Grifters On the Storm
A Tale of Two Speeches
‘Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease’, sang Bob Dylan, and yesterday there was a lot of nothingness on display and a great deal to feel uneasy about. First up was our departing PM, the Right Dishonourable Boris Johnson. In the early morning, he shambled out in front of Downing Street, accompanied by his grifter wife, to pay goodbye to a punch-drunk nation, suspended between delusions of unfulfilled grandeur and abject terror at the economic and social whirlwind threatening to engulf it.
Far be it from me to comment on female apparel on such an auspicious occasion, but I can’t help reflecting that a red see-through party dress was not the most well-thought out choice to mark the solemn transfer of power by a disgraced head of state to his successor-in-waiting.
Not that there was anything particularly solemn about Johnson’s speech. And Carrie was at least fairly transparent, which was more than could be said of the aggrieved, self-pitying charlatan who spent his last moments as PM once again trying to deceive the public with all the grace, humility, dishonesty and sleight-of-rhetorical-hand you might expect to find in a soliloquy from Iago while awaiting execution.
Like Iago, Johnson might have done better to keep his mouth shut, but he could not resist listing his achievements - most of which are not the achievements he claimed them to be - while drawing attention to what he clearly still regards as shoddy treatment by his own MPs.
Nowhere in this speech was there any recognition that Johnson was responsible for his own downfall. There was no mea culpa, no reflection, or even the slightest indication that anything untoward has happened. Mixing overwrought metaphors as usual he told the world that
The torch will finally be passed to a new Conservative leader, the baton will be handed over in what has unexpectedly turned out to be a relay race. They changed the rules half-way through but never mind that now.
No one who thinks about this will mind at all, because it’s a lie. The rules didn’t change. Johnson broke the ones that already existed. He has been forced out of power because his own MPs saw his reputation - and the reputation of their party - nosediving in the polls and finally decided that it was in their best political interests to remove him.
That’s why he’s gone. It’s the only reason he’s gone, and no amount of faux self-deprecation, cheesy jokes, classical references, or vainglorious boasting can conceal that. He’s gone because he disgraced himself and he brought disgrace on the office he held, and he did this because he is an arrogant, pampered narcissist who has got away with breaking rules his entire life and thought he could still do it.
To some extent he can be forgiven for thinking this, because the British political class and the media and the public effectively told him again and again that it was ok to break whatever rules he wanted, because he amused us or told jokes, or promised us things that we wanted to believe.
And if nothing else, Johnson’s shocking rise to power demonstrates that we are still, even in the 21st century, a deferential, even supine country that goes starry-eyed when a cheekie chappie with a posh accent, an Eton education, and some cod-Latin comes tripping the light fantastic to sprinkle magic Tory dust in our eyes.
Even as the would-be Cincinnatus left Downing Street to tend the ‘plough’ that will earn him millions through journalism and after-dinner speeches, his adoring coterie were gathered outside to witness his departure.
There was Dorries, already heading for the Lords, and sister Rachael who might end up wearing ermine too, and all the Downing Street staff, clapping and smiling and patting him on the back as if nothing has happened these last few months. It was as if some great leader were leaving Downing Street after losing an election, rather than the lazy dilettante who presided over the highest Covid death toll in Europe, and who was forced to resign because he allowed his Hooray Henry pals to stage their own Masque of the Red Death in the seat of the highest office in the land.
In recent weeks Johnson’s own MPs have shown the same deference. Yesterday Brendan Clarke-Smith, the MP who once said he was happy to support a law-breaking prime minister, tweeted:
Clarke-Smith has a 14,000-odd majority which will hopefully disappear come the next election, but that is not much consolation for this stream of respectful and even hagiographic tributes emanating from the Tory ranks - including from MPs who voted for Johnson to stand down.
To say this is not healthy and does not bode well, would be understating it considerably. Yesterday Johnson promised that he would be ‘supporting Liz Truss and our new government every step of the way’ - a promise that nothing in his record of plotting and disloyalty suggests has any credence or validity whatsoever.
Because Johnson may be incapable of remorse or regret, but he has resentful entitlement in spades. He will be seeking vengeance on the party he thinks has treated him unfairly, and he will he hoping for Truss to fail in the belief that he will be called back to another appointment with the destiny that he thinks still carries his name in lights.
This possibility can’t be discounted, and Truss undoubtedly knows this, which is why she praised her predecessor as a ‘consequential’ prime minister in her address to the nation.
Standing behind a lectern that looked looked more animated and engaged than she did, Truss gave a speech that might have been written and delivered by a computer, with a series of sentences and deadening clichés vaguely strung together, and read out with all the conviction that would once expect from a BT answering service.
It was the kind of speech to freeze the brain and crush the spirit, a speech devoid of human warmth or empathy or urgency or any sense of the multiple crises that the country now faces. Truss is only there because of the moral incontinence of the man she praised so fervently, but there was no acknowledgement of her party’s role in making it possible, and no sense of a new beginning.
There was nothing but more Tory ‘aspiration nation’ boosterism, without the thumbs-up hyperactivity of her blustering predecessor. Like a pharmacist checking the details on a prescription, Truss promised the nation that it could ‘ride out the storm’ without giving any indication that she knows what a storm is, or how people outside her shrivelled political universe will be affected by it or what she can do to help them.
A Carnival of Dullards
In its barren emptiness this speech as much an indictment of our impoverished political culture as Johnson’s florid grandiloquence. It’s impossible to believe that a leader like this can ever ‘deliver’ anything good, let alone that she can lead the country to better days.
Since 2016 the Tory Party has given the country the two worst prime ministers it is has ever had, and it would be very surprising indeed if Truss doesn’t continue that downhill trajectory. Why has this happened? Why has the most successful political party in the Western world turned itself into a carnival of dullards and narcissists?
The answer isn’t hard to find. While Brexit in itself does not fully account for Tory Party’s moral and political disintegration, it is impossible to imagine that someone like Truss would have become prime minister without Brexit.
Having hitched its political future to a political fantasy, successive Tory governments have spent the last six years trying to make that fantasy real, or at least worth the effort and the pain that has gone into it. So far it hasn’t succeeded, but until the party - and the country for that matter - is prepared to recognise and come to terms with that failure, we will get one Tory Brexit government after another, the talent pool will become shallower, and the rhetoric more and more detached from reality.
Truss comes to this toxic pool with an opportunist’s zeal, and a streak of very rightwing neo-Thatcherism that was already evident before she voted Remain and nearly wrecked her boundless personal ambition.
Already she has disregarded the ‘big tent’ exhortations of more sensible Tories, and packed her cabinet with loyalists, Brexit zealots, and ERG luminaries. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is the administration, even more than Johnson’s, that the Brexit ‘visionaries’ see as an instrument for imposing some of their more extremist libertarian proposals regarding deregulation, tax cuts and so on.
It’s actually the last administration that you would possibly want over the coming months and years, and it will almost certainly fail to produce any positive outcomes for a bruised and battered country whose collective fate is still bound to the machinations of this awful party
Johnson will be hoping for exactly that outcome, and despite the possibility that he might one day attempt to make a comeback, we should at least celebrate the fact that he has gone, and taken Priti Patel and Dominic Raab with him. And then we should also plot and campaign for the downfall of yet another malevolent Tory government, which promises to help us ride out the storm even as it prepares to make things immeasurably worse than they are.