A unanimous verdict from the 11 justices of the highest court in the land has determined that Johnson’s advice to the Queen to prorogue the parliament was unlawful. There was no reason, Supreme Court president, Lady Hale said, “let alone a good reason — to advise Her Majesty to prorogue parliament for five weeks.”
The tedious metaphor of an own goal featured in numerous reports yesterday. The truth is if Boris saw his own goal face exposed, he’d swat at the ball with his foot, sending the sphere past the uprights before concussing a child on the terraces.
Taking on what is arguably the world’s toughest job, Prime Minister Johnson has lost his parliamentary majority. He has lost six successive votes on the floor of the Commons and now he has been found to have misled the Queen. All in the space of two months.
The judicial verdict was seen as a victory by the Lib-Dems, Labor and the Greens. The Remainers on the government benches and those who have crossed over were ecstatic but the judgment is not so much about Brexit, although it is impossible to separate Brexit from anything in the UK these days.
It is more about the business of parliament and why it shouldn’t be having a lie down for five weeks during a period where the term ‘crisis’ has been in use for so long that it barely seems adequate. A much more meaningful word begins with cluster and ends with a quartet of asterisks.
Johnson has a raft of Brexit options still available to him, but he can only exercise them from the political shoebox he finds himself confined to largely by his own decree.
Obviously, Johnson’s brief tenure at No. 10 wouldn’t have seen Elgar rush to the pianola to bang out a stirring tune if the composer was still in the vertical. Johnson’s saving grace is his direct opponent, the hapless Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn possesses that rarest of political qualities, anti-charisma. When he enters the room, everyone already in it feels a sudden, almost electric urge to leave. And many from Labour already have.
There is little inspiration to be gleaned anywhere in British politics. The great irony is barrackers of Boris Johnson saw him as the saviour of Brexit, vanquisher of the Bosch and restorer of British pride. Cue a thousand wartime allusions hurled about by people who have never actually lived through one.
It turns out he’s not the messiah...
Let’s leave the Brits to their pain for a moment and look elsewhere to ponder the current fixation with finding political saviours. Not simple political operators or efficient administrators nor even gifted negotiators. When the world now scans the political horizon it wants to see the superhuman, the transcendent, the eerily other worldly.
With the possible exception of Biblical times, has there been a greater obsession with finding messiahs?
Helpfully, the Australian Labor Party has paved the way, having spent the last twenty years on a perpetual hunt for its own messianic leaders — charismatic, alluring, not simply referring to themselves in the third person but engaging in entire conversations with themselves in that hypnotic-but-not-in-the-good-Las-Vegas-way way.
Bill Shorten, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd spring immediately to mind. They ticked enough boxes to get the messiah gig. Unfortunately, no one in the party thought to give them a go at the Hare checklist.
In the US, President Trump is seen almost like an orange-skinned Jesus by some of the more excitable evangelists over there.
Trump may be a populist and there have been plenty of them before and no doubt there will be plenty more to come. But he doesn’t market himself as a saviour, defender, redeemer, protector or Aslan with a Twitter account. Neither does Johnson for that matter. Nor Brazil’s Bolsonaro. Not Duterte in the Philippines. Not rootin’-tootin’ Putin in Russia either. Not even Pope Francis in the Vatican State. President for life in the PRC, Xi Jinping? All right, maybe a little.
The point is that the messiah label is not assumed by political leaders. It is stuck on their brows by the punters. And in doing so great expectations are created that inevitably disappoint. And then we go round again with the search for the next messiah.
It’s either that or the great delusion rolls along into the truly weird. In the US, non-denominational preacher, Paula White claimed she had blessed the White House, calling it “Holy Ground” and claiming it is “now covered with the superior blood of Jesus”. You’re not going to get those stains out of the drapes with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water.
It’s as if there is a committee trawling through CCTV cameras using facial recognition technology to find “The One”. At the UN in New York earlier this week, the 16-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, berated the world for indecision and inaction on climate change.
It’s not her fault. It is the lot of children to fret over existential crises. I did it. Back in my day, it was nuclear Armageddon that had me lie awake at night.
I went through another phase a few years back where I was berated by a 16-year-old almost every day and I can only say, after a while you learn to switch off. It is only a matter of time, perhaps when Thunberg hits adulthood, that people will do the same. I just know that as time rolls along, she’s going to be torn apart by the very people who are now cheering her on. You can put the house on it. It’s so predictable.
Never mind a chosen one. Why does the bar have to be set so high? Can’t we find a politician out there who might have popped on odd socks in the morning, or missed a spot shaving or who can’t conjugate irregular verbs in Latin but in the end offers nothing more than competence?
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It is entirely possible that those who thought Boris Johnson is a heroic figure, a fixer par excellence and a political messiah may have overegged the pudding.