As a child, Boris Johnson dreamed of being crowned ‘king of the world.’ Barring a run at the American presidency, to which he was entitled as a dual national—the closest he could come was to hold the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. His lifetime’s ambition was realised in July 2019—and just 3 short years later, the sun had set over a reign remarkable for its tragic waste of terrific potential.
Boris Johnson is, contrary to his bumbling persona, an artful politician. Behind the mop of hair, the ill-fitting suits, and the gaffes is concealed a Machiavellian operator. As the Conservative MP for Henley, one of Britain’s richest towns, Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Tory. Johnson spent the early 2000s attacking the NHS and failing to attend over half of the votes in the House of Commons while moonlighting as editor of The Spectator. He described his parliamentary speeches as “crap,” missed meetings of the Standing Committee to which he had been appointed, and was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for lying about having an extra-marital affair.
Despite a dismal performance in Westminster, Boris was winning fans in the country. When he wasn’t embrangled in affairs, alleged or otherwise, he was playing the clown. Highlights included his rugby tackling of former Manchester City player Maurizio Gaudino at a charity football match and comments linking Papua New Guinea to “cannibalism and chief killing.” He appeared on and presented his own television shows, wrote books, and published endless copy—sometimes pseudonymously and almost always controversially. His regular guest hosting of the then-popular topical panel show Have I Got News For You made Boris a household name.
Boris’ popularity with the general public was seen as a threat by his erstwhile schoolmate and then Conservative party opposition leader David Cameron. In 2007 Cameron endorsed Boris’s run for the mayoralty, an election bid that looked like a charge into the valley of death. The high profile and public defeat to follow would decommission the blonde bombshell for good. Boris rode up the line to death with aplomb, content to take on the popular incumbent Labour mayor Ken Livingstone.
But Boris, like Monty Python’s Black Knight, doesn’t go down easily. He fought the 2008 mayoral campaign promising to build 100,000 affordable homes a year, to reduce crime, and to make the functioning of City Hall more transparent. He pledged to launch a review into awarding amnesty to 400,000 illegal immigrants living in London. He pledged to slash knife crime. And he won the election.
Come 2012, the Conservative mayor was up for re-election. By now, his party was in government and taking a drubbing in the polls. Public opinion was low thanks to David Cameron’s austerity programme. A back-to-work scheme plagued by ineptitude and idiocy saw the terminally ill all but dragged into employment. London had suffered its worst riots in decades after the police shot dead a gun-wielding criminal. Despite it all, Boris won again, beating Ken Livingstone and 5 other opponents with 51.5% of the vote.
Boris was flying high—even before the London Olympics boosted him into orbit. At a concert in Hyde Park held to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic torch in the capital, Boris gave a speech better than any he had delivered before or since. He told a swollen crowd that “The excitement is growing so much I think the Geiger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go zoink off the scale!” He took aim at then American presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had disparaged London’s Olympics. Boris channelled the nascent anti-Americanism of the English into a great thundering chorus of vim.
“I heard there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re ready. Are we ready?” The assembled crowd burst into rapturous cheers, which got impossibly louder as the mayor predicted “We’re going to win more bronze, silver, and gold medals than you’d need to bail out Greece and Spain together!”
Boris was again to Parliament for the London constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the surprise Conservative election victory of 2015. Returned to the halls of power he could play courtier to King Cameron, all the while eyeing the PM’s throne. His chance to snatch the crown would come with the Brexit referendum of 2016.
David Cameron never wanted a referendum on Brexit. He had assumed, like everybody else, that the Conservative’s best-case election result would be a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He knew they would veto the referendum, killing it forever. But the promise, he calculated, would have won him enough UKIP votes to maintain his grip on power. Unexpectedly, the Conservatives won a majority in the House of Commons.
Every mainstream political party queued up to support the Remain campaign. Virtually every trade union, corporation, business consortium, lobbying group and ‘expert’ joined the politicians in opposition to exiting the European Union. But Boris Johnson, who had once written that Brexit would mean “a worrying loss of influence” for the UK, jumped headfirst into the Brexit campaign and assumed the role of its de facto leader.
What makes somebody likeable? It’s likely ineffable, but a sign of it is the feeling you get when you’re with him, hear from him, or even hear about him. If a person has made a positive impression on you in the past, you’ll be biased in favour of him. The positive associations you have with a person becomes instinctual over time, and that instinct can make invisible any of the liked person’s failings and indiscretions.
