Boris Johnson’s operatic prime ministership defies category. In literary genre, it is Latin American magic realism rendered not as tragedy but as comedy. In TV terms it’s a cross between Jane the Virgin, Designated Survivor and Homeland. None was entirely plausible – indeed, they were entirely implausible – but they were compelling and in some sense lived out their own reality. In our politics, Johnson is like a combination of Bob Hawke, Barnaby Joyce and Bob Carr. In American terms, he is most reminiscent of Bill Clinton.
As a writer, with Johnson you cannot ignore the comedy, even if it may be tragicomedy, but neither can you ignore the serious. For Johnson is already one of the most consequential prime ministers in modern Britain.
Notwithstanding the chaos, I think Johnson has been a net force for good, as no one else could have secured Brexit.
His fall, or the fall of his government, would be bad for Britain, for the West and particularly for Australia.
Johnson is strikingly pro-Australian. He is the British father of the AUKUS agreement, which is opposed in principle by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Until a couple of days ago, Johnson was planning to make a big production visit to Australia in a couple of weeks. It was to be a formal state visit with Johnson addressing a joint sitting of the houses of parliament and it would have done a lot to cement the AUKUS arrangement.
That’s all off now. If Johnson goes we, along with a lot of others, stand to lose a good deal.
But will he go? I think the chances are 50-50 that Johnson survives, and if he survives he could well revive. His career has been outlandish, astounding and dazzlingly successful. He has never lost an election. As a Conservative, he won the mayoralty of London twice. He won the Brexit vote. He won the leadership of the Conservative Party. And he won a huge parliamentary majority in the election of 2019, giving the Tories their greatest popular vote share since 1979. And he did all that with the solid disapproval, indeed, visceral loathing in recent years, of most of the media.
His offence now, holding and attending social gatherings while Britain was in lockdown, is both trivial and deadly. Can it really be that the most telling piece of evidence with which to end a prime ministership is the presence of a birthday cake? No one can deny that a cake was present, gravely intones a prosecutorial voice on the BBC. You lose the prime ministership over that?
On the other hand, the whole of Britain was in lockdown. Some people couldn’t go to the hospital to visit their dying mother. The Queen mourned Prince Philip alone. And there was BoJo, boozing up in his back garden apparently unaware that this constituted a party, or at least something deeply inconsistent with the rules he was applying to everyone else.
All his life Johnson has been a cheerful rule breaker who wished good cheer on all his fellows. Broadly speaking, the British public loved that. Johnson was an English joker and in some way the public was in on the joke. He’s a bit of a lad, isn’t he?
But Johnson finally found the wrong rules to break. The public hates, absolutely, comprehensively and in every pore of their being hates, the idea that people in power have one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for ordinary folks. This is why it was never going to work with public opinion to have Novak Djokovic come to Australia without being vaccinated. The rules are the rules.
But still Johnson is not necessarily finished. Is his magic now forever dead? His fall in opinion poll ratings is spectacular. No modern prime minister has come back from such unpopularity except one – Margaret Thatcher. But our culture now is so febrile, so plastic, so fluid, that you can’t rule out a BoJo comeback.
Bob Hawke, whom I admired enormously when he was prime minister, was quite a lot like BoJo. A bit all over the shop ideologically, going from far left to solid right, he was a bad drunk and a womaniser when he was at the ACTU, and in drink astonishingly foul-mouthed. He was loved by his family, but they paid a price for the chaos in his life. Nonetheless, he had a big personality and he projected that personality to positive effect. Both men and women liked him, even with his faults.
His honesty about his faults was part of his appeal. I can remember my father, by then a very conservative man, being quite moved by one of Hawke’s tearstained TV admissions of his own failings. The big difference, though, was that when Hawke became leader he embraced a life of iron discipline for the sake of his leadership and the sake of the country. He gave up the booze and the womanising and he took his job with all the seriousness it demanded. He was supported by a wonderful spouse, Hazel Hawke, whose very persona emphasised stability and modesty in the best sense.
BoJo, on the other hand, seems to have made no personal stylistic concession to the high office he holds. Officials forbade him from taking confidential documents home because his home was constantly dishevelled, all kinds of people passed through it and documents were left lying about. Carrie Symonds is not responsible for Johnson’s failings but she seems to emphasise and reinforce the aspects of his personality – extravagance, ill discipline, personal whim, disorganisation, intense socialising, the booze – which as Prime Minister he should have been reining in.
Bob Carr had something of Johnson’s electric sense of humour and exotic range of knowledge but, like Hawke, embraced great personal lifestyle discipline as NSW premier. Barnaby Joyce was a natural, as Tony Abbott once observed; he was Australia’s best retail politician, with astonishing cut-through, but he was brought undone, at least temporarily, by a lack of discipline.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Johnson and in more than four decades in journalism I’ve never met a wittier, more verbally clever, and naturally charming person, full of self-deprecating wit, intensely alive in the minute. You’re left with the question any flawed leader provokes – how can he be simultaneously so smart and so dumb?
The comparison with Clinton is enlightening. Clinton all but threw away his presidency for an affair with a White House intern. He then lied about it under oath to a grand jury and was caught out lying. For any previous president, that would have been the end. But Clinton refused to resign and the public forgave the lie because they saw it as part of an attempt to keep the affair private.
Not resigning is one big political lesson, a lesson Donald Trump also demonstrated after the release of the revolting Access Hollywood tape. Like Clinton, Trump went on, post-disgrace, to win a presidential election. I don’t think you’ll ever shame Johnson into resigning. He’s not done yet.
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