No One Left To Lie To. This was the title of Christopher Hitchens’ biography of Bill Clinton but it fits Boris Johnson’s end perfectly too, doesn’t it?
And regular readers will have a fair idea of my elation over the events of the past few days…
There I sat, glued to the news channels, unable to work, torn between the BBC and Sky News, finally giving in to Sky because they had the magical RESIGNATIONS COUNTER up in the corner of the screen. “It’s up to 30!” I would shout gleefully. “Thirty-one! Thirty-two!” It felt like watching Eurovision and every country was giving us 10 points. I only wished Sky could have added the loud, cheerful “PING!” of a bell whenever it went up. Although it might well have ended up “dinging” as crazily as the bell of Hector Salamanca in Breaking Bad.
And then there was Johnson’s grilling by the select committee. He looked shocking, like he hadn’t slept, as he was slapped and pushed and prodded and poked around and eventually forced into confessing things like the fact that he met solo with Russian operatives when Foreign Secretary.
You know, just a tiny bit of potentially light treason. But what joy, the sheer joy, of seeing this man cornered, of seeing this bloated pile of lies, someone who has coasted through their entire life on arrogance and privilege, at the end of his rope.
Johnson went to Eton and then Oxford, where almost every tutor he had along the way warned that he seemed to think he could get by without doing any work. That the normal rules didn’t apply to him. Like all malignant narcissists, like his pal Donald Trump, he thought the rules were for the little people.
Until there he was, finally caught and bound by them. For the first time you saw genuine fear and anger in his eyes and it was delicious.
And all the time he sat there getting pulled apart by people he doubtless considered non-entities not fit to polish his John Lobb shoes, there was that resignation counter in the top corner of the screen. Thirty-four. Thirty-five…
Part of the reason it was making me so happy was that it was wonderful to be seeing one of the wave of “strongmen” authoritarian leaders finally being held to account. Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Putin and Johnson are all part of the same wave: populist leaders who came to power on a raft of crazy promises. They were going to build that wall. Get Brexit done.
Take the Ukraine. Take back control. Whatever. This was the first – and sadly the most minor of them – to be publicly skewered on his own lies.
Watching Johnson burning alive in the hot seat made me salivate at the prospect of Trump finally being made to testify under oath about his insurrection of January 6. We can but dream.
All Wednesday night the highlights continued. Michael Gove went to see his old friend to urge him to take the honourable way out, the way of the defeated Soviet general under Stalin.
“Michael went round with a metaphorical bottle of whisky and a revolver,” one Tory wag said. “Boris necked the whisky and shot Michael.” On a day of endless resignations, the hapless Gove would be only fired.
Laugh? I nearly bought a round.
By the time we went to bed on Wednesday night, the resignation counter was into the 40s. We awoke on Thursday morning to see it had hit 50 – and soon the news came: he was going to resign. I heard it, I saw it on the screen, but I still couldn’t quite believe it. Forget metaphorical revolvers, I thought they’d have to march in there with actual armed troops and haul him out of the building.
At 12.30pm the most unfit man ever to hold the office of PM came out of Downing Street to make his farewell speech. Who of his colleagues were left to cheer him out? Only the truly malevolent – Jacob Rees-Mogg – and the damned: Nadine Dorries. Poor Nadine stood there, cheering and clapping with tears in her eyes. And her tears were well justified, for she was surely crying for herself as the realisation dawned on her: “I will never hold any position of responsibility again.” Only in a cabinet as rotten as Johnson’s could someone as utterly wretched as Dorries get a seat at the table.
And the speech itself was entirely expected: a flat refusal to accept any responsibility, memorable only for the awful line “them’s the breaks”. It is, of course, a sporting expression. And it brought it home to you: that’s all this ever was to Johnson. A game. He came to power largely through championing a Brexit he never believed in and thought would likely never happen simply to advance his own career, without any thought to the economic misery it would inflict on his own country.
And now there’s the question of who will replace him as the Tory leadership contest gets into gear. Rishi Sunak? Sajid Javid? Jeremy Hunt? Priti Patel? Suella Braverman? Even a truly insane cretin like Steve Baker is stepping forward.
You see the problem with this list? That’s right – they are all absolutely awful human beings. There are degrees of awful within it, of course. You’d take the sane awfulness of Sunak or Javid over the utterly unhinged awfulness of Patel or Baker.
But the problem isn’t who leads the Conservative party. It’s the party itself. A party so devoted to greed and cruelty that it thought Johnson a fit leader. A party so riven with strife and self-hatred that it will now have had four different leaders in the last six years.
So let’s not worry too much about which rotten individual leads this rotten party. A rotten party that has, incredibly, been in power for 12 years now. Focus instead on an actual solution. Vote them out at the next general election.
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