The vast majority of Britons might not have remembered Boris’s famous Whiff Whaff speech, his popular Conservative Party conference appearances, or even quite what he said on Have I Got News For You or Top Gear. Most Britons might have forgotten his award-winning poem declaring that President Erdogan was a “wanker.” But they associate him with the feelings they themselves had when hearing these. And when he resurfaced to lead the Brexit campaign, he was able to draw on the general British goodwill that he had cultivated.
Pundits have spent years variously explaining and excusing the defeat of the Remain campaign. They have blamed Russian influence, Cambridge Analytica, Rupert Murdoch, and even a big red bus. Barring Putin’s hand, all of the bogeymen played their parts. But fundamentally it was a rebellion of the left-behind, a rejection of unabashed globalism and a backlash against capital ‘P’ Progress that led to the referendum’s result. And the energy that led to this rebellion needed a figure to corral around—that was Boris.
Thanks to a cock up by the BBC, Boris Johnson was called upon to give the closing speech at its televised Great EU Debate. The Leave side had delivered the opening remarks of the debate, so the Remain side was set to conclude. But in error, the spotlight was shone on Britain’s luckiest politician. Backstage, phones began buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets, as text messages flew in from the Remain campaign, containing lots of four-letter words. But it was too late, Boris was on his feet and marching into history.
His rousing final remarks conclude with the following hopeful message: “If we vote leave and take back control, I believe that this Thursday can be our country’s independence day.” The crowd shot to their feet in ovation. The debate moderator David Dimbleby appealed for calm as the crowd began to chant “Boris! Boris! Boris!”
Prime Minister David Cameron had backed the Remain campaign to the hilt. He had all but said World War III would erupt if Brexit were to happen, so when Leave emerged victorious, he found his political position untenable. He announced his resignation early in the morning, just hours after the result became clear.
The ball had come loose from the back of the scrum, just as Boris had always hoped it might. But with the try line in sight and the opposition in disarray, his erstwhile ally Michael Gove hooked his ankle from behind. The great blonde mop crashed into the ground, and as Boris stirred from his lowly position, he looked up to see Theresa May carrying the ball over the line.
Theresa May, as has been well chronicled, was an unreconstructed disaster. She called a snap general election and lost the majority she had inherited. Her performance was so poor she almost put Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. Three years on from the Brexit vote Britons were dragging themselves to the polls to elect MPs to the European Parliament they had voted to quit. The Conservative party came in 5th place in the 2019 EU elections, winning just 8.8% of the vote—their worst-ever national election performance. May followed Cameron out the door shortly afterwards.
Now there was no choice but to bet on Boris. He took over Theresa May’s minority government and was no less stuck in the mud than she was. But in the quagmire, he saw opportunity. He took to the bully pulpit of the dispatch box to damn the European Withdrawal Act—which he dubbed “the surrender act.” This Act had been introduced by a Remainer Labour MP and passed by a contemptuous Parliament. Boris prorogued Parliament, calling an end to the session until the decision was declared undone by that great Blair creation, the Supreme Court. He was accused of lying to the Queen and acting unlawfully. His attempts to get Brexit done were thwarted by both houses of the legislature, the judiciary, and even his own party. The establishment thought they had him beat and Brexit blocked.
But in the real-world Boris’s fight to pass Brexit was a thing of admiration. He was seen as the people’s champion, taking the fight to a zombie parliament, corrupt judges, and distant technocrats. The man who had once damned blue-collar workers as ‘likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless’ had become their champion.
Having proved beyond all doubt there was no way to deliver on the Brexit referendum, Boris called a December general election. We had seen Boris the Thatcherite, Boris the liberal, and Boris the populist. Now Boris the social democrat would take to the stage.
His campaign was unlike any other Tory election bid since Harold Macmillan. He teamed up with Labour MPs to talk up the ways his government could exploit state aid to the benefit of British firms. He promised big spending on health and infrastructure. There were to be more hospitals, nurses, and police. But the social policy would shift Rightwards—immigration was pledged to be cut via the introduction of an Australian-style points-based system, and there would be tougher sentences for criminals.
