So farewell, then, Boris. He hasn’t resigned at the time of writing, but it’s hard to see how the great escape artists will get out of this one. He’s been handcuffed, gagged, placed in a strait jacket, locked in an iron cabinet and tossed into the sea.
It’s quite an ignominious end for a political leader who won an 80-seat majority less than three years ago. Unless he negotiates a grace period whereby he stays on as leader while a leadership election takes place, he’ll have served less time in office than Theresa May. Where did it all go wrong?
I’ve been a fan of Boris’s since the first moment I saw him thirty-nine years ago. I’ve described this many times, most recently in Quillette just before Boris became Prime Minister in July 2019:
I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.
I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
To say I was impressed would be an understatement. A few years before arriving at Oxford I had watched the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford novel, and had been expecting to meet the modern-day equivalents of Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche: larger-than-life, devil-may-care aristocrats delivering bon mots in between sips of champagne and spoonfuls of caviar. But the reality was very different: warm beer, stale sandwiches and second-hand opinions. Lots of spotty students, all as gauche as me. Less like an Oscar Wilde play than a Mike Leigh film.
In Boris, though, it was as if I’d finally encountered the ‘real’ Oxford, the Platonic ideal. While the rest of us were works-in-progress, vainly trying on different personae, Boris was the finished article. He was an instantly recognizable character from the comic tradition in English letters: a pantomime toff. He was Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night demanding more cakes and ale, Bertie Wooster trying to pass himself off as Eustace H. Plimsoll when appearing in court after overdoing it on Boat Race night. Yet at the same time fizzing with vim and vinegar—“bursting with spunk,” as he once put it, explaining why he needs so many different female partners. He was a cross between Hugh Grant and a silverback gorilla.
Reading that piece back, it’s a little embarrassing how enthusiastic I was about him. I posed the question everyone was asking at the time: “Can the clown prince conquer his Falstaffian urges and discover his inner homme sérieux? Can Hal become Henry V?”
And, foolishly, I concluded that he could – although I caveated that by acknowledging it wasn’t a rational verdict, based on his track record:
The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties. What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special, someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been able to dispel that impression.
To be fair, I had three reasons for backing Boris in July 2019, two of which turned out to be good reasons. I thought he could win the next General Election – which he did – and I thought he could get Brexit done – and… well, admittedly, there’s still some work to do on that front but at least he took us out of the EU, and with a deal to boot.
My third reason – that he was the right leader to take advantage of Britain’s new-found independence, cutting taxes, slashing red tape, embracing oil and gas production, championing free speech, defending our heritage, and generally behaving like a true blue conservative – turned out to be way off the mark. The left-wing commentariat like to portray Boris as a right-wing populist – Britain’s answer to Donald Trump – but if you take Europe out of the equation he’s more like Tony Blair in a blond wig. Is Carrie to blame? I fear that was always wishful thinking on the part of die-hard believers. The pitiable truth is that he cannot bear to be disliked, particularly by the metropolitan liberal elite. Watching him pander to them – such as blaming Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on ‘toxic masculinity’ – has been a source of ongoing frustration.
My disillusionment kicked in two years ago when he imposed the first national lockdown, which I wrote about in the Spectator:
A friend emailed me earlier this week in despair about the Prime Minister. “Boris reminds me of a hereditary king — Edward II or Henry VI — who is so staggeringly incompetent that he must be removed before doing too much damage,“ he wrote. “I felt the same way about May but Boris is worse.”
He is not the only person feeling like this. It pains me to say it, but I too have given up on Boris. The final straw was hearing him talk about his plans to create an army of ‘Covid marshals’ last week – Britain’s very own, curtain-twitching version of the Stasi.
What on earth happened to the freedom-loving, twinkly-eyed, Rabelaisian character I voted for? Oliver Hardy has left the stage, replaced by Oliver Cromwell. His Government has even said it wants to lower the speed limit on motorways to 60 mph. Didn’t Boris once say that voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3? Where did that guy go?
