Boris Johnson’s cavalier instinct has gone puritan

The man elected for his ‘Merrie England’ bonhomie has become a new Oliver Cromwell threatening to ban Christmas.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a still from his 2019 Brexit campaign video.

Boris Johnson has been desperate to avoid becoming the prime minister who banned Christmas, as the puritans did during and after the English Civil War, but there is a distinctly austere tone to the restrictions that will be imposed between now and December 25. Conservative MPs, who will vote on the new measures today (Tuesday), are furious that most of England will be placed in the top two tiers, with tight controls on bars and restaurants and a ban on households mixing indoors. They are anxious about the economic impact on their constituencies and angry that such strict rules are being introduced when infection rates have fallen by a third.

As the country engages in a political civil war, with battles over Brexit and the pandemic, senior Tories also resent the increasingly roundhead approach from a prime minister who had always given the impression he would govern as a cavalier. One former cabinet minister says: “Boris was supposed to be Prince Rupert leading the cavalry and he ends up as Oliver Cromwell disrespecting his parliamentary colleagues and jeopardising Christmas.”

A shopper walks by a sign reminded people to social distance at Covent Garden in central London on November 22. Picture: AFP

I’ve contributed to today’s (Tuesday’s) episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Long View, which looks at parallels between the ban on Christmas, introduced in 1644, and the current restrictions imposed on the country in response to coronavirus. The 17th-century puritans feared that too much debauchery and drunkenness at the great midwinter feast would distract people from their devotion to God. “To them it is all about the health of the nation’s soul,” the historian Rebecca Warren explains on the programme. “The desire to fast, the desire to pray are all ways of protecting yourself and protecting the nation from further disasters which are the result of the wrath of God.” The puritans believed that to allow Christmas to carry on “would be a complete abdication of their moral responsibility”.

The 21st-century lockdown purists warn that too much social contact will threaten the closest thing the British people have to a religion - the National Health Service. Ministers, scientists, epidemiologists and health professionals are convinced that imposing tough controls when the national lockdown ends in England tomorrow (Wednesday) is the only way to save lives and stop hospitals being overwhelmed. They think it would be a dereliction of duty to liberalise the rules just weeks before a vaccine becomes available. Writing in Saturday’s Times, Michael Gove described the choice faced by ministers, with suitably moral overtones, as the “devil’s dilemma”.

Mr Johnson serves Christmas lunch to British troops stationed in Estonia at the Tapa military base on December 21, 2019. Picture: AFP

The puritans’ cause was spiritual: they thought that by forgoing Christmas people could protect themselves from going to hell. The prime minister’s motive is the physical health of the nation and he understands the risk posed by Covid-19 all too well, having been in intensive care himself when he fell ill with the disease in April. Yet in both cases leaders are asking their citizens to put aside personal pleasure and social enjoyment for the greater good.

The enduring divide in British politics is not between left and right, but between roundheads and cavaliers. It is as much about character as ideology and pits the revolutionary puritanism of Oliver Cromwell against the buccaneering individualism of the royalists. As Isaac Foot, the Liberal MP and nonconformist father of former Labour leader Michael Foot, once put it: “I judge a man by one thing: which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at [the decisive Civil War battle of] Marston Moor?” The underlying tension is between those who have a basically optimistic view of human nature and think that people, when left to their own devices, will do the right thing, and those who are convinced that the state must intervene to protect individuals from each other and themselves.

The distinction exists within parties as well as between them. Tony Blair’s aspirational champagne socialism was in marked contrast to the dour tap-water politics of his successor, Gordon Brown. David Cameron’s cavalier “chumocracy” was replaced by a roundhead asceticism under Theresa May. Boris Johnson has always been the ultimate cavalier: flamboyant, hedonistic, privileged and fun. At the last general election, his “Merrie England” bonhomie was in marked contrast to the disapproving puritanism of the vegan teetotal Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist New Model Army, Momentum.

Mr Johnson with a vial of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 candidate vaccine, known as AZD1222, at Wockhardt's pharmaceutical manufacturing facility on Monday. Picture: Getty Images

These were the terms on which Mr Johnson was elected Tory leader and prime minister. The cavalier influence was evident in the handing of contracts to Conservative donors and ministers’ friends and the “rules are for little people” attitude of some inside No 10. Jacob Rees-Mogg even has a miniature of Charles I made with the monarch’s hair, which he describes as one of his most prized possessions.

But when it comes to the country the prime minister has turned into the severest of roundheads. He has closed pubs, banned parties and told millions to lose weight. “The problem is that Boris doesn’t have any views,” says one former cabinet minister. “Those of us who voted for him thought he was a One Nation socially liberal Tory leader. Now we see him being a puritan. There is huge concern that anxiety over Covid is trumping the most basic human instinct, which is love for family and friends.”

The truth is the division within the Tory party and the cabinet is replicated within Mr Johnson himself. The prime minister’s own freedom-loving instincts are running up against the evidence that liberty must be curtailed for the sake of the nation. Mr Johnson wrote to his MPs urging them to show “unity and resolve” but such certainty is lacking in the prime minister himself. That is why the messages coming out of government are often so confused and why MPs are increasingly disillusioned with their leader.

One Tory rebel says the government’s approach to the pandemic needs to resemble a three-way see-saw, balancing the health risks, the economic consequences and the public’s willingness to comply. “If people don’t understand why they are in a particular tier then they are less likely to follow the rules,” he says. It is an opinion that is reinforced by history. In the 17th century, after several years in which festivities were banned, there were “Christmas riots” driven by what Dr Warren calls a “wider hostility to the whole of the puritan regime”.

People will only stick to tough rules if they can see the logic of the restrictions and have faith in the government that is issuing them. It is hard for the voters to have confidence in the new puritanism if they sense the prime minister does not really believe in it it himself.

The Times