The result was the biggest parliamentary majority for the Conservative party since Thatcher’s 1987 victory. Boris won 43.6% of the vote, more than Tony Blair won in his historic 1997 landslide win. Labour suffered its worst performance since the 1930s and was thought to have been wiped out for a generation. Conservative staffers celebrated with chants of ‘10 more years.’ Like Macmillan, Boris had won his victory with the support of working-class voters in the north. He pledged his newly rebranded “people’s government” would repay their trust.
And then Covid hit. Whether the British response was the right one will be known in the fullness of time. But for his part, Boris stuck by those voters who had lent him their support. He introduced generous 80% furlough payments, loans and grants for shuttered businesses, subsidised food, and rolled out vaccines faster than any other European country. This he said, was a Brexit bonus. And it was widely accepted as such.
The Prime Minister did, however, take a lot of flack throughout the pandemic. His chief advisor Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown he had helped devise, and Boris refused to sack him. With his characteristic bombast, he shook hands with patients in a Covid ward to the dismay of his scientific advisors. He fumbled press conferences, was accused of locking down too late and was blamed for a PPE (personal protective equipment) shortage.
Despite mistakes—some avoidable, others catastrophic, many both—Boris remained incredibly popular. In 2021, a by-election was called in the Hartlepool constituency after the incumbent Labour MP Mike Hill stood down following sexual assault allegations. Labour had held the seat since 1964—it having only been lost previously to Macmillan. But the Conservatives, despite putting up an unimpressive candidate, romped home in the contest, winning 52% in the Labour stronghold. Boris could not be beaten, and the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, was fated to lead his party into a fifth consecutive defeat.
Taking place on the same day, the Conservatives won a stunning victory in Tees Valley mayoral election, winning 73% of the vote in the Labour heartland. Conservative mayor Ben Houchen, who had barely pipped the post in the previous election, won by a landslide in every local authority area. The Conservatives were now as much the party of former miners as they were of millionaires. And then it all went wrong.
The Conservative MP for Wakefield was jailed for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, and the Tories lost the subsequent by-election. Neil Parish MP was forced to resign for watching pornography in the House of Commons, and his seat too was lost. Rob Roberts was suspended for unwanted sexual advances against a male member of his staff. The Dover MP was convicted of sexually assaulting two women. The MP for Somerton and Frome had the party whip withdrawn after allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use surfaced. An unnamed Tory MP was arrested for rape.
Then the Conservative MP for Tamworth, and the party’s Chief Whip, Christopher Pincher, was alleged to have groped two men in a private members club. It was alleged Pincher had exhibited this kind of behaviour previously, that Boris was familiar with the allegations, and appointed him to the powerful position all the same. The PM refused to deny that he had joked his Chief Whip was “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature.” Worse still, as if it could get any worse, Boris was slow to sack Pincher.
Pincher was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was a scandal that came after the Prime Minister had squandered his treasure trove of political capital. When Conservative MP Owen Paterson was found to have breached Common’s rules in relation to his consultancy work, Boris moved to rewrite them. After a great row, and with his own MPs threatening to revolt, Boris admitted defeat, and Paterson resigned. His seat was, like the others, lost in the subsequent by-election.
There was Partygate, which on one level was puerile and on another spoke to this emerging feeling that there was one rule for the government, and another for everyone else—not helped by the abundance of crooks and sex pests who occupied its ranks. But the saga was made excruciating by Boris’s repeated assurances as to his behaviour, which were repeatedly disproven. The slow drip of leaked photographs of Downing Street toasts landed on the PM as Japanese Water torture. He would ultimately be fined for breaching his own COVID regulations.
All this, not to mention a questionable loan Boris took out to finance an expensive refurbishment of his Downing Street flat (or his Caribbean Christmas getaway funded by a party donor). He was alleged to have said in a rage that he would “let the bodies pile high” rather than institute further lockdowns. PPE procurement was fraught with controversy as party donors and MPs’ mates ended up winning lucrative government contracts they had no earthly right to. A friend of the health minister—the same minister who would resign after breaking lockdown rules to carry out an affair—won a £40 million contract to supply vials. He was a pub landlord. This sort of sleaze should come at the fag end of a tired regime, not beset the beginning of a new government. Tory MPs were carrying on as though it were the fall of Rome and Sodom and Gomorrah all at once.
