Lockdown finished Boris – but for all the wrong reasons
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People knew what they were doing when they voted for Boris Johnson in 2019. They knew that he was a disruptor, a corner-cutter, a man with no time for norms or niceties. They sensed that, like Nietzsche’s Blond Beast, Johnson transcended the rules. And they got precisely what they had voted for. These were the qualities that led Johnson to break the deadlock in Parliament, beat Jeremy Corbyn and deliver Brexit. It was his impatience with process that gave Britain the fastest vaccine rollout of any major country on Earth.
Johnson’s victories left his opponents dumbfounded. They had dismissed him as a buffoon. Yet he took his party from 8.8 per cent of the vote at the 2019 European election to 42.4 per cent seven months later, and went on to lead Britain out of their beloved EU. The figure they had taken for a clown had belaboured them, not with an inflated bladder, but with a real crowbar, leaving them broken. No wonder they wanted revenge.
When I say “they”, I mean those who never reconciled themselves to Brexit: Conservative as well as Opposition MPs, broadcasters, columnists and, not least, many senior civil servants. Against this complot of grandees, Boris for a while had his mandate. Many Tories knew that people who would never vote “for the Conservatives” had been happy to vote “for Boris”.
But, when the pandemic hit, the mood changed. A frightened country was in no mood for jokes, and the qualities that had attracted people to Johnson in the first place – his cheerfulness, his ability to laugh at himself, his optimism – began to grate. Boris was suddenly stranded as a Falstaff in a nation new-peopled with Malvolios.
As the lockdown dragged on, fear gave way to resentment. Even those who had demanded the toughest restrictions began to chafe at their consequences, to look for someone to blame. It was Johnson’s supreme misfortune to come shambling into their line of sight at this precise moment, accused of breaking the rules that he had imposed on everyone else. The PM, it seemed, had been partying while his rules had forced families apart and kept people from dying loved ones.
Such was the mood that qualifications and defences became impossible. No one wanted to hear that an office break with colleagues was not, in any normal sense of the word, a party. No one wanted to be reminded that other key workers had posted cheerful dance videos. No one wanted to be told that Johnson, too, had gone unvisited in hospital, and that he had been prevented from seeing his own mother, who died not long afterwards – that he had, in fact, obeyed the same rules as the rest of us.
No, we wanted a sin-eater, a scapegoat. And who better than the man who had been pushed into decreeing the lockdown in the first place?
Ah, you say, but the Privileges Committee investigation isn’t about these things. It isn’t about the 2019 election or Brexit. It isn’t about whether people sang Happy Birthday to Johnson in the cabinet room. It is narrowly about whether he deceived Parliament.
Now deceiving Parliament is unpardonable. An MP can get away with drunkenness, or adultery, but not with lying at the Despatch Box. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. Still, I cannot for the life of me see, on the basis of the evidence they have heard, how the committee can ever conclude that the former PM concocted a deliberate lie.
There was one occasion when Johnson told MPs that “whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.” It may be that, that time, he fluffed his lines, for it seems that his briefings referred only to the rules, not to the guidance. But does it strike you as plausible that this was calculated deceit rather than imprecise wording?
You might say that I am doing what I am accusing Johnson’s enemies of doing, namely determining his guilt or innocence on the basis of whether I like him. And it is certainly true that, just as those clamouring loudest for his removal were generally already anti-Boris and anti-Brexit, so those insisting on his innocence make no secret of their desire to see him back in Downing Street. Well, not me. Once you resign, you resign. Fond as I am of my former Telegraph colleague, he has had his chance.
Nor do I buy the idea that we are somehow being governed by a cabal of Euro-nostalgic wets. Rishi Sunak, unlike Johnson, is a lifelong Eurosceptic. As Chancellor, he tried to hold the then PM back from writing cheques left, right and centre. It was thanks to the Thatcherite Chancellor, not the big-spending PM, that we were not locked down all over again when, at the end of 2021, the scientists were scare-mongering about Omicron.
The readiness of some Johnsonians to blame the current PM for the conclusions of an independent committee does them little credit. This is not about Sunak. It is about the nonsensical way in which politicians can be brought down by committees of other politicians, including their opponents. It is about whether any minister can in future have his or her career ended for saying something in good faith that later turns out to be incorrect.
It is, in the end, about whether a serious country turfs out its leader, not because he has immiserated it, or lost a war, or broken his promises, but because he was found in the vicinity of uneaten cake. Who are the real clowns here?
