Boris Johnson presented his memoir, Unleashed, at Cheltenham racecourse last week, amid the ghosts of bookies. They, at least, would appreciate him for who he is: a risk-taker who won, then lost, and hopes to win again. But the venue isn’t full. The Boris Johnson cult is over: he is the only one who doesn’t know it yet. The audience is old, rich, and white, and they are here to gawp and giggle. They want jokes, not policies: they always did. And all their choices — including him — flow from that. Johnson was a leader for an age of decadence, and unseriousness: we thought we could afford him, but we couldn’t. Now he is less a G7 leader than a toastmaster.
There was, beforehand, a limp kind of excitement. It felt closely held, protected. Johnson appealed to people who wanted to live through him. Too scared to drive supercars or flirt with strangers or prorogue parliament, they chose someone who would. They still speak fondly of him, because he is still the only politician they have ever liked, and I can’t think of a better measure of our failure. They still talk about his “charisma” because they don’t know him. They just think they do. He has what Kemi Badenoch’s supporters call an ability to “cut through” in the age of attention deficit disorder: in the leadership election she will depend on it. They “hope he will be back” but he “probably won’t be because MPs don’t like him”. The current Tory Party is, “individualist” and “too weakly led”. “I don’t think anyone led the party like he did.”
His entrance is downbeat. He shuffles in, hair shining and dishevelled. He looks, for an instant, mock terrified, and then does the nodding dog with his head. The downbeat entrance is deliberate: his small penance. He can’t say it in words because he doesn’t really feel it. Unleashed is not an apology for how he promised hope and set it on fire, nor is it a fair assessment of what he really unleashed, which is a more toxic populism that even he gave us. It is propaganda, written in the fake intimate style of the lifestyle columnist. I searched in the book for passages on his failure, and how he felt about it. They aren’t there.
He says he’s sorry he’s late, but it’s not his fault this time: “I understand everyone was being frisked for handguns”. They laugh: that’s not their England. The interviewer offers a trivial question first, for the fans. It’s about the zipwire at the London Olympics 2012, when he dangled with a Union Flag: the Johnson stunt by which all others are judged. “Although I was held to global ridicule,” he says, “it had exactly the effect I wanted: not for the first time!” The next day, he says, Britain “began to win medals”. This is Johnson the magician who expresses, entirely unconsciously, a universal boredom with conventional politics. It is also Johnson the Fisher King. His wounds mirror ours — that is his peculiar power — but neither are healed.
He is asked about the Brexit bus and its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS. “It’s the bus of truth!” he cries, even now. This is not a place to analyse the rotting political discourse, and what part he may have played in it. Such agonies are for Leftists. “It’s a significant sum,” he says, “people were right to ask what they were getting for it.” He adds, “Being unleashed from the EU gave us the freedom to do things differently,” and if they weren’t better, that is not his fault. Brexit saved lives during pandemic, he says. She asks about other “concrete dividends”. He looks nervous, cites giving lethal weaponry to Ukraine, makes a joke about William Hague’s baldness, and I remember that there are at least five different people inside him.
Johnson is happiest on diversions: Nicola Sturgeon, for instance. “Princess Twinkle-toes investigated by the fuzz for possession of a campervan. The Nationalist dog barked while the campervan moved on”. It’s a mash-up of metaphor and slang: and it’s meaningless. His serious point, when he gets there, is this: Reform polled low when he was prime minister. He kept us “bubble-gummed together”. But he didn’t. Rather, he opened the doors to them.
He is asked about his Covid. “A lot of people say I was shamming,” he says. But he was ill, he insists. And he realised, “I’ve done some pretty worthwhile things. I need to keep going. I thought I had a lot to live for and I had a country to look after”. Now I think: if he’s telling us he loves us, he wants to come back. He’s waiting for the party to fall so low they take him back.
The audience is restless. It wants Johnson the avatar of joy, and he’s talking about the nearness of Death, and defending his government. “We acted as vigilantly as we could, given what we knew”. He thinks Covid-19 came from a laboratory: “Do you really believe that this was the result of the love that flowered accidentally between a small slice of pangolin and a bat?” He doesn’t despair about a Trump presidency, even if he hated the Capitol riots: “He is not going to spend the first few months of his presidency trying to make the Soviet Union great again”. He says this last part in an accent thieved from Paint Your Wagon.
But then he reveals something. Being mayor of London was “great” because “I was a monarch”. And that’s it. Johnson was always more suited to absolute monarchy than parliamentary democracy, and, like an absolute monarch, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, because an absolute monarch is the law. To Tory voters who hated him because he betrayed them, and, worse, made them betray themselves, he offers nothing. To the Tory romanticism he destroyed while pretending to share it he says nothing. The wine in the suitcase was a Downing Street ritual that long preceded him. His defenestration was all, “a bit of a put-up job”. His advice to the audience – a response audience question, they still think he has something to offer, is: “there’s no earthly point in being too self-deprecating”. Is that what he thinks he was?
At Cheltenham, Johnson offers us, as ever, a mirror, because that is what he is. He mirrored our hope. Now he mirrors our confusion. The Tory Party is in ruins — he essentially endorsed Truss, his closest allies voted for her — and it had nothing to do with him. He doesn’t talk about the leadership contest. He talks about himself.
At the end, there are no cheers, as if he has disappointed them, but the disappointment should be with themselves. Johnson was our first modern populist politician and his danger was always in his precedent: now there will be other, less charming populists walking the paths he made. His damage to the polity was incalculable — the prime minister who lied to parliament — and they don’t even mind. Nor, it seems, does he. Out they go, holding copies of Unleashed. It wasn’t what we — or even he — thought it would be. It is something infinitely sadder, and that, of his legacies, will endure.
Disclaimer
Some of the posts we share are controversial and we do not necessarily agree with them in the whole extend. Sometimes we agree with the content or part of it but we do not agree with the narration or language. Nevertheless we find them somehow interesting, valuable and/or informative or we share them, because we strongly believe in freedom of speech, free press and journalism. We strongly encourage you to have a critical approach to all the content, do your own research and analysis to build your own opinion.
We would be glad to have your feedback.
Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/