All the while illegal immigration was rising to a deafening crescendo, inflation was on the up, fuel prices were soaring, and wages were falling. The billions earmarked to ‘level up’ had been spent on COVID, leaving little to go around for the planned scientific and infrastructure revolutions. Debt had exceeded 100% of GDP, the UK slumped from the 5th to the 6th richest economy in the world, the Brexit deal had yet to be ironed out, and NHS waiting lists were reaching all-time highs. So, when Boris’ comments about Pincher surfaced, there were few arguments left to draw upon in support of the Prime Minister’s continued tenure. His MPs mutinied, and they threw out their most electorally successful leader in over three decades.
Liz Truss went on to be the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Rishi Sunak will go on to lose the election to Labour. It’s not especially important that the upshot of all this is that the Conservative party will lose. (Who cares? They’re terrible.) It’s important because the end of the Boris project represents the failure to consolidate a historic and lasting pro-worker, pro-nation consensus. After World War II, the Labour party established a new consensus. The Conservative party would sing to their tune until 1979, after which Margaret Thatcher remade the political landscape in her image. The results of the 2019 election should have cemented a generational realignment. But they didn’t.
Labour lost the support of the voters their party had been founded to represent. Though the party performed well in urban centres and university towns, they were routed across the post-industrial towns and villages of England and Wales. White working-class voters turned their backs on the Labour party in numbers previously thought unimaginable.
Labour had been ignoring working-class voters for decades. They could afford to neglect them because, the logic went, those voters had nowhere else to turn. Through the 2000s, voter turnout dropped to record low levels. Working-class voters abstained from the ballot box, making them still easier to ignore. A great political war was fought between the Tories and Labour over the ‘Waitrose Shopper’ demographic.
The Brexit vote reawakened millions of voters who had slipped in their apathy into disinterested hibernation. 17.4 million Brits voted for Brexit—for comparison just 9.5 million voted to elect Tony Blair with a big majority in 2005. Workers had attained something like a class consciousness. And come the 2019 election the Waitrose Shopper had been forgotten—now the so-called Workington Man took centre stage. He was between 30 and 50, living in a large town, likely to be self-employed and working a trade. He put Boris Johnson into number 10 Downing Street to get Brexit done.
The shock result threatened to force the Labour party to embark on a radical metamorphosis. They would have to bend to the socially conservative mean of the British people and acquiesce to the so-called Blue Labour tendency in their party. Radical stances on gender, speech, reparations, culture, crime, and immigration would have to be jettisoned. The economic settlement would have to put British people first.
Similarly, the Conservatives were now supported by a radically different coalition than had backed them before. Their approach to the economy would have to become more equitable, with a focus on localism. Mass immigration to fuel growth would have to give way to the upskilling of British workers and wage increases.
As a fan of the classics, Boris might like to be compared to Alexander the Great. Like the Greek, Boris conquered the world and then had no idea what to do with it. When his armies rebelled, he led them on a death march through the desert, destroying his own legacy and failing those who had held him up on their shoulders.
Consequently, both parties have been let off the hook. The Tories are free to return to being the uncaring party of the Home Counties that is content to laud over the ruins of the UK as money is siphoned into the South East, and Labour can again embrace without restriction the most radical social policies that the maddest Californian professor could dream up in an acid trip.
Boris Johnson isn’t the messiah; he’s a very naughty boy. It might be he rose in spite of himself, riding a series of fortuitous events to the top of global politics. Or his supporters might have him right in saying it was for him that his triple triumph—of London, Brexit, and 2019—was won. But none could credibly deny he was a lousy governor.
With a large parliamentary majority, an unquestioned mandate from the people, and a track record of winning, Boris could have remade British politics. But while BLM riots ran roughshod through the streets, extreme climate protestors blockaded ambulances, and illegal immigrants piled into 5-star hotels, he busied himself at climate summits, with Ukraine, and with online censorship. That’s not to say Boris might not be remembered for saving Ukraine—as well he might and a good thing too—but that’s not what he was elected to do.
Ultimately, he lacked the stamina and discipline to see his project through. He imagined he could surf a tidal wave of public support into eternity as the father of the nation. Yet here we are, back in 2005, Boris set to become a footnote in Chinese history and voters lamenting their choice between red technocrats and blue. So ended the reign of King Boris.