He came back – sort of. I never really got over the pang of disappointment I felt when he abandoned his ‘take-it-on-the-chin’ approach to the pandemic – the Swedish approach – and decided to fall into lockstep behind most European leaders. But at least he stuck to his guns and lifted restrictions on ‘Freedom Day’ on July 19th 2021 – and that was in spite of the usual chorus of ‘scientists’ telling him it was reckless and irresponsible and would cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. He clearly wobbled a bit at Christmas – and the chorus piped up again, refusing to acknowledge that they’d cried wolf six months earlier. But he more or less held firm and the remaining restrictions were then lifted, one by one, and the rest of the world followed suit (apart from China). He showed real leadership in the aftermath of the pandemic – if only he’d done the same 14 months earlier.
His defenders in the last few weeks have trotted out the line that he “got the big calls right” – and I suppose one out of two isn’t bad given that nearly every other Western leader scored zero for two. As for going all-in on the Covid vaccines and stretching every sinew to roll them out, that looks like a less impressive “call” with each passing day.
Ukraine? I give him points for showing a bit of manly vigour in defence of Western values, but I know that’s a minority view in the sceptical community – and the frequency with which he’s flaunted his close relationship with Zelensky and his popularity in the Ukraine in recent weeks has been so shameless as to almost reduce those points to zero.
So what was it that did him in? The obvious answer is his lack of a moral compass and Boris’s recent difficulties, which have all been of his own making, are a good illustration of the old saw that acting selfishly, unconstrained by conscience, ends up not being in your own self-interest. Is he a sociopath? Probably not, but he’s clearly an outlier on the morality spectrum.
However, while lack of ‘character’ has clearly been a factor in his demise, it’s also to do with his general inattentiveness. I’m sure if he’d thought through his response to the recent Chris Pincher scandal he’d have realised that his initial story – I know nothin’ – would quickly unravel. How to account for such carelessness? As a journalist, he was in the habit of tossing things off without giving them much thought, but as a Prime Minister? Why didn’t Prince Hall become Henry V? Is he constitutionally incapable? Has slapdashery just got into his soul? It doesn’t seem to be laziness, exactly, more that he’s acquired the habit of doing so many different things at once he cannot devote much time to any of them. Standard operating procedure for a journalistic edge-lord, I suppose, but disastrous in a PM. He spread himself too thin.
Assuming he goes – indeed, may have gone by the time you read this – what will he do next? I imagine Carrie will be off pretty sharpish (although that may be unfair), which means he’ll have three sets of alimony to pay so he’ll need to start earning the big bucks. Expect a seven-figure deal for his political memoirs, a column in the Telegraph and an after-dinner speaking tour – and probably half a dozen other gigs. Presenting Have I Got News For You? Kind of tragic, really.
Stop Press: Boris has resigned. MailOnline has more.
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Seems like the straw that broke the camel’s back will turn out to be how some allegations regarding one MP’s conduct were handled, on top of some work parties. Not the biggest folly and evil in UK peacetime history – the covid scam. Pathetic.
What’s really odd it around 550 to 600 MPs of all parties have consistently voted for or supported every one of his everyone of his disastrous policies: lockdowns, a terrible Brexit surrender, covid jabs, net zero, draconian attacks on freedom such as online censorship, police bill, unlimited immgration, trying to hand our sovereignty to the World Health Organisation. Massive borrowing and taxation. Spending our non existent money on Ukraine.
They are all his accomplices.
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If only he had the balls to admit that the reason he so vigorously ignored the lockdowns his own government imposed was that they were pointless.
Of course the invasion of France in Henry V was a hugely unrespectable matter, Olivier and Branagh, notwithstanding
https://www.ageofautism.com/2020/12/covid-and-shakespeare-the-dark-heart-of-the-national-epic.html
Also, at a military level Johnson is grotesque placing his own country in danger by pointlessly taunting Putin while equally pointlessly arranging to send tens of thousands of Ukrainians to certain death in a war which they can only lose (while pillaging our purses to give to the clown Zelensky to launder). A war criminal certainly. Falstaff turns seriously unfunny Henry IV Part II when he is sent to recruit a regiment and turns it into an extortion racket. The trouble is Johnson is only the most conspicuous member of a class who think like this, and we seemingly have not a single member of Parliament who dissents from this black farce.
