So Boris Johnson is a remainer after all. Clinging on in No 10, he has, it turns out, the same view of leaving as he does of the rules: that that’s for little people. The one consistent principle of his career has been cakeism, his ardent belief that he alone should be able to have his cake and eat it. And so, true to that spirit even to the last, he has decided both to resign and to remain in office.
Of course, it’s an outrage that he’s still there. Defenders of the Downing Street squatter say it’s no different from the way David Cameron and Theresa May stayed in post while the Tory party – not the country – handpicked a new prime minister. But this situation is wholly different. Johnson has been rejected because his colleagues decided that he lacked the basic integrity to do the job, that he could not be trusted with the keys to the house. By allowing him to stay there, possibly until October, Conservatism’s most senior figures are required once again to parrot nonsense in public, contradicting the words they had uttered no more than a day earlier, just to accommodate him (literally so). Like a vaudeville hypnotist who can make his subjects launch custard pies into their own faces, Johnson’s ability to mesmerise his subordinates into idiocy – even now – is a spectacle to behold.
If they do come to their senses and eject him sooner, they should let the cameras in so we can have one of those post-toppling-of-the-dictator videos, showing the golden wallpaper and the £3,675 serving trolley. At the very least, his successor’s first act should be to order a deep clean of the premises. And not just physically. Given the way Johnson burned through ethics advisers, there needs to be a full, independent audit of what happened in that building for the three years he lodged there. Leaks and resourceful reporters have revealed much, some of it emerging only now; but there will be more.
And yet I can see the risk here, for Labour especially. The danger is that the malaise is identified with one man, so that his removal is deemed to have solved the problem. Think of it as 1990 syndrome. The Conservatives successfully loaded the unhappiness generated by 11 years of Tory rule on to the back of Margaret Thatcher alone, so that once she had been sent out into the desert the party could present itself as cleansed of its sins – a move so effective that John Major won a majority two years later. Plenty of voters felt they had got a new government, so there was no need to get another one.
Which is why Keir Starmer – now boosted by the decision of Durham police to issue no fine and press no charges over “beergate”, and by the moral standing of having promised to resign if the decision had gone the other way – is right to say the issue is not the past 12 months but the past 12 years. For that reason, the party missed a trick after last month’s confidence vote, when 211 Tories stuck with Johnson. Starmer barely mentioned it in the subsequent prime minister’s questions, but he could have used that moment to drive home that, from then on, all of Johnson’s misdeeds were not his alone but were on all those who had stood by him.
Indeed, if this week’s resignation is to provide more than a brief catharsis, if it is to banish not just Johnson but Johnsonism and the conditions that made it possible, offering wider lessons for our politics, then the reckoning will need to be much broader – and it will have to include the issue that dare not speak its name.
Clearly the Conservative party has most to answer for, choosing this man as its leader in 2019 when everything you needed to know about Johnson was already known. They say that character is destiny. The habitual lying and deceiving that proved his undoing, and ours, were never hidden: their outcome was foretold from the start. Dishonesty is the nature of the man, and the Tories who made him our nation’s leader knew it.
But Labour, too, has a case to answer. In 2019, it put to the electorate an alternative to Johnson who, by every possible data point, was shown losing and losing badly. By sticking with Jeremy Corbyn in the face of all that evidence, Labour flung the door of Downing Street wide open for Johnson and all but ushered him in. As the elections analyst Peter Kellner has written: “Johnson’s victory in 2019 owed less to his popularity than Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity.” Johnson was no electoral wizard, blessed with some kind of magical appeal. He was just lucky to be gifted an opponent who was even more distrusted than he was: Corbyn’s ratings slumped after his response to the Salisbury spy poisoning in 2018 and never recovered. Blame for that rests not with those who pointed out this obvious reality at the time, but with those who refused to heed the warning.
There are other institutions, too, with lessons to learn. A media that indulged a liar, seeing his fraudulence as amusing and roguish rather than disqualifying. A wider political culture that places a very particular notion of charisma above all other qualities, a notion tightly related to class. Johnson’s shtick was bound up with the tics and tropes of the English upper class, insulating him from the consequences of behaviour that would have terminated a career decades ago if it had been committed by someone with a different accent and from a different school.
But the largest, most obvious conclusion is the one spoken of least. Assessing Johnson’s legacy, his admirers put Brexit at the top of the list. They’re right to do that, because it was indeed a transformative act and he was responsible for it, both as the driving force of the Vote Leave campaign and as prime minister. But now he stands condemned as a liar by his own followers, committed Brexiters among them. Surely, a country will lose faith in the product it bought when the man who sold it to them has been exposed as a fraud?
It should, but few are yet keen to press the point. Naomi Smith of the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain has observed from focus groups that telling leave voters they were lied to plays badly: “You can see a stiffening of the back. People say, ‘I’m not an idiot, I wasn’t fooled.’”
It might be wiser to proceed gently. Smith suspects that Tory leadership contenders, even pro-Brexit ones, will be newly wary of Johnson’s Northern Ireland protocol bill, for example, with its cavalier breaking of international agreements: they’ll talk instead of the need to respect the rules and to restore Britain’s reputation. That’s a start. Meanwhile, reality is doing the heavy lifting of discrediting Brexit, in the form of lost growth, rising bills, increasing hassle and the absence of any concrete benefit not expressible through abstract nouns such as “freedom” or “sovereignty”.
The dots are all there. Voters are already beginning to join them, even as Starmer insists that the subject is essentially closed. The politicians might not want to say it, but this week is a milestone in the fate of Brexit. The prime author of Britain’s exit from the EU has fallen: the standing of his calamitous project is heading the same way.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Boris Johnson resigns
Join our panel, including John Harris, Jessica Elgot and John Crace. as they discuss the end of the Johnston era in this livestreamed event, on Tuesday 12 July, 8pm BST | 9pm CEST | 12pm PDT | 3pm EDT. Book tickets here