Boris Johnson, The Man Who Lost the World
TOLGA AKMEN / AFP
As a child, Boris Johnson dreamed of being crowned ‘king of the world.’ Barring a run at the American presidency, to which he was entitled as a dual national—the closest he could come was to hold the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. His lifetime’s ambition was realised in July 2019—and just 3 short years later, the sun had set over a reign remarkable for its tragic waste of terrific potential.
Boris Johnson is, contrary to his bumbling persona, an artful politician. Behind the mop of hair, the ill-fitting suits, and the gaffes is concealed a Machiavellian operator. As the Conservative MP for Henley, one of Britain’s richest towns, Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Tory. Johnson spent the early 2000s attacking the NHS and failing to attend over half of the votes in the House of Commons while moonlighting as editor of The Spectator. He described his parliamentary speeches as “crap,” missed meetings of the Standing Committee to which he had been appointed, and was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for lying about having an extra-marital affair.
Despite a dismal performance in Westminster, Boris was winning fans in the country. When he wasn’t embrangled in affairs, alleged or otherwise, he was playing the clown. Highlights included his rugby tackling of former Manchester City player Maurizio Gaudino at a charity football match and comments linking Papua New Guinea to “cannibalism and chief killing.” He appeared on and presented his own television shows, wrote books, and published endless copy—sometimes pseudonymously and almost always controversially. His regular guest hosting of the then-popular topical panel show Have I Got News For You made Boris a household name.
Boris’ popularity with the general public was seen as a threat by his erstwhile schoolmate and then Conservative party opposition leader David Cameron. In 2007 Cameron endorsed Boris’s run for the mayoralty, an election bid that looked like a charge into the valley of death. The high profile and public defeat to follow would decommission the blonde bombshell for good. Boris rode up the line to death with aplomb, content to take on the popular incumbent Labour mayor Ken Livingstone.
But Boris, like Monty Python’s Black Knight, doesn’t go down easily. He fought the 2008 mayoral campaign promising to build 100,000 affordable homes a year, to reduce crime, and to make the functioning of City Hall more transparent. He pledged to launch a review into awarding amnesty to 400,000 illegal immigrants living in London. He pledged to slash knife crime. And he won the election.
Come 2012, the Conservative mayor was up for re-election. By now, his party was in government and taking a drubbing in the polls. Public opinion was low thanks to David Cameron’s austerity programme. A back-to-work scheme plagued by ineptitude and idiocy saw the terminally ill all but dragged into employment. London had suffered its worst riots in decades after the police shot dead a gun-wielding criminal. Despite it all, Boris won again, beating Ken Livingstone and 5 other opponents with 51.5% of the vote.
Boris was flying high—even before the London Olympics boosted him into orbit. At a concert in Hyde Park held to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic torch in the capital, Boris gave a speech better than any he had delivered before or since. He told a swollen crowd that “The excitement is growing so much I think the Geiger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go zoink off the scale!” He took aim at then American presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had disparaged London’s Olympics. Boris channelled the nascent anti-Americanism of the English into a great thundering chorus of vim.
“I heard there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re ready. Are we ready?” The assembled crowd burst into rapturous cheers, which got impossibly louder as the mayor predicted “We’re going to win more bronze, silver, and gold medals than you’d need to bail out Greece and Spain together!”
Boris was again to Parliament for the London constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the surprise Conservative election victory of 2015. Returned to the halls of power he could play courtier to King Cameron, all the while eyeing the PM’s throne. His chance to snatch the crown would come with the Brexit referendum of 2016.
David Cameron never wanted a referendum on Brexit. He had assumed, like everybody else, that the Conservative’s best-case election result would be a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He knew they would veto the referendum, killing it forever. But the promise, he calculated, would have won him enough UKIP votes to maintain his grip on power. Unexpectedly, the Conservatives won a majority in the House of Commons.
Every mainstream political party queued up to support the Remain campaign. Virtually every trade union, corporation, business consortium, lobbying group and ‘expert’ joined the politicians in opposition to exiting the European Union. But Boris Johnson, who had once written that Brexit would mean “a worrying loss of influence” for the UK, jumped headfirst into the Brexit campaign and assumed the role of its de facto leader.
What makes somebody likeable? It’s likely ineffable, but a sign of it is the feeling you get when you’re with him, hear from him, or even hear about him. If a person has made a positive impression on you in the past, you’ll be biased in favour of him. The positive associations you have with a person becomes instinctual over time, and that instinct can make invisible any of the liked person’s failings and indiscretions.
