Boris Johnson’s Legacy
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I still find it appalling that the Tory party has cast out as their leader a man who less than three years ago was their political salvation against Jeremy Corbyn.
Boris Johnson is often accused of provoking a constitutional crisis by proroguing Parliament. This is entirely false — it was the recently empowered supreme court, breaking all tradition to stop Johnson on behalf of Remainer sentiment, that attempted to thwart the crown in Parliament.
In fact, Boris Johnson’s chief legacy is solving the constitutional crisis he inherited, namely the one that shipwrecked Theresa May’s premiership. She had become leader of her party and prime minister when, upon the arrival of the “Leave” vote in the Brexit referendum, David Cameron resigned leadership of the party. The people of the United Kingdom had given her a mandate for Brexit. However, there was no parliamentary majority in favor of executing the policy. Had she run an election on executing Brexit, and serving the majority of Britons that voted for it, she would have won. Instead, she ran an election that she muddied with budgetary gimmickry — the so-called dementia tax — and other issues. She ended up creating a parliament even more hostile to Brexit, one that was falling prey to Remainers within and without — see the way that the BBC worked with the bumptious Remainer, Speaker John Bercow, to undermine her government. Years and an election were wasted giving time for Remainers to launch extra-constitutional resistance to Brexit.
It was Johnson who ended this. By calling an election that was held in December 2019, he vowed he would get Brexit done. This was the decisive issue in that election. And it gave the Tories an unthinkably large majority in the House of Commons. Johnson finished the deal — well, mostly.
There was a second constitutional problem that Johnson inherited and punted as the price of “getting Brexit done” — namely, the Northern Ireland Protocol. While the arrangement suits certain business interests in Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the EU, it is an offense against the Good Friday Agreement, which, contrary to popular myth, actually strengthened the Union by defining the only means through which Irish unity can be effected: a border poll. The Northern Ireland Protocol effectively traduced this by transferring many questions of economic governance in Northern Ireland away from the United Kingdom, on the basis of Northern Ireland’s geographic connection to the Republic of Ireland. This has the effect of severing the political — and democratic —connection between Northern Ireland’s people and their government.
Having signed a Brexit deal, there was little else comprising a mandate for Johnson’s premiership, and it showed. He could have used his electoral result as a mandate for completely revolutionizing British government and politics, for deposing the claque of political-class functionaries that had frustrated Brexit and wrecked the May government. Alas, he seemed to be serving what could be delicately called a “domestic constituency” of one with his promises for a carbon-free future. A vague impulse to serve the former Labour voters who had come into the party caused the government to occasionally squirt some infrastructure cash around “red wall” areas, but not in an organized sense.
Johnson then took on the thankless task of meeting the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic. He did so in a way that reaffirmed the rule of the expert class, even as that class was coming into even more disrepute — and worst of all, even as he himself and his government were unwilling to live under the rules they imposed on their own nation. It confirmed the worst of Johnson, that he did not believe in the rules, and was willing to serve himself with his hypocrisy, but not his voters with the same willingness to buck the system. A leader can be self-indulgent if he serves his people too — that is, his self-indulgence can be seen as the price of his salutary willfulness. But Johnson was seen as morally weak and politically weak, unable to let the people in on his own rebellion against lockdown.
Lastly, his fundamental liberalism triumphed over his populism. Nowhere more so than on the issue of immigration. Brexit (and Johnson’s career with it) was propelled by a popular revolt against open borders. Now Great Britain’s borders are open to everyone and everything, except unchecked goods on a ship from Belfast.
I see no one in the Tory party capable of succeeding him and leading to a successful election, absent a Labour leader who vows fealty to North Korea’s Juche ideology. The Tory party will now turn to its true form, a bag of snakes devouring one another. I’m sure subjecting the nation to yet more months of this hissing, writhing, inner party psychodrama will endear the restive Scots toward remaining in the Union.