I won’t be sorry to see him go – a deeply evil and disgusting individual.
Only to be replaced by someone equally – if not more so – evil and disgusting – which is good because the crazier the government gets, the more people might actually see what a farce the whole system is. Then we can lock the lot of them up and start again. I realise this might take about 50 years given the apathetic stupidity of most people in this country, but still.
(Go on Nadine, stand for PM, you know you want to!).
I can’t stand the bloke but I’d love it if he stayed on for another year or so just to piss the BBC off
That may be cutting your nose off to spite your face, but understandable all the same.
There’s a strong chance whoever replaces him will be worse with regards to Covid
A poseur, posing as a conviction politician but lacking any conviction; a weak, vacillating, wobbling jelly; by far and away the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.
You know it is difficult to think of many who were not quite ghastly. Obviously Churchill had colossal vision and courage.
Churchill was one of the biggest traitors in our history.
He was utterly owned after Chartwell was saved for him.
I think it’s probably a tie between Bozo and Bliar.
There are many evils which Bliar set in motion – the Supreme Court, the forthcoming Human Rights Bill, the Orwellian “education, education, education”, and there will be many, many more that we and even historians might never learn of. The damage done to this country by this pitiable excuse for a human being is incontovertiably incalculable.
Bozo ties Bliar for his falling in with the Davos Deviants and all the miseries that have followed, too numerous to list here, and none that members are unaware of. However, his relentless push of the C1984 injections will ultimately see him listed amongst the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc.
As this shit show brewed in early 2020 Bozo had the opportunity to aim for a Churchillian apprenticeship but he bottled it and sold himself like Judas. His place amongst the league table of the worst examples of our species ever to inhabit this planet was assured.
Yes if these injections turn out to be as bad as it is looking and if these excess deaths are as a result of lockdowns and jabs. Also if this 400 billion borrowed, wasted spent causes an economic UK disaster and I think that’s what he spent?
And the phoney war on Co2 and the zany net zero. Even if someone else is worse he is guilty as proven.
The coup against him was from the remainers, which started in earnest with C19, they could not believe Thor luck!! And used a perceived threat and their bitterness to sell the British people down the river just to destroy him, he was not astute enough to work it out and became a useful fool as they plotted with macabre glee behind their masks, dictating the covid lockdown guidance just to illustrate that GB can not survive Brexit and needs the EU.
Sadly he played into their hands and dragged the rest of us with him, disgrace.
Go.
Astute and to the point. It was hard to imagine that there would be a rival to the corporate Tony Bliar and then along came Boris.
Thank you.
…by far and away the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.
And that takes some doing.
Doesn’t it just?
I enjoyed this first-hand account of BJ in his Oxford years. But I don’t believe, given the global and seismic nature of events that have taken place, that we can view what has happened in Britain in a vacuum, which this outlook seems to want to. Covid-19 was surely a coup (by whom is another matter) – Western lawmakers became Vichy governments overnight, and their very survival now seems to rest on their willingness to follow external orders. I do believe that Johnson was at least reluctant to follow these orders because they were antithetical to his ideology, but the harsh truth I believe is that he, like all other Western leaders, is a traitor who handed our wealth, our way of life, our culture and our future to an occupying power.
Uncanny.
I guess the first time I saw Johnson was on TV as President of the Oxford Union going on about his class entitlement and I thought he was a pompous ass. I guess he has a talent when he wants to of connecting with ordinary people for just a few seconds to make them feel important – that is where he trumps other politicians. He probably belonged on the stage.
Tonight’s headline on the BBC news website: “Johnson sacks Gove”.
Sweet. I despise Gove – government covidian in chief.
Yes I enjoyed that headline too. Awful, awful human being.
You can understand why his biological parents gave him away.
