A lying shit who likes to be liked

Pardon my language, but that is the way to understand Boris Johnson

The world doesn’t really need hundreds more words on the character, demerits and current travails of the man who has been Britain’s prime minister for the past two-and-a-half years. Others have done a brilliant job at describing and defining Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and the damage he has done, principally to Britain but now also to himself. If you wonder how much more this politician has really lied than other politicians, then the fiercely independent but quite Tory-inclined journalist Peter Oborne and his team have assembled this terrific website cataloguing the lies told by Johnson personally, in Parliament and elsewhere, and by his government. If you wonder how incompetent and inadequate he has been as prime minister I’d recommend reading the missives by another Tory-inclined but fiercely independent journalist, Bruce Anderson, on the Reaction website, or Alex Massie in the Spectator, the title of whose recent column ("The Unfathomable Inadequacy of Boris Johnson" tells it all. Or a more forensic recent piece on Substack by someone much less sympathetic to the Tories, Philip Stephens, on why this has happened, how it has affected Britain’s international reputation and what he hopes Britain will get next: “a measure of decency and competence”.

What I want to focus on here is something else, a seeming contradiction in this man’s flaws that has been illuminated by the current furore about the many parties and gatherings-with-alcohol that were held at No 10 Downing Street in evident violation of the various lockdown or social gathering rules that the British government had imposed at the time. For those who haven’t been keeping up, the Institute for Government has an excellent explainer both about the inquiry under way headed by the civil servant Sue Gray and the known timeline of parties under scrutiny. For those who think the furore is going to die down, Johnson’s nemesis, the special adviser he fired in November 2020, Dominic Cummings, produced an updated blog today (January 17th) which he summarised on Twitter thus:

Lovely people, aren’t they all? The issue of whether or not the prime minister lied to Parliament is a crucial one, because if it can be proven that he did then it is an offence for which he is supposed to resign.

But I digress, in a sense. The question I want to focus on is why on earth Johnson and his team held so many parties — so many indeed that among the juicy details have been the acquisition of a special wine fridge for Number 10 and the despatch of a staffer to a local supermarket with a wheelie bag to buy wine for one of the events. Virtually everyone who has previously worked in Number 10 Downing Street under recent prime ministers — Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair — has expressed incredulity not just at the number of parties that have been held but also at the role played by alcohol. Not for decades has the British prime minister’s office been associated closely with alcohol: Margaret Thatcher was known to be partial to Scotch whisky in the evenings, but no one would have described her operation as boozy. You have to go back to Labour’s Harold Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s to find what is now being described in the British media and, especially, by Tory politicians as a “drinking culture in Number 10”.

Yet this phrase is itself strange. It feels chosen deliberately in order to divert responsibility away from Johnson himself and towards some indefinable community atmosphere, as if the officials and special advisers holding the most responsible jobs in the government were somehow on the razzle, modern-day equivalents of the advertising folk in the Mad Men TV series. To anyone who knows British civil servants or the operations of government this is plainly wrong.

The explanation has to be a different one. It lies in Boris Johnson’s style of leadership and management. Anyone who has watched him in his various leadership roles, as editor of the Spectator, as Mayor of London, as Foreign Secretary and now as Prime Minister will realise that management is not his forte. He is not an unpleasant man at all. The issue is that he doesn’t actually care in the slightest about other people, which is quite a disadvantage when it comes to management. Like Donald Trump he has little or no empathy, but unlike Trump he does not come across as malevolent or nasty. So there have been many episodes following which colleagues and employees have described him as “a shit”. We won’t even start to imagine what words his two divorced wives and the girlfriends who have borne some of his children use about him. But despite thinking of him as a shit, especially when finding he has lied to them or been utterly disloyal to them, it is rare, possibly non-existent, for people to think of him as actually evil.

In part, this is because he has made himself a celebrity by being an entertainer. People of course like that. Why has he done that, now over many decades? The reason is that, like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi but absolutely unlike Trump, Boris Johnson likes to be liked. His symbol is the smile, not the scowl, the joke not the snarl. I will always remember the UK-Italy conference he attended in 2016 as Foreign Secretary, at which he made a dreadful speech that was somewhat accidentally insulting to the Italians, all about how the fact that Shakespeare based so many of his plays in Italy never having visited the place meant that after England’s schism with the Roman Catholic Church we still had lots of Italians doing business in London so they would still want to sell us Prosecco. (I simplify, but not much.) Following the speech he stayed for dinner, at the end of which he insisted on going round every table shaking as many hands as he could. (Disclosure: I refused, a refusal he later described as me “playing hardball”.) The reason is that this man who many see with justice as a lying shit is also someone who likes to be liked.

Hence the parties. He likes parties, because people like him at them. In Number 10, this has evidently been his main tool of management. He couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag in any conventional sense, but he knows from his Spectator days that a cheery party with plenty of booze is bound to make you popular. It is not that there is a “drinking culture” at Number 10. It is that there is a leadership culture which relies on booze and parties. The fact that Johnson encouraged his government’s own rules to be broken, even on the very day they had been announced, and overlooked the fact that they were whooping it up on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, does not need to be explained by some sort of principled rejection of covid restrictions or contempt for the public. It can be explained by the fact that this weak man, as hopeless at leadership as he is at concealing his lies, just likes to be liked, particularly by those closest to him. The officials who are now girding themselves to be made scapegoats for all of this should remember the following: these parties were nothing personal and did not mean that he liked you. He just wanted you to like him.