Boris Johnson once wrote two leading articles, one endorsing ‘Leave’, the other ‘Remain’. Boris Johnson appeared on the show Have I Got News For You to raise his public profile. Boris Johnson uses his pithier middle name – ‘Boris’ – rather than his real one, Alexander.
It is, apparently, the little touches like these that make Boris Johnson sui generis. His name is invoked as a self-evident punchline, loaded with meaning. We are told that Boris Johnson casts a long shadow; so long, indeed, that serious attempts have been made to recast all of recent history as his personal drama: a schoolboy rivalry with David Cameron that festered, terminating in fratricide and Brexit.
Boris Johnson is not allowed the normal vanity and manoeuvre of a politician – the kind that we freely grant to, say, Gordon Brown. When Boris resigned from parliament on Friday, we were taken on a whistlestop tour to revisit those he had vanquished: George Osborne, Theresa May and more. We were invited to see them not as failed politicians, but as victims who had – at last – lived to see their old oppressor brought low. But why? What exactly has Boris Johnson done to these people? In 2016, and in 2019, Boris competed with these individuals for power. In each instance he did so on a clear political platform, known to all. In the end, he won, and they lost – vanishing into well-renumerated obscurity.
Assertions of Johnsonian uniqueness have never been convincing. Glance at the rap sheet. None of it looks particularly out of place. Hedging his bets? Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, now bywords for conviction politics, ducked the EU referendum altogether. Parliamentary purges? George Osborne planned to dump his party’s radical wing; Keir Starmer has already done so. Self-promotion and opportunism? Please.
We start to get the sense that all this is deliberate. Exoticising Boris Johnson as something unprecedented is designed to gin up a sense of crisis and emergency. It declares him to be somehow outside the body politic. Old bosses bemoan ever employing him as a young man. He should not have been allowed to write articles or books. From this, the use of special measures to hound a duly-elected politician from public life is only a short step.
Boris Johnson is a degenerate aristocrat who makes an appeal to the people. This archetype is probably older than democratic politics itself. Healthier polities are not so easily rattled by these kinds of adventurers. Regency Britain eventually let Charles James Fox back into the fold, and certainly never considered a lifetime ban from office. For Boris it has always been something of an act: demagoguery, but with a wry face. Only modern Britain, stolid, worthy, and neurotic, could see in this a real threat to the body politic. But see it they do, much to Boris’s own shock. Classical allusions have no doubt inspired him, and he has spent his whole career wondering why no one else seems to get the reference.
The pathology runs deeper still. The main event of Boris Johnson’s political life has been Britain’s departure from the European Union, a momentous act. But Brexit is exactly the kind of about-face that liberal democracy is meant to absorb, on the pattern of 1945 or 1979. The fact that this hasn’t happened simply discredits everyone involved. The real story since 2016 hasn’t been about one man’s ambition, but the collapse into incontinence over an attempt to moderately reform the British state, an attempt that – by the way – enjoys two democratic mandates.
The mandate was thrown away. Boris locked Britain down for over a year, and was only talked out of it by those he now denounces as wets. The temptation is for Johnson’s Rightward critics to cut him loose. But this would be a mistake. Boris’s present difficulty speaks to more elemental questions. What we are confronted with, now, isn’t the decadence and drift of the Johnson Government, but whether opposition politics is possible in Britain at all. Via the Privileges Committee, Whitehall and a declining class of lobby journalist asserts its old control over the executive. In years gone by, this control rested on leaks and on elegant obfuscation. But, enraged by Brexit, their tools have become crude and cracker-barrel. They no longer plot, only harangue. The endless drawing up of rulebook violations is used to keep ministers in quasi-judicial limbo, locked up in the extra-parliamentary barracks of Portcullis House. This is designed to harry and demoralise, or score a lucky hit; at the very least it wastes their time. As a demented last resort, MPs can now – apparently – be banned from Parliament outright.
Under these new rules, policies are of no moment. As are the virtues that Boris was said to lack: probity and ‘fitness for office’ – whatever that means. If personal probity couldn’t save Dominic Raab – who has eaten the same sandwich and ‘superfruit pot’ for lunch every day for the last ten years – then it will not avail anyone else.