The vast majority of Britons might not have remembered Boris’s famous Whiff Whaff speech, his popular Conservative Party conference appearances, or even quite what he said on Have I Got News For You or Top Gear. Most Britons might have forgotten his award-winning poem declaring that President Erdogan was a “wanker.” But they associate him with the feelings they themselves had when hearing these. And when he resurfaced to lead the Brexit campaign, he was able to draw on the general British goodwill that he had cultivated.
Pundits have spent years variously explaining and excusing the defeat of the Remain campaign. They have blamed Russian influence, Cambridge Analytica, Rupert Murdoch, and even a big red bus. Barring Putin’s hand, all of the bogeymen played their parts. But fundamentally it was a rebellion of the left-behind, a rejection of unabashed globalism and a backlash against capital ‘P’ Progress that led to the referendum’s result. And the energy that led to this rebellion needed a figure to corral around—that was Boris.
Thanks to a cock up by the BBC, Boris Johnson was called upon to give the closing speech at its televised Great EU Debate. The Leave side had delivered the opening remarks of the debate, so the Remain side was set to conclude. But in error, the spotlight was shone on Britain’s luckiest politician. Backstage, phones began buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets, as text messages flew in from the Remain campaign, containing lots of four-letter words. But it was too late, Boris was on his feet and marching into history.
His rousing final remarks conclude with the following hopeful message: “If we vote leave and take back control, I believe that this Thursday can be our country’s independence day.” The crowd shot to their feet in ovation. The debate moderator David Dimbleby appealed for calm as the crowd began to chant “Boris! Boris! Boris!”
Prime Minister David Cameron had backed the Remain campaign to the hilt. He had all but said World War III would erupt if Brexit were to happen, so when Leave emerged victorious, he found his political position untenable. He announced his resignation early in the morning, just hours after the result became clear.
The ball had come loose from the back of the scrum, just as Boris had always hoped it might. But with the try line in sight and the opposition in disarray, his erstwhile ally Michael Gove hooked his ankle from behind. The great blonde mop crashed into the ground, and as Boris stirred from his lowly position, he looked up to see Theresa May carrying the ball over the line.
Theresa May, as has been well chronicled, was an unreconstructed disaster. She called a snap general election and lost the majority she had inherited. Her performance was so poor she almost put Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. Three years on from the Brexit vote Britons were dragging themselves to the polls to elect MPs to the European Parliament they had voted to quit. The Conservative party came in 5th place in the 2019 EU elections, winning just 8.8% of the vote—their worst-ever national election performance. May followed Cameron out the door shortly afterwards.
Now there was no choice but to bet on Boris. He took over Theresa May’s minority government and was no less stuck in the mud than she was. But in the quagmire, he saw opportunity. He took to the bully pulpit of the dispatch box to damn the European Withdrawal Act—which he dubbed “the surrender act.” This Act had been introduced by a Remainer Labour MP and passed by a contemptuous Parliament. Boris prorogued Parliament, calling an end to the session until the decision was declared undone by that great Blair creation, the Supreme Court. He was accused of lying to the Queen and acting unlawfully. His attempts to get Brexit done were thwarted by both houses of the legislature, the judiciary, and even his own party. The establishment thought they had him beat and Brexit blocked.
But in the real-world Boris’s fight to pass Brexit was a thing of admiration. He was seen as the people’s champion, taking the fight to a zombie parliament, corrupt judges, and distant technocrats. The man who had once damned blue-collar workers as ‘likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless’ had become their champion.
Having proved beyond all doubt there was no way to deliver on the Brexit referendum, Boris called a December general election. We had seen Boris the Thatcherite, Boris the liberal, and Boris the populist. Now Boris the social democrat would take to the stage.
His campaign was unlike any other Tory election bid since Harold Macmillan. He teamed up with Labour MPs to talk up the ways his government could exploit state aid to the benefit of British firms. He promised big spending on health and infrastructure. There were to be more hospitals, nurses, and police. But the social policy would shift Rightwards—immigration was pledged to be cut via the introduction of an Australian-style points-based system, and there would be tougher sentences for criminals.
