The travails of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are difficult for outsiders to appreciate. In the Brexit crisis, Johnson ended the greatest failure of British parliamentary government since the American Revolution, if not the English Civil War.
For several years after narrowly voting (52 percent) to leave the European Union in 2016, Britain had a counterfeit government promising to follow the people’s instruction to leave while in fact attempting to remain and calling it departure. Faced with a parliamentary majority of remainers and a Conservative Party and national majority of leavers, the government of Theresa May waffled and ended up with almost no support, since she was neither a leaver nor a remainer, nor a magician.
Boris Johnson faced a parliamentary majority that withheld its confidence from him and, with the connivance of an especially egregious speaker of the House of Commons (John Bercow), declined to support his request for dissolution and a new election. He finally managed to negotiate that point, elevated the election to a virtual referendum on the most efficient enactment of the national will to depart Europe on the best possible terms, campaigned ably, and won a parliamentary majority worthy of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair at the top of their games.
Despite widespread skepticism that it could be done, he did negotiate a smooth exit from Europe and had scarcely been done with that when the coronavirus fell upon him as upon most of the world. He fell heavily into the trap, as most of the world did, of excessive lockdowns and absurd masking and social distancing regulations. But he was also, next to President Donald Trump, the most effective advocate and enabler of vaccines, and Britain was, with Israel and the United States, the most advanced country in the world in vaccinating. Johnson eventually saw the failure of authoritarian countermeasures well before Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Scott Morrison in Australia, and most of Western Europe did. Under this grace of medical conversion, Boris Johnson has led Britain to the front of the line in self-emancipation from the insane rigors of excessive COVID lockdowns. He overrode irresponsible and blackmailing unions, and ignored officious medical hysteria more effectively than all but a few leaders.
Johnson thus has a much better than passing record in the two greatest crises that he has had to face, and foreigners should remember that in choosing to depart an “ever closer [European] Union,” he not only preserved British political institutions that have evolved gradually over nearly a thousand years and were about to be replaced altogether by well-intentioned but relatively untested European substitutes, he also detached one of the world’s most-respected nationalities, and still one of its five or so most important countries, from a largely socialist and quasi-neutralist Europe to seek closer ties with the much more congenial and longer established free-market democracies of the senior Commonwealth, especially Canada and Australia, and the United States. The European commissioners are not really answerable to the European Parliament, and Europe is not, by British standards, an adequately democratic system. Britain was torn between the attractions of the European market and the very foreign authoritarianism of Brussels.
Europe never sought the adherence of Britain in order to confer upon it the control of the fulcrum of the balance of power within Europe, which it frequently exercised from the time of Cardinal Wolsey under Henry VIII and in respect of France and the Holy Roman Empire through to the late 19th century, when first Germany unified by Bismarck, and then Stalinist Russia, were too powerful to be contained other than by Britain allying itself to France and both countries attracting the support of the United States. The smaller European countries wanted Britain to help defend them against the overlordship of Germany and France; Johnson believed, as did a narrow majority of his countrymen, though it was never quite expressed this way, that Britain had a more exalted destiny.
The Complaints
The complaints against Johnson that appear to endanger his incumbency seem quite trivial. He has a great comedic ability, and his tendency to reduce controversy to farce, one of his most conspicuous and normally endearing trademarks (and I write as his former employer), served him well as a Member of Parliament and as mayor of London, and even for a time as foreign secretary, but they are widely thought to be unbecoming to a prime minister, and the nation has wearied of it. That is easily corrected, and if Boris Johnson is not too burdened by what Dr. Samuel Johnson called the “disingenuousness of years,” he can simply cease to be unserious other than in the parliamentary tradition of repartee so brilliantly exemplified by Disraeli and Churchill and, to a degree, Harold Macmillan.Beyond this, Johnson faces problems of policy and of carelessness. He ran as a Thatcherite Tory and has been a high spender and is now reduced to the particularly odious form of taxation of raising the obligatory charge for the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS is rivaled only by the BBC as the greatest sacred cow in Britain, though it has been stripped bare and revealed as utterly inadequate in the COVID crisis. Presuming he survives the immediate crisis, the prime minister will have to do a sharp course correction, and emulate the early Thatcher years while taking advantage of the COVID disaster to impose radical reforms on the NHS. He has an excellent Chancellor in Rishi Sunak to assist him.
He has also, inexplicably, been gulled by the climate change zealots; the shaman being deceived by more relentless and fashionable tricksters. It is time for that most difficult and often disreputable but, occasionally (and this is such an occasion), absolutely necessary act of a barefaced 180-degree turn. Johnson is a most-talented communicator and can easily explain his way through this solely on the basis of the facts: He was sold a false prospectus and it has only now become clear that climate change alarmism and the proposed curative measures were seriously mistaken, and he has changed course accordingly, as the national (not to mention his own) interest requires.
Johnson has undoubtedly been careless in riding roughshod over the minority factions of his party. They have been vocally assisted in dissent by Boris’s always maliciously envious former colleagues in the Fleet Street press to whom, when he entered public life 20 years ago and several reporters asked him why, he replied, “They don’t put up statues of journalists, do they?” Boris is capable of great charm, and it is time to deploy that talent now. The British Conservatives are a treacherous party. Boris is the 14th Conservative Party leader since the entirely voluntary retirement of Stanley Baldwin in 1937. All of the intervening leaders were either ejected by their own parliamentary or cabinet colleagues (Chamberlain, Eden, Heath, Thatcher, Duncan-Smith, May), eased out more gently (Churchill, MacMillan, Home, Howard), or they departed immediately after a national popular rejection (Major, Hague, Cameron).
Boris Johnson, beneath his clownish exterior, is no amateur in the treachery and chicanery of the Westminster lobby, and he certainly hears the sound of knives being sharpened. But he has a legitimate mandate, and he certainly has the ability to break the Conservative Party into pieces if he is knifed in the back, and above all he has the ability as well as the incentive to raise his game. He’s a very talented man and has on balance been a good prime minister. He deserves a wholehearted chance to fulfill his mandate and probably possesses the political strength and cunning to do so. With that said, he never should have allowed the walls to close in on him as they have.