We are on a speeding train & we know the brakes don’t work !!…
Savage Jabbit!!.. What a piece of work !! God help us , I can sense that he may eventually land Boris,s job
Oh no please no. That would be too awful for words.
Well Toby, this must have been hard to write for you- kudos for that display of courage and integrity alone-
not least the references to the ever worse looking vaccine program and his rabid Ukraine support aka warmongering.
It’s also quite illuminating for us who have not met him in person, whether we ever fell for him or not. He does have a certain charisma and entertainment value, that is for sure, as otherwise, he would not have been written up by you and his other fellow chattering class members for neither London Mayor nor PM in the first place.
I’ll certainly forgive you for falling for this so visibly lazy narcissist nihilist, not just because his successor will likely be even worse and more authoritarian on Covid and because Brexit looks to be an ever better decision by the day to this Eurotrash Remainer, despite its many overpromises and, sadly now so typically British, totally botched mishandling, but also because you did far more for the country and its truly liberal people than he did and ever will do just by launching this site.
(Even more so before its latest revamp, but that’s a different story.)
Seconded.
Boris’s skills are probably in sussing out what people want to hear, and persuading them (on first impression) his heart is in the right place.
But he has no idea or intention of actually accomplishing anything real. Any sign of trouble, he caves in. He seems to be spineless, unfocused, and overawed by charlatans. No wonder he is Prime Minister.
I doubt he has much idea concept of lying or truth. But in the scale of ethics,
lying about drinks after work, and about being aware of plausible worrying rumours is nowhere near as bad as imposing pointless expensive broken dangerous and futile measures on millions of people, just because he couldn’t stand the heat.
Indeed. It would be interesting to hear him appearing in court as a witness. What would his declaration be? Some of the truth, but not all of it, and some other things as well? He could be a field day for a competent barrister who tried to examine him.
What is going on?
There must have been a fundamental parting of the ways. Sinak and Jabbit are indisputably followers of the Davos agenda, so do their resignations suggest that Bozo has fallen out with the Reset? Or have these two called for his resignation on the grounds that he is not following the Agenda closely enough and “at pace” – a squealy little public service term – and Bozo has rejected their request?
The Davos replacements will have to have sworn allegiance to Bozo and that suggests a virtual civil war in the Tory party.
Or perhaps a show of tory infighting is designed to act as cover for something very nasty on the horizon?
Whatever the answer, we the plebs will be the least of these actors’ considerations.
An enormously capable and likeable man in many ways, but one who always seems to have the opinions of the last person who spoke to him…
I too enjoyed the persona for years, but the reality of government by Stonewall, Greenpeace and the medico-pharma mafia has been nauseating. The sight of him yesterday in front of the committee wearing an AIDS lapel badge with some bloke with a rainbow lanyard prominent in camera right behind him is almost too apt to be true. Finally he was brought down by a gay groper in Pride Month. Someone up there has a sense of humour.
He could have had his Thatcher moment, and told the cabal to sling their hook.
He tried, initially, but folded pretty goddamn quickly.
Politics is not supposed to be a popularity contest. It’s about doing the right thing. And he messed up because he’s a vain crowd pleaser.
Bye Bye, Boris. Maybe you can lift the lid on this horrid scam and genocide in your memoirs. I’ll read them.
“He could have had his Thatcher moment.”
Indeed. He even potentially had an opportunity to look like a Churchillian apprentice but when the God’s came calling he turned them down. Now he will forever be remembered as this country’s biggest traitor and greatest mass murderer.
If he has upset the Davos Deviants his future might not be too bright.
There must be some right kompromat on him. I doubt he was in a position to hold up for long…
As Johnson has
been forceddecided to resign, I fervently hope that he sacks that rat Nadhim Zahawi from his recently acquired coveted post as Chancellor!Do it, prime minister, do it! Please.
I think it’s more our tragedy rather than his.
Possibly.
60mph on a motorway! If we continue on our current trajectory you’d be lucky to 20, and then only if you own a horse.