It seems rather apt that Boris Johnson pocketed a huge advance from a publisher for a book about William Shakespeare but never got round to writing it. Johnson’s rise and fall hovers between cheap farce and theatre of the absurd. It has none of the grandeur of tragedy. The only line of Shakespeare’s that came to mind at his political demise was the first bit of Mark Antony’s elegy for Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them”. If the good that Johnson did in his public life is to be interred with his bones, the coffin will be light enough. But the evil will weigh heavily on the coming decades.
This is what is so strange about Johnson’s place in history. It is hard to think of a figure at once so fatuous and so consequential, so flippant and yet so profoundly influential. His reign was short – its malign hangover will last long. He was a politician so incompetent that he could not keep himself in office even with a thumping parliamentary majority, a sycophantic press and a cabinet specially selected for slavish self-abasement. Yet he has remade the political architecture of Britain, of Ireland and of Europe.
Johnson’s dark genius was to shape Britain in his own image. His roguishness has made it a rogue state, openly defiant of international law. His triviality has diminished it in the eyes of the world. His relentless mendacity and blatantly self-seeking abuse of power have ruined its reputation for democratic decency. His bad jokes made the country he professes to love increasingly risible.
There is no pleasure in this strange story – not for the majority of British people, not for Ireland and not for Europe. It was another great English writer, John Donne, who wrote that “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less”. Britain was never a mere clod, and Europe is indeed the less for its departure. A dense but delicate network of connections and relationships – with Ireland as well as with the continent – has been cut or badly frayed. As Europe faces two overlapping existential crises (the climate crisis and the invasion of Ukraine), Johnson’s Britain has made itself a source of further disruption and uncertainty.
The disgrace is that, for Johnson, all of this is so trifling. His lust for power was real and deep, at least as demanding as his other, more bodily appetites. But what, in the end, did he really mean by power? His understanding of it was always that of the juvenile delinquent. On Desert Island Discs in 2005, he spoke of the pleasure of making trouble, which motivated his mendaciously anti-European journalism: “Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door … and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.”
It is indeed a weird idea of power. The soundtrack to Johnson’s political career is the crash of breaking glass as he chucks rocks over the walls of the neighbours across the Irish Sea and the Channel. The construction products of Johnson’s imagination – Boris Island, the garden bridge in London, the fabulous bridge that was going to connect Scotland to Northern Ireland – were fantasies whose very grandiosity made them infantile. But at least they never happened. It was the destructive side, that pleasure in political vandalism, that became real – a reality in which Britain seems likely to be trapped for a long time after his departure.
The worst aspect of this is his reckless sabotaging of the Good Friday agreement. It is possible to imagine that Johnson was smug enough to think that both British and EU political institutions were sufficiently robust to withstand his own cynical abuse of them. But surely even he must have had a basic understanding that peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is a delicate and radically unfinished business. He must have had some inkling that this is one place where the consequences of stirring up tribal identity politics were all too obvious.
But he did it anyway. He deliberately trivialised the problems of the Irish border, comparing it to the line between two traffic zones in London. He dismissed Northern Ireland as the tail that was wagging the Brexit dog – an irritating appendage, in other words. He played with the delusions of his admirers in the Democratic Unionist party, egging them on or abandoning them as the mood took him. He lied repeatedly about the meaning of the protocol he negotiated. He introduced legislation deliberately designed to make Northern Ireland a source of open-ended conflict with the EU.
This achieved two things. It brought relations between Britain and Ireland to their lowest point for decades. And it thrilled autocrats everywhere. Johnson made the rule of law and the honouring of treaties into another of his bad jokes. On 1 July this year, Johnson tweeted that “25 years ago, we made a promise to the people of Hong Kong. We intend to keep it.” The Chinese embassy in Dublin retweeted this with a reply: “2 years ago, we made a promise to the Northern Ireland Protocol (sic). We are determined to break it.” The terrible thing is that the Chinese were, in this respect, right: Johnson’s behaviour has given them licence to ignore the obligations they entered into 25 years ago.
This is the level to which Johnson has reduced Britain on the world stage, making it fair game for the taunts of tyrants. Even while Johnson was doing good by supporting Ukraine, he was simultaneously giving Vladimir Putin grounds to believe that the west only pretends to believe in the rule of law. This descent is not just bad for the UK. It is bad for the whole democratic world. Johnson turned one of the great historic democracies into a state in which his own cynicism, recklessness and lack of honour became official policy. In doing so, he has allowed every enemy of democracy to say that it is a hollow system whose rules and values are a sham.
It isn’t – and there are those who will continue to fight to defend and deepen it. The great question that faces Britain is whether it can rejoin that side of the fight, as an honourable, law-bound and serious presence in international affairs. It is very hard to see an answer coming from within the ranks of those who allowed Johnson to make such a mockery of their own country. The harm that Johnson has inflicted will not be undone quickly – or by those who found it intolerable only when it threatened their own immediate interests.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times
