The Tragedy Of Boris Johnson

I don’t think we can really assess the premiership of BoJo yet. I’m not a historian by any stretch of the imagination but it’s taken me the best part of the last 15 years to stop wanting to throw things at the TV or radio when I hear Tony Blair’s voice. (I have never stopped shivering and wanting to throwing things when I hear Maggie Thatcher’s voice.)

With BoJo we haven’t even had a proper chance to reflect and examine the actions he and his cabinet took during the Covid pandemic. They trot that out as “a great achievement” but we haven’t properly looked at the mistakes they made, the chumocracy that appointed minister’s wives to various roles - one undoubtedly highly qualified for it, the other really not. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I think there were necessarily terrible, but I’m not saying they were necessarily wonderful either (they are saying they were). How many of the “wonderful” things they did were their ideas? How many were suggested from beneath? How many mistakes were made and how much did it cost us, in lives and money?

Likewise, I’m of the opinion that Brexit is a disaster but, in fairness, it is still in the process and it could turn out better than I expect. I doubt it, but it could.

So, before we assess the impact of BoJo as premier we certainly need time for those two things to work through and for their impact to be properly understood.

However, BoJo hasn’t left office because of how he handled Covid or Brexit. It’s not really about the fact that he’s raised taxes and is paying out money hand over fist - things that Jeremy Corbyn said he’d do (actually Corbyn was promising to spend less and raise taxes less but he wasn’t planning for Covid). Rather, BoJo has left because of his character.

That makes his premiership a tragedy.

Before we go any further, I feel I should refer you to the excellent Educating Rita where Rita is taught the difference between tragic and tragedy. Tragic events are sad - death of a loved one for example - whereas tragedies reach their inevitable end because of character flaws that have been present throughout - you can predict the ending of a tragedy from early on, it is typically also tragic but it doesn’t have to be, it merely has to be based in the flaws of the character. RomComs are not quite tragedies, however predictable, because their ending is not really based in the flaws of the characters but is perhaps the closest we have to a “tragedy” with a happy ending.

If we look at BoJo his party lost confidence in him because of his increasingly erratic relationship with the truth, the rapid cycling of the story and the way it made his colleagues look bad and the Tory party look bad to those who might vote for them.

British politics, voting patterns are changing, but there are people, like me who will never vote Tory for all kinds of reasons. The fact that I, and others like me, looked at BoJo’s statements about the parties in No 10 and said “You damn liar” wasn’t going to cost them a single vote. Tory voters tended, at least en masse, to look and say and forgivable, honest mistake. The floating voters, who ultimately decide the outcome of elections I think were landing on my side of the divide, but it’s hard to be sure.

Then the Pincher fiasco hit. BoJo lied like a three year old and got caught like a three year old. Worse, at least for the Tory MPs, he sent others out to lie for him, with firm assurances that “yes, this is really the truth” and by the time they were being interviewed he had changed the lie again, so they were left looking like complete fools. Politicians in the UK rarely tell the big lie like that. BoJo is a notable exception. If they’re asked an awkward question, they’ll flannel, or they’ll answer a slightly different question. One of the favourites at the moment is about childhood poverty and malnourishment, they won’t address whatever statistics are raised, they will, instead, point (accurately but irrelevantly) to the amount of extra money they’ve promised to councils for child services over the next three years. But BoJo is happy to just lie through his teeth and seems to think he can just get away with it. We had £350Mn/w for the NHS (we never paid £350Mn/w to the EU, it was never all going to paid to the NHS). Before returning to politics, he was sacked from his job at The Times for just making up a convenient quote. The list goes on. The litany of lies in his professional life is long. In his personal life, it’s longer. So is his inability to keep it in his pants. No one is quite sure how many affairs he’s had, nor how many children he’s got. Possibly including him!

Really the fact that he’s been forced to resign after being caught lying like a child over what he knew and when about a sexual predator he appointed to a position of responsibility and care, combining both his major flaws into one terminal scandal is entirely predictable. The only real shock is that it took three years to happen.