Boris Johnson and the price of dishonesty
English original of article in today's La Stampa. To come shortly, a note about the shooting of Japan's Shinzo Abe
The fall of Boris Johnson feels as if it has been a long time coming. Yet by British political standards it has been remarkably fast. He first took office as prime minister on July 24, 2019, less than three years ago. In December 2019 his Conservative Party won a huge parliamentary majority in a general election. On that basis, commentators speculated that he might now be in office for a decade. But now he has been forced to resign, making him at this point the shortest-serving Conservative Prime Minister since 1963.
Just one month ago Mr Johnson had won a vote of no confidence in him called by his Conservative MPs. Yet with more than 40% of his parliamentarians voting against him this still left him badly wounded. It always seemed likely that another scandal would soon come along to convince members of his own cabinet to desert him and finish him off, and that is exactly what happened one week ago.
The nature of the scandal is not what mattered: it concerned sexual assaults by someone he appointed as a member of his government in full knowledge of that person’s character. What tipped the balance was Mr Johnson’s dishonesty about it, with the story being told by Number 10 Downing Street changing almost hourly.
That led two senior members of his cabinet to quit on Tuesday, leading to a flood of other more junior resignations, which by early on Thursday had reached over 50 people. Finally, the man Mr Johnson had appointed less than two days ago as his new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nadhim Zahawi, called publicly on his boss to go. And so, a few hours later, he said he would.
Unfortunately, the fight is still not over. Normally, a resigned prime minister stays on in Downing Street as caretaker until a new party leader has been chosen, which can take up to two months. That is what Mr Johnson says he wants to do, just as his predecessor Theresa May did in 2019, and he has assured the Cabinet that he will follow convention during this period. But with 50 members of the government having resigned, it is hard to see how this can work, and nor is Mr Johnson known for either sticking to his promises or respecting convention. Many senior Conservatives still want him to leave immediately, with someone else appointed as a caretaker, or with a much abbreviated leadership contest so as to get him out quickly.
So why has a powerful, seemingly successful leader fallen so rapidly and, for the country, so shamefully? To answer that, we need to go back to basics. There are two fundamental truths about Boris Johnson as a politician.
The first is that he is like Silvio Berlusconi but without the money: his key political tools are optimism, smiles and jokes, and his key skill is as a salesman. That skill is what won him and his party the 2019 general election. The second truth, however, is that like Donald Trump he has shown little real interest in governing, as opposed to simply winning. He lacks the basic competence or seriousness to govern well, and when he gets into trouble he resorts to telling lies.
It is that recurrent dishonesty that has created his downfall. In a system of cabinet government as in Britain, a lack of seriousness and competence in the prime minister can be coped with by other more conventional ministers. But when that leader is repeatedly dishonest, and in a way that is so incompetent that his dishonesty is quickly revealed, the whole government’s credibility becomes destroyed.
That is what has happened under Mr Johnson, and it was predictable. Everyone who has worked with him, whether as Editor of the Spectator magazine from 1999 to 2005, as Mayor of London in the mid-2000s, as Foreign Secretary in 2016-18 or since 2019 as Prime Minister, will have known full well that they were working with a charismatic salesman but also a dangerous clown.
During 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic took hold, it quickly became clear that Mr Johnson’s decision-making was erratic and his communication was chaotic. Other ministers, however, were able to compensate for his weaknesses, eventually bringing order into the disorder and in 2021 running a much-admired vaccination programme.
However, when his government imposed strict lockdown rules on the entire country, several times during 2020 and 2021, what happened was that Mr Johnson broke those rules which he had himself announced, and then lied about that rule-breaking.
This is what became known in Britain as “partygate”: the scandal of a large number of social gatherings that were held among officials and friends in Number 10 Downing Street at times when ordinary families were unable even to hold proper funerals for their relatives. The Number 10 party that caused most damage to Mr Johnson’s public reputation was one held the evening before the funeral of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, during which even she had to sit alone and isolated.
This rule-breaking was bad enough, but the most damaging aspects about it were his denials and dishonesty. His style is always to buy time through the lie, but often this just means that the problem gets worse. That is what happened again over the past few days.
Of course, inflation, the beginning of strikes on railways and other services in search of higher wages, and the rising cost of living thanks to energy and food prices have not helped. But those problems are shared with other countries. Brexit has not helped either, since it has reduced Britain’s trade and added further to those costs, without any strategy being evident for how Mr Johnson’s government planned to exploit or at least cope with it.
Yet fundamentally this British political crisis is not about those troubles but about dishonesty and credibility. The Conservative Party knew that if it were to fight the next general election, due in 2023 or 2024, under Mr Johnson’s leadership it would likely lose, heavily. With a new leader, and hence new prime minister, it will stand a chance. The political calculation is as basic as that.