The result was the biggest parliamentary majority for the Conservative party since Thatcher’s 1987 victory. Boris won 43.6% of the vote, more than Tony Blair won in his historic 1997 landslide win. Labour suffered its worst performance since the 1930s and was thought to have been wiped out for a generation. Conservative staffers celebrated with chants of ‘10 more years.’ Like Macmillan, Boris had won his victory with the support of working-class voters in the north. He pledged his newly rebranded “people’s government” would repay their trust.
And then Covid hit. Whether the British response was the right one will be known in the fullness of time. But for his part, Boris stuck by those voters who had lent him their support. He introduced generous 80% furlough payments, loans and grants for shuttered businesses, subsidised food, and rolled out vaccines faster than any other European country. This he said, was a Brexit bonus. And it was widely accepted as such.
The Prime Minister did, however, take a lot of flack throughout the pandemic. His chief advisor Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown he had helped devise, and Boris refused to sack him. With his characteristic bombast, he shook hands with patients in a Covid ward to the dismay of his scientific advisors. He fumbled press conferences, was accused of locking down too late and was blamed for a PPE (personal protective equipment) shortage.
Despite mistakes—some avoidable, others catastrophic, many both—Boris remained incredibly popular. In 2021, a by-election was called in the Hartlepool constituency after the incumbent Labour MP Mike Hill stood down following sexual assault allegations. Labour had held the seat since 1964—it having only been lost previously to Macmillan. But the Conservatives, despite putting up an unimpressive candidate, romped home in the contest, winning 52% in the Labour stronghold. Boris could not be beaten, and the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, was fated to lead his party into a fifth consecutive defeat.
Taking place on the same day, the Conservatives won a stunning victory in Tees Valley mayoral election, winning 73% of the vote in the Labour heartland. Conservative mayor Ben Houchen, who had barely pipped the post in the previous election, won by a landslide in every local authority area. The Conservatives were now as much the party of former miners as they were of millionaires. And then it all went wrong.
The Conservative MP for Wakefield was jailed for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, and the Tories lost the subsequent by-election. Neil Parish MP was forced to resign for watching pornography in the House of Commons, and his seat too was lost. Rob Roberts was suspended for unwanted sexual advances against a male member of his staff. The Dover MP was convicted of sexually assaulting two women. The MP for Somerton and Frome had the party whip withdrawn after allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use surfaced. An unnamed Tory MP was arrested for rape.
Then the Conservative MP for Tamworth, and the party’s Chief Whip, Christopher Pincher, was alleged to have groped two men in a private members club. It was alleged Pincher had exhibited this kind of behaviour previously, that Boris was familiar with the allegations, and appointed him to the powerful position all the same. The PM refused to deny that he had joked his Chief Whip was “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature.” Worse still, as if it could get any worse, Boris was slow to sack Pincher.
Pincher was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was a scandal that came after the Prime Minister had squandered his treasure trove of political capital. When Conservative MP Owen Paterson was found to have breached Common’s rules in relation to his consultancy work, Boris moved to rewrite them. After a great row, and with his own MPs threatening to revolt, Boris admitted defeat, and Paterson resigned. His seat was, like the others, lost in the subsequent by-election.
There was Partygate, which on one level was puerile and on another spoke to this emerging feeling that there was one rule for the government, and another for everyone else—not helped by the abundance of crooks and sex pests who occupied its ranks. But the saga was made excruciating by Boris’s repeated assurances as to his behaviour, which were repeatedly disproven. The slow drip of leaked photographs of Downing Street toasts landed on the PM as Japanese Water torture. He would ultimately be fined for breaching his own COVID regulations.
All this, not to mention a questionable loan Boris took out to finance an expensive refurbishment of his Downing Street flat (or his Caribbean Christmas getaway funded by a party donor). He was alleged to have said in a rage that he would “let the bodies pile high” rather than institute further lockdowns. PPE procurement was fraught with controversy as party donors and MPs’ mates ended up winning lucrative government contracts they had no earthly right to. A friend of the health minister—the same minister who would resign after breaking lockdown rules to carry out an affair—won a £40 million contract to supply vials. He was a pub landlord. This sort of sleaze should come at the fag end of a tired regime, not beset the beginning of a new government. Tory MPs were carrying on as though it were the fall of Rome and Sodom and Gomorrah all at once.
