London: Max Hastings, a legendary British newspaper editor and Boris Johnson’s former boss, was seemingly on to something when he predicted Johnson’s premiership would “almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability”.
Hastings ran the London Telegraph when Johnson was a young reporter in Brussels. He’d given him a job after Johnson was sacked by The Times for allegedly inventing a quote from his godfather, the historian Sir Colin Lucas.
He argued that while Johnson as a journalist was a “brilliant entertainer” who had become a popular mayor of London, he was “unfit for national office” because he “cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification”.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson addresses the nation as he announces his resignation outside 10 Downing Street on July 7.Credit:Getty Images
“Dignity still matters in public office, and Johnson will never have it. Yet, his graver vice is cowardice, reflected in a willingness to tell any audience, whatever he thinks most likely to please, heedless of the inevitability of its contradiction an hour later,” Hastings wrote in The Observer three years ago, just as the Conservatives were electing Johnson as their new leader.
There wasn’t much unknown about Boris Johnson before he took up residence at 10 Downing Street. He was a fully formed public figure whose career highs and lows and messy private life had been reported at length.
The front pages of Britain’s newspapers on Friday.Credit:
About 15 years earlier he was fired by the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, from positions as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman for lying about his extramarital affair with the Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt.
Johnson had supposedly argued that he’d been well within his rights to lie to the press about his personal life. It was almost as if a pattern was established.
He has continued to famously divert questions about his family and personal life, especially during the election campaign in 2019. It’s believed he has at least eight children – to several partners including from an extramarital affair while he was mayor.
Johnson, schooled at Eton and Oxford, had made a name of himself in the media, but when he was still in his early 30s he told friends he wanted more. For someone who had declared at the age of eight that he wanted to become “world king” it should not have come as a surprise.
“They don’t put up statues to journalists,” he once said.
First elected an MP in 2001 he continued with his writing, landing himself in controversy time after time with his commentary.
He defied conventional political wisdom, survived gaffes and being caught lying and even overcame his marital infidelities to become the remarkable and colourful British politician of his generation.
But if the Boris Project, as his aspirations became known, had always seemed inevitable, it was also inevitable that it would end in tears.
Johnson, 58, announced on Thursday that he would step down as Conservative party leader. He can, however, claim to be the most consequential British politician of his generation. He will be remembered many ways by many people, but ultimately, as the man who took the UK out of the EU.
To many voters he often seemed above politics. Certainly, beyond party politics. He was his own separate brand.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during a media briefing on coronavirus. His own staff did not observe lockdown rules.Credit:AP
In the Brexit referendum and the 2019 election, his celebrity and famous irreverence helped turn out the disaffected. His rallying cries “Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done” were effective at motivating those reluctant to vote. They helped drive Leave over the line to win the vote 52 per cent to Remain’s 48 percent. It also helped deliver seats in the “Red Wall” – a set of constituencies mainly in the Midlands, northern England and north-east Wales which had historically supported Labour but switched to Tory in 2019.
During that general election Johnson pitched himself as the only person who could deliver on the Brexit promise, while vowing to invest in left-behind areas of England.
Having stood up for bankers during the financial crisis, he now railed against London’s pre-eminence. He built a new electoral coalition uniting rural parts of southern England with seats in former industrial towns, where working-class loyalties to the Labour Party had frayed.
It cemented his image as a “Heineken politician”, one that could reach parts of the country that other Conservatives could not.
He won with a majority of 80 seats, the Conservatives’ largest majority since 1987. The victory was so large that it seemed Johnson could enjoy a decade as prime minister.
But while he had previously been regarded as a “lovable buffoon”, his critics argued that after wooing progressives in London as mayor, he’d pivoted to become a sort of British Trump. Someone who would whip up xenophobia and ugly racism and shift his party to a hard-right populist grouping that polarised the country and threatened to break up the United Kingdom.
Of course, he was not Trump. Nowhere near it. But he came close this week when he threatened to barricade himself in 10 Downing Street and ignore the mass resignations that triggered his downfall.
He set himself apart from Trump again on climate, where he became the most outspoken world leader on ambitious action to reduce greenhouse emissions. Perhaps, one day, those on the progressive side of politics will recognise the shift and that he played a pivotal part in getting the world’s richest nations talking about decarbonisation as an economic issue.
