Wrong ‘un Boris Johnson is a product of modern Britain

Matthew Parris  June 15, 2023, 3.30pm

Have you seen the film Being There? This classic 1979 satire stars Peter Sellers as Chance, a gardener with learning difficulties – but mistaken for a savant because his pronouncements make no obvious sense so are thought to be profound. He catches the ear of the US president. “Chauncey Gardiner” becomes a national celebrity and White House adviser, and is himself being lined up for the presidency as, in the final scene, he wanders off and walks across the surface of a lake. “Life,” we hear quoted at the end, “is a state of mind.”

Any pub, any workplace, may have a ludicrous if engaging loudmouth, but he isn’t made prime minister. So, in an important sense, Boris is innocent. The culprits are those who (variously) chose him to lead the Conservative Party, voted in a general election to put him in Downing Street, carried on supporting him in the face of every indication that he was an empty vessel – and now wail that we were landed with a wrong’un.

Landed? By whom? Ourselves. He was the product of 21st-century Britain’s state of mind. Splashing around at the shallow end of politics, we prized performance over substance. Dazzled by celebrity, we looked for a mascot rather than a commanding officer. Moreover – and this adds to our culpability – we always knew he was no good. Never will I forget the first time I blurted out the truth more than seven years ago in a Times column (March 26, 2016) whose headline and strapline our sub-editor got exactly right: “Tories have got to end their affair with Boris – Charm can make us forget the dishonesty and recklessness that would be ruthlessly exposed if he became leader”. I’ll quote a paragraph about the “abyss” I said we faced, and make no apology for an I-told-you-so because I did tell you so.

“The abyss is Mr Johnson’s public and private record. We don’t seem to see it, yet it stares at us from yellowing newspaper print, from an insuppressible internet, from the public record, from judicial statements, from colleagues’ judgments, from everything we know or ought to know but have been persuaded, such is his charm, to brush aside and forget.”

The response to that column from friends in politics and journalism should have taught me I was wrong in expecting Johnson’s early downfall. By email, verbally and by text message I was deluged with congratulation and encouragement. But hardly a single one of those egging me on had themselves gone on record with their own low opinion of the man. A couple of them were to back him, later, for the leadership. Since then I have learnt something about the world. But still, I’ve watched with disbelief as those who fell for Johnson the first time around have duly fallen for him the second time too, and the third and fourth. Is it just, as I’ve suggested, our era’s fascination with stardust and glitter? Our infantile preoccupation (and here I include my own trade) with the exhibition, “messaging”, “communicating” and entertaining – to the exclusion of sheer bloody competence in public administration? In fact, I think there is something more, something that seems temporarily to have disturbed the balance of the Tory mind, tilting it in his favour: Brexit Derangement Syndrome. Ambushed by zealotry, the party forgot balance sheets and CVs and fell for a mere cheerleader.

When, famously, Johnson wrote two draft newspaper columns, one in favour of Leave and the other in favour of Remain, to help him (he said) make up his own mind about which argument was most persuasive, there was something he omitted from both columns: the real reason he chose Leave. Which would best assist a Johnson leadership bid? The answer was incontestable. Help Cameron and Osborne win their referendum and entrench their own leadership? Or knock them from their perches? You know the answer. So did he. If Leave won and he’d led the campaign, he’d be king. If Remain won and he’d supported it, Cameron would be the star.

Next week the Commons will vote on the Privileges Committee report. The House will overwhelmingly endorse the committee’s powerfully supported conclusions. But some Tory MPs, though they would not disagree, will abstain. Why?

Since I would not like to use this word of named individuals, I will use it now, before anyone (including, perhaps, they themselves) can know who these MPs are. They are cowards, and examples of what carried this shoddy joker into Downing Street in the first place: an excess of discretion and a want of valour.

They will have their reasons, of course. Maybe a handful of activists on their local Conservative association are residual Johnson fans – why antagonise them? Probably a few thousand among their constituents still admire him – why upset a fervent minority when the majority (with little time for Johnson) will hardly notice? And then there are parliamentary colleagues. Love Sir Michael as I genuinely do, the sight of Michael Fabricant MP defending Johnson on TV is a tell-tale of dwindling support. Maybe a dozen from among some 350 really support him (though you wouldn’t think it from the BBC’s unsteady news judgment that “both sides” should have equal time). But why make an enemy of any colleague when, by abstaining, you don’t have to?

Thus. could silence win a majority among Commons Tories, allowing Johnson to remind us later that most Conservatives did not support their own colleagues on the privileges committee. Rishi Sunak, were his whips to encourage colleagues to abstain, should remember John Clare’s To a Fallen Elm: “Thou’st sheltered hypocrites in many a shower/That when in power would never shelter thee.” I’ve often enough quoted Margaret Thatcher on this subject. When hunting a crocodile (she told the late Ian Gow) and the creature has been driven onto a sandbank, you don’t help it back into deeper water. “You stick the knife in.”

Stick it in, then. Relieve the British people, and relieve your columnist, of ever having to think about this political bubble again. Boris was a state of mind. End it.