In most successful revolutions, there comes a moment when the dictator is ushered out of office by a powerful figure within their inner circle. During the Arab spring, the formula became familiar: a military commander would claim they could no longer stand by as a despotic president brutalised protesters. They would speak up, jettisoning their career for the sake of the nation, and would give a pious address about their love of country. Yet as the bitter aftermath of the Arab spring demonstrates, the person who deposes the dictator often helped to create them. They are not a saviour. In fact, they may be the next dictator.
The Tory party is now home to an entire cast of these protagonists, who all claim they did the right thing for the sake of the nation. Over the next few weeks, Tory ministers will do and say anything they can to launder their reputations and heap responsibility for the catastrophic failure of this government on the head of Boris Johnson alone. Their resignation letters and tweets have all followed the same treacly template – one that is sickening in its dishonesty, disgraceful in its resorts to the rhetoric of patriotism, insulting in its reach for excuses, transparent in its identical format.
“I can no longer, in good conscience, continue serving,” wrote Sajid Javid, despite doing so through several scandals. Meanwhile Rishi Sunak believes the standards of “proper”, “competent” and “serious” government must be upheld, as if he had not previously realised that Johnson was none of those things. Nothing quite screams “principles” as supporting Johnson through numerous scandals, only to jump ship at the precise moment it becomes clear it is sinking.
As Conservative MPs jostle to the front of the crowd to sell themselves as would-be Tory leaders, we are expected to believe that Johnson rose to power entirely unassisted or enabled, or that leaders fall from the sky, like meteorites, and then squat in office until a big enough crowd is assembled to heave them out. Most implausibly of all, we are expected to believe that those who enthusiastically defended Johnson when he lied, cheated and recklessly mismanaged a deadly pandemic are now to be trusted to lead us next.
Another paper-shredding exercise is playing out in those parts of the media that either could not stomach the Labour alternative at the time of the 2019 election, therefore giving Johnson a premiership by default, or were intoxicated by him in a climate of Brexit bravado and gleeful Corbyn-bashing. To both of these camps, Johnson’s worst traits (which everybody was familiar with) were still preferable to any political alternative that remotely threatened the status quo on immigration, foreign policy or the chummy complicity between the government and the media.
Johnson’s rise promised to boost a media that thrived along with him and his party on fear-mongering about immigrants, the EU and other villains such as children who needed free school lunches. The 2019 election campaign had brought with it a “sense of slightly unfocused excitement”, Matthew Parris wrote in the Times in 2020. It wasn’t about what Johnson would actually do, he says, but about his “zing”, his “whizz-bang, sparkle, fizz, gusto, passion – and fun”. Only three short years earlier, Parris had written about the very same Johnson, “incompetence is not funny … A careless disregard for the truth is not funny.” Like those principled Tory MPs, the rightwing press continued to find excuses for Johnson, a man whose nature it knew all along, until it calculated that he was now no longer a “greased piglet” and instead a liability.
Again, the clock resets and we are expected to move on and believe that those who helped Johnson along the way feel as angry, disappointed and betrayed as the British people. And you know what? Many will believe it. When unpopular leaders are ousted from office, two things happen. First, in the vacuum of power their departure creates, king-makers and king predictors, eager to get in on the action, begin to make their bets on who will lead the country next. And so a frenzied horse commentary kicks off. The language of electoral race analysis has little use for the moral judgments that would expose the character of leadership contestants.
And so the news beat expunges the ghouls who are now running to replace Johnson, declaring them “slick”, “impressive”, “good at briefings”, “interesting politicians”, “ones to watch”, “serious” operators. Already, we are seeing profiles of candidates, endless polling that pits would-be Tory leaders against Keir Starmer and “who’s up and who’s down” commentary. As they are questioned, these candidates are already being called upon to give their views on everything from taxation to trans issues, but few will be asked why, only weeks ago, they defended Johnson against lockdown partying allegations (Grant Shapps), supported Johnson in last month’s no confidence vote (Liz Truss), or backed Johnson when calls for him to resign began in January of this year (Javid).
Everybody shimmying away from the crime scene also benefits from the sheer momentum that drives the collective desire for a new start. After Johnson’s cascade of scandals and two years of Covid bleakness, who wants to believe that the sickness in our politics and the frailty of our economy cannot be purged by getting rid of the single individual who had come to personify it? In removing Johnson from office, the right thing appears to have been done. Nobody wants to listen to the person arguing that the problem does not lie with a single individual, or that there has been no honour in Johnson’s removal.
The profound changes we yearn for in British politics will not be achieved by replacing one Tory leader with another. So long as this shock collar is triggered by the rightwing media and political establishment whenever structural reforms are proposed, little will change. To quote Javid in his own address to the Commons: “There are only so many times you can turn that machine on and off before you realise that something is fundamentally wrong.”
And so, as with all crises, at the moment when we are most susceptible to believing good news, we are sold the lie that the trouble is over and the culprits have been isolated. But it’s not over. The only hope we have is to plant our feet and stand firm. There is not a single excuse, or a single forgivable reason, to ever trust those who knew who Johnson was all along, and who inflicted him on the nation anyway.
Guardian Newsroom: The end of the Johnson era
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Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
