BREXIT
Boris Johnson and the Rise of Britain’s Trump
With the ascension of Boris Johnson, the final act in the Brexit saga may be close, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be bloody.
The denouement of the Brexit soap opera began with a woman standing alone, in tears, in the middle of a lonely London street. It will likely end the same way, except Theresa May will have more company. The streets of London with be awash with tears by then.
On television, the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street looks deceptively accessible. Only a podium stands between the PM and the press and, by extension, the people. Behind her, the famous black door and the serene street scene. It all seems so out in the open, so calm, so egalitarian.
It isn’t, of course. Downing Street is the ultimate gated community, populated exclusively by those with their hands on the levers of power and off-limits to the public formally since 2005 and, in practice, for far longer.
Without passing cars or passersby to be concerned with, the best place for a Prime Ministerial photo op is in the middle of the road. Which is where Theresa May found herself when she announced - fittingly, in the final days of May - that she would be resigning over her inability to come away from Brussels with a workable Brexit deal.
The final straw was her inability to gain consensus for the latest in a string of doomed attempts to sort out the details over the divorce. As with every other attempt, she was shouted down by her own parliamentary colleagues for being both too Remainy and not Remainy enough to support. It was the Schrodinger’s Cat of post-war integrated economic policies.
I’ve written before that it is hard to be entirely unsympathetic toward Theresa May. She was indeed a terrible leader of both her party and her country, being too indulgent to the petulant whims of the former and hopelessly out of touch with the latter. Her time before that as Home Secretary was also patchy, with question marks over her commitment to both civil liberties and law enforcement.
With May’s Prime Ministership and reputation now unsalvageable, the irony should not be lost that, before all this, she was a Remainer. She tried to find a way out of Europe not because she believed Britain was better off outside the EU than in, but because she resolved to uphold the will of the majority.
But she was no worse and probably far better than either the man she replaced or any of those who sought to replace her.
And she was the only one to offer some sense that her ambitions were more for her country than herself.
Theresa May was a patriot. People who are violently, tragically wrong often are.
So it is justifiable to feel a little sorry for her when it was her turn to stand in the road and confess her sins, her voice remaining steadfast almost to the end, breaking into tears only when it came to acknowledging “the enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.”
Unable to go on, she walked away, alone and perhaps at peace, leaving it to whoever came next to pick up the pieces.
That person, after a long Game of Thronesesque power struggle, is Boris Johnson, former Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary. For Johnson, the second time seems the charm.
In the final weeks before the Brexit vote, Johnson’s evangelical embrace of the Leave cause put him on track to succeed David Cameron as Prime Minister. At the last minute, Johnson’s own leadership campaign manager, Lord Chancellor Michael Gove, backstabbed his old university chum to try to steal the prize for himself.
Gove’s audacity and treachery were hard to encapsulate at the time, though one Johnson ally managed to capture it quite succinctly in a text to a journalist from The Sun newspaper.
Michael Gove was, the source put quite succinctly, “a cunt who set this up from the start.”
Gove and most other contenders for leadership of the Conservative Party and by default the Prime Ministership, have been safely eliminated.
Johnson has finally secured the prize he craved, and this time around he knows what he is doing.
Not about how to get out of Europe without plunging the UK into constitutional, economic and existential crises, of course. He has proven this at every stage of the debate by simply not offering explanation, policy or plan.
He hasn’t the first clue as to how to halt a resurgence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, or prevent a second Scotland independence referendum, or avoid the devastation of a Welsh economy heavily dependent on European trade.
But, more importantly, he will know who to blame. Eurofascists, invading immigrant hordes, traitorous Remainers.
On that front, there is blame aplenty to go around.
From the time he first nailed his colours to the Leave mast, Johnson has gambled that his path to Number 10 lay in a chaotic divorce from Europe, not a harmonious reconciliation. There is a twisted logic to this. In these times, Johnson knows that England (and its only England that matters, given the rest of the Kingdom will never warm to him) are more likely to come together to rebuild the nation that he and Nigel Farage demolished than to preserve a union that is economically stable but beholden to foreign partners.
It’s a page straight from the Trump playbook. And Johnson is nothing if not England’s Trump. Even Farage must by now admit he has been replaced as the master of British political disaster. Xenophobic populism has a new king. Farage with snivellingly bow down before Johnson, just as he does to Trump.
Trump’s spectre looms large over Great Britain in many ways these days. The most recent example being the resignation of Kim Darroch, the British Ambassador to the United States.
Darroch loyally served both his Prime Minister and country in many ways, not the least of which was managing the ‘Special Relationship’ between the two nations even in the face of Trump’s belligerence and bullying of Prime Minister Theresa May. It was Darroch who saw to it that May was the first in line to meet with the newly-minted President Trump. When Trump returned the visit, Darroch worked - as much as humanly possible, at least - to shield Trump from the vitriol of British protesters.
He also made the mistake of providing frank and fearless advise on Trump’s ability and temperament to his Prime Minister.
Confidential diplomatic cables were regularly sent home to London, containing Darroch’s blunt description of the dysfunctional, faction-riven, “clumsy and inept” Trump White House.
Worse, Darroch offered his assessment of Trump himself.
“For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet,” he wrote, “President Trump radiates insecurity.”
The comments were part of a treasure trove of confidential cables leaked to the Mail on Sunday, a conservative tabloid newspaper.
The response from the White House was typically Trumpian. A little petty vengeance in the form of a withdrawn invitation to a state event, followed up with a bit of big-stick bullying of the British Government, and topped off with a torrent of late-night social media abuse. Trump tweeted that Darroch was “whacky” and a “very stupid guy”, among many other insults.
Darroch received strong support from May and token sympathy from UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but his fate was sealed when Johnson repeatedly dodged questions on his future. Only after Darroch was forced to step down, and only when confronted by The Sun newspaper did Johnson eventually claim Darroch had enjoyed his ‘full support’, even if he Johnson didn’t say it publicly. Even this tepid response only came after being backed into a corner on the subject. His telling first response when asked was that he thought “it would have been better if the whole subject had never come up.”
In any other time, the refusal of the next custodian of the Special Relationship to weigh in on the fate of such an integral player in arguably the most crucial international partnership of the post-war era would be unheard of. Now it is just unheard.
Johnson’s first, best move after May’s resignation was to hire Australian spin doctor Lynton Crosby, the undisputed master of negative campaigning in both his native and adopted homelands. In conservative circles, as academic and commentator James Murphy puts it, Crosby is “a man to hire or, if one is too slow or squeamish for that, a man to fear.”
Crosby’s first act was to get Johnson, famously prone to public gaffes like claiming President Obama had an “ancestral dislike of the British Empire” because his father was Kenyan, and that Muslim women in burkas “look like letter boxes”, to shut up. With one recent notable exception, Johnson has kept very quiet, refusing to weigh in on anything of substance beyond Brexit Or Bust sloganeering.
As with every challenge a post-Brexit Britain will face, Johnson refuses to be drawn into substantial comment, let alone decision.
No explanation. No policy. No plan.
In Borisland, silence speaks for itself.