All the while illegal immigration was rising to a deafening crescendo, inflation was on the up, fuel prices were soaring, and wages were falling. The billions earmarked to ‘level up’ had been spent on COVID, leaving little to go around for the planned scientific and infrastructure revolutions. Debt had exceeded 100% of GDP, the UK slumped from the 5th to the 6th richest economy in the world, the Brexit deal had yet to be ironed out, and NHS waiting lists were reaching all-time highs. So, when Boris’ comments about Pincher surfaced, there were few arguments left to draw upon in support of the Prime Minister’s continued tenure. His MPs mutinied, and they threw out their most electorally successful leader in over three decades.
Liz Truss went on to be the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Rishi Sunak will go on to lose the election to Labour. It’s not especially important that the upshot of all this is that the Conservative party will lose. (Who cares? They’re terrible.) It’s important because the end of the Boris project represents the failure to consolidate a historic and lasting pro-worker, pro-nation consensus. After World War II, the Labour party established a new consensus. The Conservative party would sing to their tune until 1979, after which Margaret Thatcher remade the political landscape in her image. The results of the 2019 election should have cemented a generational realignment. But they didn’t.
Labour lost the support of the voters their party had been founded to represent. Though the party performed well in urban centres and university towns, they were routed across the post-industrial towns and villages of England and Wales. White working-class voters turned their backs on the Labour party in numbers previously thought unimaginable.
Labour had been ignoring working-class voters for decades. They could afford to neglect them because, the logic went, those voters had nowhere else to turn. Through the 2000s, voter turnout dropped to record low levels. Working-class voters abstained from the ballot box, making them still easier to ignore. A great political war was fought between the Tories and Labour over the ‘Waitrose Shopper’ demographic.
The Brexit vote reawakened millions of voters who had slipped in their apathy into disinterested hibernation. 17.4 million Brits voted for Brexit—for comparison just 9.5 million voted to elect Tony Blair with a big majority in 2005. Workers had attained something like a class consciousness. And come the 2019 election the Waitrose Shopper had been forgotten—now the so-called Workington Man took centre stage. He was between 30 and 50, living in a large town, likely to be self-employed and working a trade. He put Boris Johnson into number 10 Downing Street to get Brexit done.
The shock result threatened to force the Labour party to embark on a radical metamorphosis. They would have to bend to the socially conservative mean of the British people and acquiesce to the so-called Blue Labour tendency in their party. Radical stances on gender, speech, reparations, culture, crime, and immigration would have to be jettisoned. The economic settlement would have to put British people first.
Similarly, the Conservatives were now supported by a radically different coalition than had backed them before. Their approach to the economy would have to become more equitable, with a focus on localism. Mass immigration to fuel growth would have to give way to the upskilling of British workers and wage increases.
As a fan of the classics, Boris might like to be compared to Alexander the Great. Like the Greek, Boris conquered the world and then had no idea what to do with it. When his armies rebelled, he led them on a death march through the desert, destroying his own legacy and failing those who had held him up on their shoulders.
Consequently, both parties have been let off the hook. The Tories are free to return to being the uncaring party of the Home Counties that is content to laud over the ruins of the UK as money is siphoned into the South East, and Labour can again embrace without restriction the most radical social policies that the maddest Californian professor could dream up in an acid trip.
Boris Johnson isn’t the messiah; he’s a very naughty boy. It might be he rose in spite of himself, riding a series of fortuitous events to the top of global politics. Or his supporters might have him right in saying it was for him that his triple triumph—of London, Brexit, and 2019—was won. But none could credibly deny he was a lousy governor.
With a large parliamentary majority, an unquestioned mandate from the people, and a track record of winning, Boris could have remade British politics. But while BLM riots ran roughshod through the streets, extreme climate protestors blockaded ambulances, and illegal immigrants piled into 5-star hotels, he busied himself at climate summits, with Ukraine, and with online censorship. That’s not to say Boris might not be remembered for saving Ukraine—as well he might and a good thing too—but that’s not what he was elected to do.
Ultimately, he lacked the stamina and discipline to see his project through. He imagined he could surf a tidal wave of public support into eternity as the father of the nation. Yet here we are, back in 2005, Boris set to become a footnote in Chinese history and voters lamenting their choice between red technocrats and blue. So ended the reign of King Boris.
READ NEXT
Christian Heritage: Worthy of Celebration
No Whites, Please.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou: Portrait of an Eternal Centrist