to do that, because it was indeed a transformative act and he was responsible for it, both as the driving force of the Vote Leave campaign and as prime minister. But now he stands condemned as a liar by his own followers, committed Brexiters among them. Surely, a country will lose faith in the product it bought when the man who sold it to them has been exposed as a fraud?
It should, but few are yet keen to press the point. Naomi Smith of the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain has observed from focus groups that telling leave voters they were lied to plays badly: “You can see a stiffening of the back. People say, ‘I’m not an idiot, I wasn’t fooled.’”
It might be wiser to proceed gently. Smith suspects that Tory leadership contenders, even pro-Brexit ones, will be newly wary of Johnson’s Northern Ireland protocol bill, for example, with its cavalier breaking of international agreements: they’ll talk instead of the need to respect the rules and to restore Britain’s reputation. That’s a start. Meanwhile, reality is doing the heavy lifting of discrediting Brexit, in the form of lost growth, rising bills, increasing hassle and the absence of any concrete benefit not expressible through abstract nouns such as “freedom” or “sovereignty”.
The dots are all there. Voters are already beginning to join them, even as Starmer insists that the subject is essentially closed. The politicians might not want to say it, but this week is a milestone in the fate of Brexit. The prime author of Britain’s exit from the EU has fallen: the standing of his calamitous project is heading the same way.
Never gonna happen…
Smartest thing to do would be to negotiate a return to the transition period as the country is clearly not done transitioning, if NIP, Dover woes, and all around moaning about the economy are any indicator. May as well stay with what works while transitioning to some unicorn working Brexit scenario. Only once that scenario is implemented and proven to work would it be safe to leave. That’s what a transition period is for after all. All that is required is to follow EU Single Market and Customs Union rules as the country has done for decades.
Yes! we should undo Brexit, however this is as utterly naive as believing we could make some sort of deal in the first place with the EU.
Honestly I would love to turn the clock back but it’s just not possible.
We can change the policies we have in dealing with the EU in terms of NI, trade, science, industry or what ever, but as the EU have said repeatedly since the referendum was first suggested, there is no deal to be had and they are bound by their own rules. We need to accommodate them.
There is no fucking way the EU will let the UK back in for at least a generation. It simply can’t be trusted.
Bit too late to undo the entire conservative party amd everything they stand for these days.
Agree, but try convincing a under educated electorate who listened to the Tories last time out! The Gammonati is still strong.
Oh, so now it’s *his* Brexit. How lame is that?
Seems to me, more than half of the UK were for Brexit. NI and Scotland voted to remain, but their vote was not honored or respected. No democracy for them.
We really need to take a long hard look at how someone like Johnson could possibly be voted in as PM, and with a massive majority.
I’ll admit I was completely taken in by him back in the days when he was on HIGNFY. But by 2019 surely most of us knew exactly what he fucking was, even if some of us might still have been surprised by his shamelessness.
The people who voted for him, of course, must take most of the blame. I hope at least some of them will have learnt their lesson.
As the article says, Labour must share a chunk of the blame for putting up one unelectable leader after another. Regardless of the policies and integrity of Brown, Miliband, or Corbyn, they were never going to win an election.
But also, the number of people who didn’t vote in 2019 was larger than the number of people who voted Tory. Why didn’t they vote? The most common reason I’ve heard is that it was a waste of time because of FPTP.
Firstly, so what? It takes 10 minutes, usually once every 4 years. Do it anyway.
Secondly, no it wouldn’t have been a waste of time. If a significant proportion of non-voters would have voted Labour (as seems likely) then at the very least it would have given Labour more votes than the Tories.
That would either have given Labour a majority of seats, or else it would have left us with the outrageous situation of the party with least votes getting a majority.
Best case Labour would have won, worst case it would have been undeniable proof of the massive injustice of FPTP. Either has to be worth voting for, surely?
his brexit can’t be undone. we lost all of our special privileges and will never get them back even if we rejoin. at this point, even as an avid remainer in the referendum, i wouldn’t vote back in because of that. if we got back everything we had before, sure i’d vote back in, but that’s not going to happen. i wish we’d remained but what’s done is done
I feel sorry for the people still seemingly upset by Brexit.
I doubt the UK folks want to rejoin the EU. You’d be a net payer that is have to finance other countries constantly, including the Ukraine as the latter will become a part of the EU eventually – so more money that will go to non-UK folks. That’s simply how it is. Rich countries such as Norway or Switzerland know exactly why they do not join (I am aware that they are paying money to the EU as well, but they do so primarily to access the common market – it’s a bit like a mafia how the EU operates. Either you pay, or you are not allowed from delivering to the market.)
Guardian la la land.
We would have to purge Johnson’s Tories from the party first. The EU won’t give us the time of day while any trace of his leadership remains close to power. Rejoining would also see us join under a different deal to what we had before we left, we will not be able to get our own way like we did before and we will join more in the way of equal partners. People may think Brexit was a mistake but will they want to rejoin the EU if it means we have to be in Schengen?
Move on already
We’ll become a bit more Scandinavian (often voted as happiest places on earth) by joining the single market. 100% of businesses owned by people aged 50 n under want to join the EU again.-Business morning free paper in London.
Lol good luck with that.
What about the lies told by the remoaners then?