Johnson at 10

Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell,  Johnson at 10 (Atlantic)

If one thing that history, or any study, does is to try to make order out of chaos, some coherence out of disorder, an account of Boris Johnson's premiership is as much of a challenge as any authors would want. 'At 10' means this is not a biography but an analysis of a Prime Minister's attempt to do the job. To tell such an involved story purely chronologically risks making it too much of a farce wrapped in a fiasco inside a disaster and so, separating out themes into discrete chapters follows threads and means that characters like Dominic Cummings reappear after one thought they had exited the main action.

It's a rare thing for a politician, never mind a Prime Minister, to be assessed as a success but some have their moments. Johnson's chances of enjoying a period of achievement were ruined by the outbreak of Covid soon after he had gained his 80-seat majority having battled ingloriously with the minority he inherited but the most ill-prepared leader was visited upon the country as retribution for their gullibility in falling for the transparent rhetoric and woolly optimism that was his signature way of operating. It's not Seldon and Newell's fault that the synonyms for 'shambolic' in their thesaurus have to be repeated over and again. 

More than any other Prime Minister's, Johnson's head that wore the crown lay uneasily. 

We know, because he's said so, that Dominic began plotting against him as soon as Brexit was 'done', if one could call it done when he left it half-baked having promised the deal was 'oven-ready'. His paranoia was entirely justified with other aspirants to his job soon sensing that he'd be short-lived in the post. He constantly needs help, reassurance and to be told what to do. Among all the many contributory reasons for his downfall, his lack of authority, his lack of grasp and insecure, transactional loyalties were the underlying theme. The Evening Standard listed 48 policy U-turns from May 2020. 

If anything, Seldon and Newell are kind to him, presenting him as the hapless manager in the middle of opposing forces, desperate to keep them all happy, making them promises he couldn't keep and, as we saw, all at sea and rudderless. Their story is one of internal machinations and how one's worst enemies in the job are not the opposition but within. His landslide election victory that he thought was all down to him and made him strong wasn't as much due to his much-vaunted charisma and talent for communication as it was Jeremy Corbyn's unelectable lack of any such things. Labour collapsed and gave the impression of an impressive personal success for Boris but, beyond the party members in the country who still needed to believe in his grandstanding, it was a tawdry and ramshackle coalition that made up his support, most of who saw him as a puppet to bring about their dubious agendas.

There never had been a plan. The plan had simply been to be Prime Minister. The comparison made here is not with Churchill, certainly not Thatcher or Reagan, it's with Lloyd George who likewise preferred to suit himself and dispense with awkward protocol. But not enough is made of the compulsive mendacity,

He possessed a chronic aversion to the truth,

the spendthrift attitude to money that wasn't his, whether decorating the Downing Street flat to his gaudy taste or on outlandish projects - like a tunnel or bridge to Northern Ireland - that would give him a legacy,

or his assumption that rules were not meant for him, from the parties held at no. 10 that he was at first 'furious' about before it turned out he was at them, through signing agreements he had no intention of honouring to the 'bewilderment' he apparently later genuinely felt at the findings of the Inquiry into Partygate but was the same incredulity he had so often suffered from when in office.

 

His leading of support for Ukraine was his Churchill moment but no more than what anybody ought to have done. What he can be given credit for is seeing through Donald Trump, not immediately but sooner than he might have been expected to with such an admirer of his. Any attempt he had once made at a rapprochement with Putin was no worse than Cameron's interest in links with China or Chamberlain thinking he'd done a deal with Hitler.

The closest he ever got to a belief in anything was a vacuous idea of 'freedom' but that means whatever you want it to mean, nobody's against it, and despite his wide reading and supposed intellectual abilities, it was the shallowest of ideas, the 'libertarian' instinct being as self-serving as he remained until what we must hope was the end of his political career.

That end was brought about by the accumulation of all the evidence that showed what he was like. It was the avalanche of resignations, with Rishi Sunak as the most significant, on top of the habitual lying, standing by the likes of Chris Pincher and the way in which he so quickly stopped being a winner and became an electoral liability. But, like any of them, he took some persuading to go. It would have taken more than wild horses to drag him away, he said it would take panzer tanks. Ultimately, it was because he simply couldn't form a government from those that remained loyal to him, the likes of Nadine and Jacob who, in some most peculiar way, almost deserve some meaningless low-grade honour of the sort they would enjoy if only for services to the dance band on the Titanic.

 

In an odd way, I almost miss him. It's gratifying to be able to feel 'better' and on higher moral ground than somebody so famous and billed as 'glamorous' and 'rock star' even if he quite clearly was a chancer who got a lot luckier than he should have. And it could be invigorating to be so cross at his behaviour, his troublemaking and the fact that he never answered a question at PMQ's. Keir Starmer's second question, right through to his sixth, should always have been, No, no, it's Prime Minister's Question Time and we can wait all day for an answer to the first.

Rishi Sunak deserved better than to have to pick up the mess, like Gordon had to, and John Major. They had inherited from Prime Ministers who equally had to be persuaded to go but had at least achieved things in their time. I'm surprised that Seldon and Newell even take the time to consider how Boris Johnson compares to their list of 'great' Prime Ministers, perhaps it's part of their remit and what they always do. It's not that he didn't prove to be, having had the potential, as they seem to think could conceivably have been the case. Their end, like they say his was, was in their beginning and the reason why he was so awful and such an embarrassment was not due to prevailing curcumstances, those that he surrounded himself with or any of that whole company. It wasn't even 'chiefly', it was only, as some of us knew many, many years ago that it would be, himself.