The three tenors of showman populism, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi, reached the top through a combination of telegenic clownishness, “I alone can fix it” braggadocio and a shared strain of narcissistic nationalism – and now one faces the judgment of the courts, another has fled the judgment of his peers, while the third contemplates the judgment of the heavens.
In the week Berlusconi met his maker – doubtless with a wide, permatanned smile and an inquiry as to where one might find the most winsome angels, only to be directed towards the downward escalator – Trump and Johnson respectively contemplated a charge sheet and a verdict of the earthly variety. Both are stunning documents.
Over 106 damning pages, Johnson was found unambiguously guilty by the Commons privileges committee of lying serially and seriously to parliament. There are plenty of jaw-droppers in the committee’s report, including confirmation that the breaking of Covid regulations in Johnson’s Downing Street was not an occasional deviation from the rules imposed on the rest of the country from that very building, but rather a way of life. We learn that “wine-time Fridays continued throughout”, that “birthday parties, leaving parties and end of week gatherings all continued as normal”, that while the rest of the country was locked down – keeping sick and dying children apart from their parents in their final days – No 10 was an “island oasis of normality”.
Despicable though such rule-breaking was, it’s the lying to parliament that matters most. Not for nothing is that considered among the highest of political high crimes and misdemeanours: parliament cannot hold ministers to account if those same ministers can lie with impunity. It is only the knowledge that they will pay a stiff, possibly career-ending penalty for dishonesty that compels them to confess awkward truths – the uncomfortable facts that, if they remained hidden, would make parliamentary scrutiny, and indeed any kind of decision-making, impossible. So of course Johnson had to be suspended from the Commons, and for long enough to trigger a recall byelection – though this supposedly fearless champion of the Great British people has run away rather than face them at the ballot box.
The 44-page indictment of Trump is no less shocking. Again, it’s not so much the original offence – holding on to highly sensitive classified documents, many containing military secrets, after leaving the White House – but rather the subsequent dishonesty. The US justice department sets out how, rather than hand back the papers as required, Trump had aides hide them from investigators and even from his own lawyers, stashing them in various rooms in his Florida resort including a ballroom, bathroom and a shower, storing them so sloppily they spilled on to the floor, and then urging an attorney to “pluck” out and conceal the most incriminating ones.
Meanwhile, the shade of Berlusconi will be hoping for celestial clemency for a past that saw him accused of bribery, money-laundering, tax evasion, Mafia connections, multiple corruption charges and paying for sex with a minor nicknamed Ruby the Heart Stealer.
Naturally, there are differences among the trio – Johnson is the only one to be outside the Vladimir Putin fanclub, and to have neither made nor squandered a fortune in business – but the similarities are more striking. Whether it be the promiscuity, the photo-op buffoonery, the personal shamelessness or the stoking of toxic national chauvinism, these three men were usually singing variations of the same aria. A key refrain was offered by the two who still live this week.
You could hear it in the responses of Johnson and Trump to the copious evidence set out against them, each man resorting to the same familiar claims, even the same vocabulary. Naturally, neither took a trace of personal responsibility. Despite the facts, the dates, even the photographs that anyone could see with their own eyes – brimming boxes of documents for one, a raised champagne glass for the other – both simply asserted they had done nothing wrong, that it was those who had investigated them who should be in the dock: “thugs, misfits and Marxists”, according to Trump, a “kangaroo court” according to Johnson. Each man claimed a bogus victimhood, casting himself as the target of a cruel, politically motivated “witch-hunt”.
You can see why both reach for that argument so swiftly, just as Berlusconi did floridly and often. It neutralises what should be a terminal political event, namely a conviction by a court (or its parliamentary equivalent). If that conviction can be recast as a partisan attack, then the guilty politician is transformed from lying crook to martyred tribune of his people. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you,” Trump told supporters after his court appearance on Tuesday. “I just happened to be standing in their way.” In the same way, Johnson insists the privileges committee – which includes two diehard Brexiters – punished him not because he lied, but “to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step.”
Both men hope that the ploy will do for them what it did for Berlusconi, reframing past crimes as wholly forgivable acts wickedly exploited by the leftist/elite enemy, thereby paving the way for a glorious comeback. It might even work for Trump; Johnson’s polling is much bleaker. While a majority of Republicans continue to believe Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him, a Savanta poll shows that a narrow majority of Conservative voters accept the committee’s verdict that Johnson deliberately misled parliament. Put that difference down to the contrasting media landscapes of the two countries: the continued existence of the BBC means Britain’s political tribes do not yet exist within wholly separate, sealed-off infospheres.
But the damage is great all the same. For both Trump and Johnson are, like Berlusconi in his pomp, tearing away at something precious. It might sound hyperbolic, yet it is not only democracy but civilisation itself that rests on our acceptance of the rule of law. In some ways, it requires a suspension of disbelief: assisted by the rituals, costume and ceremonies of the courtroom, we construct “the law” as somehow above the mere whim or bias of this or that individual. We accept it instead as a system that transcends us and to which we are all subject. It is the only way we can get along, the only way we can live ordered lives. The alternative is brutal violence and competition: the law of the jungle.
When Trump brands every federal investigator a personal agent of Joe Biden, every judge a partisan hack doing the bidding of the politicians who appointed them, he takes a knife to that conception of the law – one that is necessary for society to function. Johnson has similarly slashed away at public trust in parliament – the same Johnson who seven years ago this week urged Britons to commit an act of national self-harm in the name of a sacred parliamentary sovereignty that was, he claimed, spuriously, imperilled by Brussels.
They do it so casually, trashing the institutions on which we all depend, destroying the trust without which society cannot exist. They do it to get themselves through a news cycle, to keep alive the hope that, once more, they might wear the crown that they tarnished so badly. For them, it’s just a tactic, a move from a playbook. But for us, the consequences are lasting. Even out of office, these men have taken a collective reservoir of trust built up over many centuries – and filled it with poison.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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