Boris Johnson: his part in my downfall
or ‘How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Bombshell’. Part 1 in a series of reflections on Boris Johnson’s unlikely rise and inevitable fall.
It’s been quite a journey with me and Boris.
As a teenage leftie in 2008, hearing in my Sixth Form library that that well funny guy from HIGNFY was running for Mayor, I knew Red Ken’s London — my precious socialist citadel — was under threat. The blond barbarian was at the gates (was Henley-on-Thames even in London?!) and my pleas to peers that they shouldn’t use their first vote on him just because he was funny fell on deaf ears. Laughter was the new opium of the masses.
Fast forward to 2012, and the situation had reversed. A spell at the University of Liverpool had shown leftism to be less about rebellion and more like a dreary, conformist pseudo-religion. The spirit of fearless enquiry on the ill-fated Telegraph Blogs had proved much more liberating, and I had slaughtered several of the sacred cows I’d previously herded around with me. In particular, a slavish adherence to a variant of multiculturalism, which demanded priority over all other liberal principles: feminism; gay rights; freedom of expression; even racial harmony where Jews were concerned. Ken Livingstone (along with George Galloway, another teenage hero of mine) personified this approach, notably through his courting of the loathsome cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The red barbarian was at the gates, and only the blond buffoon could stop him.
So my first ever vote for a Tory was less for the Tory in question, and more against the alternative. I saw the wily classicist as Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity — on an Olympian zipwire, fresh from zapping a revolt from the left’s Plutonian shore.
This position had not changed by 2016, because I remember regarding Michael Gove’s kamikaze Machiavellian turn on Boris as a) a public service and b) entertaining enough to shake me out of my post-referendum stupor (I had wanted the 52:48 result, just the other way round…).
We know what happened next. The years of paralysis were not only embarrassing, but seemed to confirm the undercurrent Leaver narrative that ‘the Establishment’ would simply not allow this sort of thing. Although the outcome had not been my favoured one, as I saw it the UK had been true to its “sweet, just, boyish” self in trusting its populace with a vote on EU membership — which other member state had dared? — but now looked set to betray itself, just as my two other countries had done over EU-related plebiscites: Ireland in 2008; and Greece twice, George Papandreou’s in 2012 , which never even happened, and Alexis Tsipras’ in 2015, the less said about which the better. If even old Britain couldn’t buck the Brussels juggernaut, then nobody could.
2019 was of course the endgame; Remainer and Leaver briefly united in a hateful embrace, pouring scorn on Theresa May’s vassalage deal, and then abandoning both major parties’ mealy-mouthed approaches to Brexit, with the Lib Dems taken up by ‘Remoaners’ and the Brexit Party a meteoric outlet for Brexiteer frustrations. As a reluctant Remainer who had — agonisingly — considered voting Leave and had long ago shed what little emotional attachment I had to the EU, I opted for the latter. The deadlock had to be broken. But by who?
Enter stage-right, Boris; this time as Mars, the Bringer of War, flanked by a mercurial Dominic Cummings. Or perhaps it was the other way round? Anyway as my initial ‘Readiness for Raab’ sank without trace, Boris was the only option remaining, or at least the only option that did not simply involve reheating May’s thin gruel. Continuity May was Jeremy Hunt who insisted renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement could not be done.
Prime Minister Johnson’s first move was to play Hercules, and clear out the Aegean stables that the 2017 Parliament had become. Proroguing Parliament was by historic standards entirely constitutional and due to party conference season would have only have resulted in a few extra days without parliamentary sitting, had not reckoned with the Europhile import of a ‘Supreme Court’. Bobbing Boris suddenly found himself cast as Minerva, out-weaved by a hale (and hearty) Arachne. Remainer friends viewed this as nothing short of an attempted metamorphosis into a British Mussolini, and displayed a sudden affection for the people they now praised as ‘One-Nation Conservatives’.
Reader, I took a different view; I am as broad-church a Conservative as any and I didn’t enjoy seeing ruddy, cigar-chomping Kenneth Clarke, gaunt, thoughtful Orientalist Rory Stewart or Sir Nicholas Soames — the very bloodline of Churchill — cast to the Party’s outer-darkness, but by this point it had to be done. The years of stasis had to end, and so the Cavalier-in-chief had his Cromwellian moment and cried “In the name of the 17.4million, go!”
When the Reformation Day Brexit failed to show, and Comrade Corbyn got tired of featuring in chicken memes and accepted the inevitable winter election, I was ready to do my bit. But posing for my first (of many) photos with the Ealing Southall Conservatives, foreboding potential futures did flash through my mind. Would the images emerge at gatherings of shocked Remainer-leftie friends, who wouldn’t put a cigarette paper between this and me joining a revival of the British Union of Fascists? And worse, would time prove them to have a point…? Later on reflection, the past featured too; how had I travelled so far from that Che Guevara T-shirt wearing dreamer who hated the sight of the toff with the blond mop, only to have voted him directly for him for Party leader and PM, and then campaign for him — again, directly, in his actual constituency of Uxbridge?
I suppose I’ll write about that too someday. There was the moment of pure elation elicited by the “stonking majority”, when Boris really did seem like ‘World King’ (the former Ealing North Labour MP and all-round anti-Corbynista tease Steve Pound burst into the Conservative room at Ealing Town Hall, smirking “Has anyone got a membership card?”) But fundamentally I never stopped seeing Boris as…well, Boris. Dynamic, big picture…funny, yes. But also chaotic, undisciplined and slippery as a fish. Not Zeus, but Pan — or Loki. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed in an 80-seat majority going to such waste, but of course I’m not surprised.
I will however maintain ’til my dying day that in the stasis of the Brexit wars, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was the disrupter, a necessary Fool. When Brexit Britain was left with a poor hand, all our aces played away, we did what any player would do, and played the Joker.
