Carrie Johnson recently confirmed she was expecting her third child, and I wish her stamina. At one point I also had three children under the age of three-and-a-half, and can confirm it’s quite a handful. However, at least I was not also married to a toddler at the time.
The Johnson household will soon effectively contain four babies of various sizes, with the 58-year-old one currently going through what nanny might call “a difficult stage”. He will be 59 on Monday, the very day parliament debates and votes on the damning privileges committee report that found he misled it. Unfortunately, the ex-prime ministerial nappy has already been filled, and the pram screamingly emptied of all toys. Or as Johnson put it to an aide last summer, hours before the resignation of 57 (FIFTY SEVEN) ministers finally forced him to quit: “dignity is a grossly overrated commodity”. Takes an overrated commodity to know one, I guess.
From ambushed-by-cake, then, to ambushed-by-snakes – why do these annual misfortunes dog Boris Johnson? At least, as predicted, other career options are already available. Courtesy of the Daily Mail, Johnson has just accepted the position of “newspaper columnist”, an extremely silly job, which in large part involves implying you’d do it better if only they’d give you a turn running the country. As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, surely we have tested the central premise of that one to destruction.
Anyway: back to the destruction. The Conservative party is at war with itself, public servants have been subject to a campaign of intimidation at the highest level, and the inquiry into the government’s error-prone and at times calamitous handling of Covid is just beginning. Cut to black, and the screen caption: “Four years earlier”.
Four years earlier, it is summertime, and a man called Rishi Sunak is himself writing a newspaper column, which appears in the Times beneath the headline “The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us”. And it’s certainly all there – the notion that Johnson has “instant credibility”, is “one of life’s optimists” and has “policies underpinned by values”. To the country’s problems, Mr Sunak writes, “there really is only one logical answer: Boris Johnson.”
Flash forward 18 months from then, and Johnson’s government is rolling out a hardhitting new advertising campaign. A very ill-looking woman in an oxygen mask is staring despairingly into the camera. “Look her in the eyes,” reads the caption, “and tell her you never bend the rules.”
Now skip forward again to Thursday, which Johnson spent howling about his “expulsion on trumped-up charges”. The only thing that is Trumped-up is him. All populists secretly hate their people, and Johnson was the same. But he also came to secretly fear them, which is why he didn’t have the balls to face them at the ballot box during any recall byelection. And why, a few turns of the wheel ago, he pulled out of running formally in the contest to replace Liz Truss, having initially thought he’d found the only thing worth returning from one of his many ligger holidays for.
Via these strategies of avoidance and denial, Johnson persuades himself that he is actually adored by the country. In fact, last summer, he was booed by crowds on the steps of St Paul’s as he arrived for the late queen’s platinum jubilee service, just as he had been booed by crowds at the cricket, and would soon be booed by crowds on Whitehall clamouring for his departure from Downing Street.
It’s not that his implosion could have been predicted; it’s that it was. That’s the thing with fatal flaws – you know at the start how it’s going to end. For all Johnson’s splashy manoeuvrings, the focus now must be on the Tory MPs who should have known this. Right up to this present moment, Johnson didn’t just lie – he lied about the lies he had told, and he lied about the lies that he had not yet told, but had every intention of telling. Having explicitly denigrated the terms “witch hunt” and “kangaroo court” to the committee, these were precisely the phrases he deployed when he didn’t like the way it was going.
Johnson can dish it out, but never take it. He himself ended the careers of those who didn’t suck up to him, without a second of remorse. He expelled 21 Conservative MPs for the crime of opposing him on a no-deal Brexit, including two former chancellors and his hero Winston Churchill’s grandson. Those who refused to return to his heel were barred from standing in the next election – not for lying to parliament, but for telling it the truth about the danger of crashing out of the EU without a deal. This week, his supporters threatened to deselect MPs who voted for the report on Monday.
Yet having banked their aggression, Johnson has now called them off, telling them not to vote against the report after all. Sorry, but that sort of get-out shouldn’t do. Tory MPs need to stop running and face up to what their party enabled, and at least make some profoundly belated attempt to acknowledge that and do the right thing. The parliamentary Conservative party in the majority showed appalling judgment on Johnson, despite mountains of indications it would turn out badly. It failed to understand not simply the vital flaws in Johnson’s criminally overhyped “oven-ready deal”, but human character itself. People don’t change – they just become more exaggerated versions of themselves in one way or another, and anyone who couldn’t see that Boris Johnson would end up behaving like Boris Johnson to the vast detriment of the country and its democratic institutions is too stupid and naive to be in politics. Monday is the time for Conservative MPs to turn up and find some backbone and self-respect – and if they still can’t, to accept that they, too, are in the wrong job.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
