Politicians, journalists and assorted hangers-on have been regaling each other with their risque Boris Johnson anecdotes for as long as I can remember. “Boris” this, “BoJo” that. Even his detractors used his first name. The braggadocio, the enjoyment of watching his ascent, reached a peak during his tenure as mayor of London. Commentators, even those on the left, joked about how fun it was to have a Conservative in charge of the capital city who whizzed around on a zipwire.
The bonhomie suddenly turned to buyers’ remorse when he embraced the Brexit cause in 2016. What, I ask now, as I asked then, took people so long? It was abundantly clear to me from the moment I met him (he and I were foreign correspondents at the same time for the Telegraph) that Johnson was a charlatan. While I was covering the collapse of communism from Moscow, he was in Brussels inventing stories about straight bananas.
It is not the ideology that rankles (one can always respectfully agree to disagree), but the opportunism. His only lodestar was his ego. Leave? Remain? Oh gosh, which one shall I go for? Let’s sock it to those pesky Europeans; let’s invent a few jolly lines about the Turks and the NHS; we’re not going to win, after all, but it’ll be a laugh, and it’ll help me shaft my old chums Dave and George. And so it was. The Clown-in-Chief was shocked by his own success, and the rest is British ignominy.
Johnson was not the cause of this country’s malaise or the main reason that it is held in disdain in many chancelleries around the world. He is a symptom of a wider failure of political culture. He was invented and nurtured by people who should have known better, but who were only behaving like everyone else.
When I joined the lobby as a political correspondent for the Financial Times in the mid-1990s, I was shocked by the trivia, the flunkeys and the parochialism of it all. Few journalists had any international experience or points of reference beyond this island. They saw politics as a game, reaching its weekly peak (or nadir) with the pantomime of prime minister’s questions. They might on occasion denounce what they called the “yah-boo” politics, but they were willing accomplices in the spectacle.
In the early 2000s, an adviser to Tony Blair, while rightly berating me for a cheap bit of knockabout commentary, said that his own government frequently managed to sidestep its errors because reporters didn’t dig deeply enough to uncover the facts. How many hospitals were really built? What happened to the latest housing promise? Drama is easy to write about because it doesn’t involve much work.
The laziness of that period is magnified many times now. Twitter has rewarded an army of would-be Johnsons, with their public-school one-liners and their faux fury. Public broadcasters believe they are delivering on their duty of impartiality by taking the most “liked” exponents on both extremes as representatives of public opinion.
One can only hope that Britain hit rock bottom during the double defenestration of last autumn. While Liz Truss’s 49-day tenure was rightly the object of mockery, how much serious analysis was there at the time of Johnson’s actual delivery? One example: regional inequalities are greater between north and south than between the former communist East Germany and the better-off west. Levelling up might have been a good soundbite for its time, but its delivery has been negligible.
As for Brexit, only now as increasing numbers of its advocates admit that their fantasy project has failed is the reckoning beginning to take place. It has taken a while, but explaining complicated trade figures isn’t sexy, or easy.
For the moment, British politics is back in the hands of two representatives of a more sober tendency. Rishi Sunak may indulge 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 a degree of common sense for the first time in years. Admittedly, the bar is set low. His most important attribute is that he does not indulge in flourishes.
As for Keir Starmer, he must be relishing the mayhem around him as he watches the Tories and the Scottish Nationalists self-combust. All the while, his preparations for government intensify. Yet much of the coverage of the Labour leader remains superficial, focusing on labels about his personality. Far more important is a detailed analysis of the direction he plans to take the country. Is he really going to remain as timid as he is now on Europe? Has he lost the appetite for radical measures to combat the climate emergency?
Politics is a serious business that needs to be conducted by serious people. Leave the clowns to the circus, the entertainers to comedy shows. The next generation of MPs should be rewarded for their deliberative attention to work in committees and their interventions on the floor of the House of Commons – not for their performances on Have I Got News For You or I’m a Celebrity. Programmes such as Question Time, clickbait for our shrill and superficial times, should start looking instead for some original thinkers.
With Johnson’s demise, a country mired in economic malaise and social division finally has the chance to grow up and to jettison politics as theatre. If it fails to seize the opportunity that the past year of mayhem has produced, it will procure for itself a younger clone of Johnson. And it will have only itself to blame.
John Kampfner is author of Why The Germans Do It Better, published by Atlantic
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