Boris Johnson was greeted with applause as he returned to Number 10 after the 2019 election victory.Credit:AP
Boris Johnson was his own separate brand.
In October last year, Johnson’s father Stanley told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that his son’s critics were often too quick to “slag him off” and underestimated his intellect and genuine interest in the environment, particularly around biodiversity and the proliferation of plastics.
When Britain finally left the EU on January 31, 2020, Johnson promised the start of a “new act in our great national drama”.
He hailed the 2020s as a “decade of prosperity and opportunity” for post-Brexit Britain, saying the UK could “turn the page on the division” of the previous three years.
Within a month COVID-19 hit, and he found himself contemplating health restrictions that went against his socially libertarian instincts. He was painfully slow to order national lockdowns, leading to the unnecessary deaths of thousands.
Discharging patients without testing in accordance with government policy brought COVID-19 into aged care homes. But he won public sympathy when he himself almost died of the virus that year.
A rapid vaccine rollout and billions of pounds of state support then steadied his position.
But it is how he behaved in private, not his policies, that undid him.
“There’s a pattern to Boris’ life, and it isn’t the lust for office, or for applause, or for susceptible women, that mark out this pattern in red warning ink,” Matthew Parris, a former Tory MP and political columnist for The Times wrote even before Hastings.
“It’s the casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal; and, beneath the betrayal, the emptiness of real ambition: the ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained.”
Things started turning against Johnson in late 2020 when his key aide, Dominic Cummings, travelled hundreds of kilometres to Barnard Castle at a time when Britons has been ordered to stay at home.
Cummings had been the architect of both Johnson’s finest achievements – Brexit and the 2019 election win. And so, the prime minister went against a howl of public disgust and stuck by his man.
At the time Johnson said he had “regrets” but only about the anger and confusion the public felt over his aide’s 800-kilometre round trip. It came at a heavy political cost.
But Cummings, involved in a power struggle within Number 10, soon resigned and spent his time outside politics attacking Johnson, whom he likens to a shopping trolley – smashing from one side of the aisle to the other due to his indecisiveness.
Dominic Cummings’s unauthorised drive across England during lockdown became a pain point for the already struggling Johnson government.Credit:Getty
Probity issues also plagued his government, with questions over who paid for his holiday to Mustique in the Caribbean in early 2020 and over the expensive refurbishments to his Downing Street flat.
These stories bubbled up and faded, but never entirely went away.
In November last year he demanded his party vote against the suspension of fellow Brexiteer and former cabinet minister Owen Paterson, who had breached paid lobbying rules. It caused outrage and prompted an embarrassing U-turn and apology. And with each mishandling, more questions were raised over his judgment.
Perhaps the hammer blow was revelations of Downing Street parties during the pandemic. And it was Cummings who helped expose those breaches.
In December, Johnson approved an independent investigation into allegations that he and other officials held lockdown-breaking parties during periods when members of the public were under strict restrictions.
His hand was forced after a stream of reports in newspapers led to explosive public anger over what became known as partygate.
The investigation, led by civil servant Sue Gray, was temporarily impeded when Metropolitan Police started their own probe into the events and ordered Gray to redact her findings until officers had finished their enquiries.
On April 12, after months of speculation and building evidence against the prime minster, Johnson was fined £50 by police for attending his own birthday party in May 2020. He was the first British prime minister found to have broken the law while in office.
Things came to a head last month with a no-confidence vote, which he narrowly survived, however two shocking byelection losses followed.
For many Tory MPs, the final straw was a changing official account of what the prime minister had known about inappropriate behaviour by Tory MP Chris Pincher before appointing him as minister.
These instances weren’t mentioned in Johnson’s resignation speech on Thursday evening but that came as no shock to his colleagues. Again, he suggested he had done nothing wrong; he was instead the victim of “relentless sledging” and an “eccentric” decision by Tory MPs to get rid of him.
“He’s clearly very angry,” one former cabinet minister told the Financial Times.
“Because, of course, it’s never his fault.”
After three years in power, Johnson lost his party and his country.
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