It was never going to happen. Boris Johnson was never going to walk into Downing Street, tuck in his shirt, brush his hair and retire the qualities that had defined his life and career: dishonesty, a lack of seriousness, laziness and amorality. The fact that he was carried into No 10 on a wave of media and political support is an indictment of a political culture that saw all of those qualities and thought, you know what, he’ll do just fine.
He didn’t, of course. And it has been a surreal experience watching a nation seeing “Boris” unravel before them. It has been like watching a play in which the actors continually switch scripts – one minute they are Johnson lovers, the next Johnson haters. Overnight, the politicians who brought him to power, who stood by him at his absolute worst moments, switched parts and soberly resigned in disgust at his actions. Papers that cheered for him as he flew into No 10 and brushed aside his mishandling of the pandemic, turned too. In his final hours, the Daily Mail called him a “greased piglet”, and asked if he could “wriggle out of this”. A more important question should have been asked: who greased him?
What did his supporters expect? A man far more artful than the one they got, I suspect. One thing we were told, over and over, was that Johnson was in fact smart and canny (you don’t hear that so much any more), and that the clown show was just his way of disarming people so that he could sneak his gigantic brain past them without alert or threat. His trick was to have people underestimate him, and then, haha!: the joke was on them as he pinned them down with his epic political talents. Johnson knew exactly what he was doing, we were told, only last year, by the Atlantic. “His electoral genius lies in his ability to stop his opponents from thinking straight,” the interview read. A 2019 New York magazine profile of Johnson, headlined Boris’s Blundering Brilliance, asserted that “he has been serious all along, using his humour and ridiculousness to camouflage political instincts that have, in fact, been sharper than his peers’”.
The problem is, it wasn’t an act. And the insistence that it was, that Johnson was not as bad as he seemed, has been the making of him. Perhaps that is why the anger at his failure contained in the resignation letters of members of his cabinet is shot through with bitter feelings of betrayal. We made you, they seemed to say, and you have let us down. “I have been loyal to you,” Rishi Sunak’s letter read, but the country needed to be governed “properly, competently and seriously”.
In short: we made light of your lies, only for you to lie to us too. We indulged your culture war divisiveness, only for you to divide us as well. We discounted your volatility so that you could fortify us against a threat from Labour, only for you to bring chaos and scandal. You were supposed to calm Brexit uncertainty and febrile politics, a candidate who promised change but not real change, nothing that questioned the economic or social status quo. You were supposed to be disruptive, but only cosmetically so. We “priced in” a huge margin of error for you, only for you to go beyond even that.
Note that Johnson’s demise was not the result of ethical breaches so numerous that people couldn’t take it any more, but the falling out of co-conspirators. Still, it will all doubtless be written into a reassuring morality tale about how there is always a line too far. But the less comforting truth is that Johnson’s biggest crime was that he breached a pact, one strained by the pandemic and its aftermath: his role was to look as if he was on the side of the people, but discreetly work for their overlords to whom the rules did not apply. Then he was caught partying during lockdown and that illusion was shattered. Even then he had a chance; but he couldn’t summon the humility to make amends. He simply became too much work, for his party and his media, so he had to go.
Ends of stories invite neat narratives. Johnson will probably be written about as a tragically flawed protagonist who flew too close to the sun, or whatever. But his story is bigger than him. His “electoral genius” was to simply be in the right place at the right time when an establishment rocked by an undeliverable Brexit, and given the jitters by a resurgent Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, needed a candidate to unclog it all and drag the country forward somehow. The problems he was supposed to solve were, in fact, insoluble. Brexit remains unresolved now, with trade wars looming. Economic inequality continues to rise so sharply that a cost of living crisis threatens unimaginable devastation once the temperature cools. The national mood – something that Johnson was supposed to lift with his cheer – is dark.
Despite all this, a form of Johnson will come around again. Liz Truss, in accepting her new role as prime minister, paid tribute to him as her “friend”. We see in her his ghost: disembodied from reality, picking fights and stoking a culture war to distract from the fact that Britain’s problems are not fixable by a clever tax trick that will bring down inflation or new policies on law and order, but by fundamentally reimagining how business is regulated, and how wealth is accumulated and distributed. Johnson’s is a cautionary tale of what happens when a society becomes so wedded to the status quo that it will keep repeating the same mistakes, no matter how harmful.
Johnson is gone, but we have a new prime minister in whom the fear of change and an attachment to morally bankrupt modes of economy and governance still remain. Johnson was a symptom of failure, rather than a cause of it. His story is not about him, but us.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