So it has proven. Rishi Sunak’s Government is based on a simple idea: probity and ‘fitness for office’ to end the conflict with Whitehall. This idea has now been tested to destruction. Rishi has watched his ministerial bench slowly empty, picked off for trifles. Probing attacks have already been made on Rishi himself, which will end in his own arraignment. Either you assert the House of Commons’ sovereign authority over its rivals, or politics will simply disappear. Defending Boris Johnson would be a first step in this direction. It would say that a majority of 80 from the British people counts for something, and is more important than a nonbinding office handbook.
But ‘Boris’ is more than just a point of principle. Matt Goodwin tells us that Boris the man is less important than the broader ‘Realignment’ he represents. This idea should not be taken too far. Of those who have had any success in centralising power in Parliament there are exactly three: Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson. Each of these people – infamously – proceeded on individual will and charisma, not big ideas. A gift for command, gravitas, organisation, a common touch. These are high virtues. And they are rare ones – just ask Ron DeSantis. There is no Bonapartism without a Bonaparte to hand. Boris Johnson has immense popular appeal across the country, and, crucially, a cosy retirement of books and speeches no longer seems to be on the cards. As a classicist, the dilemma will probably feel familiar to him. It should be familiar to us, and we’d be advised to meet him halfway.
Stop Press: Read Boris’s scathing 1,700 word statement on the Privileges Committee’s report into partygate describing the findings as “deranged” and “beneath contempt”.
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Yet more good news for Fishy the WEF stool pigeon. I predict a plum job inside the organisation when he becomes the first Conservative PM in 120 years to return less than 100 MP’s at a general election. What an accolade. And Kneel will jump on board to further immiserate the country and its people before he departs for his preferred place of work – Davos.
It’s all coming along nicely for them.
How can we be so collectively dumb to keep putting an X in abox for these squirming parasite UN lackeys that have long since serving the public, and now bend over the bonnet of EV’s to be shafted up the a.. by the Davos deviants, as you often call them.
Tri Lateral Kneel let’s not forget ! One of their own !
And there was me thinking road tax went on, well, roads! I guess I’m too old fashioned.
This guy is a star. I won’t vote. Fu+k the establishment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqr2lbTcyM
It’s the most powerful message you can send. The only message they’ll hear: We see you. We are not playing. We are coming.
“The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – the Government’s fiscal watchdog – estimates the Treasury’s receipts from VED at £8bn in 2023-24, up from £6.7bn in 2020/21. Adjusting for the 570,000 extra drivers on British roads, this works out to a 17.4pc increase per head.”
Bloody hell! So along with all the other freebies given to immigrants we are now giving them a free car on arrival. No wonder the boats keep coming.
Eh what? Is that real or are you just winding me/us up?
Bloody hell I hope it’s a BEV!
Oh no. That would be impractical without off-street parking.
Well if you are a politician, a civil servant an advisor living in the hallowed Westminster, EU, etc, you don’t need a car, because you have a car provided by us the tax payer with a driver, and when you aren’t using that you are in London with all your ilk, and don’t move out of the little bubble you live in, apart from when you need to visit the proles, then its a tax payer funded car and driver, Helicopter or jet.
They don’t care about us, they care about their place in the political world, how they appear to the WEF boys and where theie next big opportunity is to make bucks for themselves.
Seconded
Never mind driving costs WHAT ABOUT Humza Useless & his pay off – Ready ? Well it’s £52K a year for the rest of his life !!
FFS!
You can tolerate a lot of abuse over a couple of months if you know that at the end you can walk away safe in the knowledge that you have 52 grand for life to look forward to.
He knew he wasn’t up to the job of FM, and I did wonder if there was a period of ‘time in post’ to qualify for that obscene level of pension…and he hung on till he decided to ditch the Greens.
It is not just a war on the motorist, it is a war on the whole standard of living of the people in the wealthy west. But ofcourse the car is the one really big example of our wealth. A private vehicle can take us from our front door to anywhere in the country and the Sustainable Development Collectivists at the UN and WEF hate that. They think a bus, train or bicycle should be all we need. The excuse for the lowering of our standard of living is always “climate change”, the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated, and yet huge chunks of the population really think there is a climate emergency, because they hear it nearly everyday on their 6 O’clock News. ——How can people hardly believe a word coming from the mouths of politicians on almost everything, but when it comes the climate they seem to swallow it all down whole? ——The answer it seems is endless propaganda and scaremongering often referred to as “science”
One group that is fighting for the rights and freedoms of all motorists is the Alliance of British Drivers (ABD.org.uk). Please support them and preferably become members.
Yup I am a member.