Nightmare on Downing Street

Johnson, Brexit, and the Populist Shop of Horrors

Right-wing populism may share certain common features, but its representatives are always very specific products of the culture and history of the countries they emerge from. 

In Brazil, the former army captain Jair Bolsonaro could taunt former president Dilma Rousseff with the memory of her torture by the military precisely because Brazil was ruled for nearly thirty years by military regimes that still appeal to many Brazilians.  

In the US, a reality tv star, alleged rapist, and real estate billionaire became what some American Christian leaders call ‘God’s flawed instrument’ because many Americans liked Trump’s tawdry vulgarity, his racism, his greed and viciousness, his sense of white entitlement, and his toxic masculinity. In the Philippines, many Filipinos supported the murderous ‘penal populism’ of Rodrigo Duterte without reservations and actually relished Duterte’s foul-mouthed brutality.

The trick that all these leaders use is simple but effective: whatever their background they present themselves as outsiders who somehow represent the real interests of ‘the people’ more than the established political classes, and say and do things that ‘normal’ politicians supposedly don’t dare to.  

In the UK, this game has been most successfully played by a devious ex-Etonian sociopath with tousled air, a cultivated PG Wodehouse persona, a fondness for lame puns and after-dinner jokes, and a veneer of comic unseriousness which somehow managed to convince millions of mostly English voters that it would be a good idea to make him prime minister.

Many of them regret it now, and millions of us regretted it at the time. But Johnson’s rise is not simply due to his powers of deception. He didn’t promise to build great beautiful walls, exterminate his left-wing opponents, or murder drug dealers.  He became Tory leader because of Brexit, and he became prime minister because he promised to ‘Get Brexit Done’, having spent nearly three years trying to undermine his predecessor’s cack-handed attempts to transform the fantasy of Brexit into political and economic reality.

Johnson was not interested in these realities, beyond their usefulness to him personally, and too many voters were more concerned with getting Brexit done than they were with the man they elected to do it.

Without Brexit, Johnson might have made it to Downing Street, but the route would have been longer and more tortuous, and he might have lost patience, and his party have lost patience with him.

Populists promise to make their countries ‘great again’ with various proposals and pledges. Johnson had only one, or at least only one that mattered: Brexit. And this was because in the UK, dreams of restored ‘greatness’ have been imagined almost exclusively through the prism of Brexit, and the imagined consequences of Brexit. 

Consider what might have happened had David Cameron not promised an in/out referendum in 2013 to please the Eurosceptic wing of his own party. No doubt the Europhobic ultras would have continued to argue their case, helped by UKIP’s successes in local elections. 

In response, Cameron and his successors would have continued to tack right, in order to placate these sectors, insofar they could.  These conflicts would have generated new crises, which might have toppled Cameron and brought someone like Johnson to power. 

The Battering Ram

But in the end, it was Brexit that brought Cameron down, and provided the nationalist right with a political battering ram that enabled it to destabilise the UK’s moribund political order and its ‘old boys club’ constitutional mechanisms.

Anti-‘globalism’, economic resentment, culture wars, anti-immigrationism, hostility to ‘elites’ and ‘experts’, loathing of ‘cosmopolitan’ liberalism and leftism, with a tendency to conflate the two; white insecurities about demographic decline and the rise of minorities; generalised disgust with politicians – all these hallmarks of the global populist insurrection made Brexit possible, and made the election of Boris Johnson possible.

The irony is that in achieving these outcomes, Brexit destroyed the old Tory Party and transformed it into a party that had no other purpose beyond Brexit, and which now has no real purpose except to keep Johnson in power. 

Consider this week’s vote of confidence.  No one can be surprised that some of Johnson’s supporters and professional rightwing controversialists, such as the obnoxious Spiked luminary Mike Hume, have tried to portray the no confidence vote as a ‘Remainstream media’ plot to ‘reverse Brexit.’ 

Never mind that the MPs who voted against Johnson include ERG stalwarts such as ‘hardman’ Steve Baker, Mark Harper, and Andrew Bridgen.  These people return to Brexit because they have no other place to return to. Without Brexit, Johnson could not have withdrawn the whip from his Tory opponents, thereby further gutting the party of talent and expertise. 

Of the 211 MPs who voted for Johnson, some 160-odd are so-called ‘payroll’ MPs who have some kind of job that they owe to his patronage.  His cabinet is probably the greatest concentration of mendacious, cowardly, self-seeking grifters ever assembled in a British government. 

Despite the endless references to Ukraine, and ‘getting on with the job’, it is not at all clear what job this cabal is getting on with, or how it intends to deal with the multiple problems converging on the country, some of which are caused, or partly caused by the Brexit that they got ‘done.’ 

Without Brexit – and the endless culture wars and pseudo-victimisation have accompanied Brexit - it is not clear what the Tory Party stands for, or what Johnson stands for.

This is why Johnson’s political project -insofar as one can be detected at all – consists mostly of headline grabbing distractions, back-of-a-fag-packet improvisations that contradict previous attempts at the same. One minute he’s flirting with social democratic nostrums about ‘levelling up’, the next he’s threatening to break international law and pack refugees off to Rwanda.

Today Johnson tried some rehashed Thatcherism – benefit users can pay mortgages, housing association tenants can buy their own houses – despite the fact that most of the despised ‘experts’ have ridiculed these proposals.  He also promised to cut taxes – to reassure the likes of Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson and ‘traditional’ conservatives that his government is a good-old Tory tax cutting government.

Because Johnson has no identity beyond Brexit - a project which he only regarded as a means to power rather than a permanent principle, he belongs to no one and everyone. He wants to cut down and level up, to be Big State and Small State, to be hard and soft. More than anything else, he wants everyone to stop talking about parties.

On Tuesday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid compared the NHS to ‘Blockbuster in the age of  Netflix’, and called for reforms that cannot be achieved without privatisation - or government investment derived from taxation. Johnson’s government has not always been quite so farcical, though it has always been this dishonest.   In the first months of the pandemic, his administration was forced by public pressure, a national emergency, and the despised ‘experts’ to act against its leader’s instincts and actually act like an enabling state - up to a point.

This period didn’t last long, and was marked by flaws and contradictions, from ‘seeding’ Covid-infected patients in care homes, to the nepotism and corruption that accompanied PPE procurement.  

The King of Comedy

Today however, Johnson’s cabinet are like canoeists paddling in sand, and it’s darkly hilarious that this predicament is almost entirely due to the moral incontinence and arrogant dishonesty of a man who wanted to party like 1999 even though it was pandemic Britain in 2021. 

We can laugh at the humiliation and disgrace of the greatest charlatan in British political history, but as Thomas Hardy once said, comedy only scratches at the tragedy underneath. In the end the joke is on the country that placed its fate in the hands of a man who so patently lacks any of the qualities that his position requires. 

And as wounded as he is, Johnson is still there, vengeful, arrogant, and blustering, and the mother of parliaments has not yet found a way to remove him, beyond relying on the flickering moral compass of a hollowed-out Tory Party, and the weak manoeuvres of an opposition that has still not decided what kind of opposition it wants to be.

This is a perilous situation for any country to be in, let alone a country facing multiple economic problems, some of which are self-inflicted. 

If millions of voters now see through Johnson, it doesn’t mean that they see through Brexit, or that they have rejected the toxic populism which has wrought such havoc over the last six years.  If the UK is going to wake up from the political nightmare in which we are all trapped and find its way to a better place, it needs to look beyond the destructive narcissism of the world king, and ask itself some serious questions about how he got there, and why so many people didn’t see the horror that was in front of their faces.