Story Time

Tom McTague's recent article in The Atlantic, "The Minister of Chaos: Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing", has been widely derided as what happens when one journalist is played by another, even to the point where his peers have resorted to good-natured parody. In part this is the result of a British writer attempting to explain to an American audience why "British Trump" might be simplistic, but it also reflects the continuing determination of the press to indulge the Prime Minister by bracketing his obvious defects (the lies, the callous indifference, the incompetence) to present a portrait of a flawed but complicated individual, possessed of an unusual political cunning and personal charm. An early remark that pretty well sums up the whole article establishes a common interest in misrepresentation: "When I began meeting with Johnson early this year, I didn’t know precisely how he would take to interrogation. His exuberance worked in my favor; the fact that he is a former journalist, familiar with our wicked ways, did not." By the end, the article is frankly admiring: "As ever with Johnson, it’s hard to discern true belief from narrative skill".

An example of the Prime Minister's familiarity with the weaknesses of journalists was the casting of his role in the European Super League fiasco as "the people's tribune, defender of the national game from the threat of alien imposition ... channeling a cry of anger and turning it against globalization". This decidely misleading tale included Johnson lobbing in the term "deracinated", which seems to have dazzled McTague, while occluding his role in having apparently given Ed Woodward of Manchester United reason to believe that the government wouldn't object days before the announcement broke. What we see here is both flattery on the part of Johnson and a refusal to actually interrogate the subject on the part of McTague. The journalist love-in becomes positively cloying at times: "Johnson often carries a notepad around, a habit from his days as a journalist. A former aide told me that you know he has taken your point seriously if he writes it down. He runs meetings like an editor, surveying his staff for ideas, always looking for 'the line' - cutting through dry and occasionally contradictory facts to identify what he sees as the heart of the matter, the story." Given the many credible tales of his laziness and insouciance, this is a very generous reading.

One thing that McTague reveals is that Johnson's "charm" is in large part sheer excess: "In his office, Johnson steered the conversation to a subject he raised nearly every time I saw him. He’d read an article I’d written, a kind of eulogy for the late British novelist John le Carré". Beyond the trowelled flattery (at a later point he insists that the lesson of Horace is that history remembers the writer, not the patron), this anecdote does reveal the Conservative leader's theory of British history, but it turns out to be little more than a bipolar belief that the structural headwinds that face the UK can be overcome by a triumph of the will: "To Johnson, le Carré had exposed not the fakery of the British ruling class, but its endemic passivity, and acceptance of decline. ... He said he was trying 'to recapture some of the energy and optimism that this country used to have.'" This sounds very much like making a silk purse out of the sow's ear of Brexit. To emphasise the point, "In an early phone call with Joe Biden, an aide told me, Johnson said he disliked the phrase special relationship after the president used it. To Johnson it seemed needy and weak" (you'll notice this is another revelation by a helpful "aide").

That introduction of a US angle is typical of McTague's approach, and Johnson's complicity, but it can sometimes be tin-eared, as here [my italics]: "His mission, he says, is to restore Britain’s faith in itself, to battle the 'effete and desiccated and hopeless' defeatism that defined the Britain of his childhood. He believes that if you repeat that it is morning in Britain over and over again, the country will believe it, and then it will come to pass. His critics, however, say he is just leading the country 'sinking giggling into the sea.'" That last is a reference to Jonathan Coe's insightful 2013 LRB piece in which he laid the blame for Johnson's prominence in public life on the media's weakness for Oxbridge satire: "he seems to know that the laughter that surrounds him is a substitute for thought rather than its conduit, and that puts him at a wonderful advantage". It's also worth noting at this point that Johnson spent the late 1970s at prep school and Eton, before proceeding to Oxford, so the view of the country he imbibed at the time might have been slightly jaundiced, not to say overly-influenced by that satirical tradition.

The narrative of traditional Tory declinism offset by boosterism is dignified by McTague as near-genius: "Yet Johnson understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals do. He is right that his is a battle to write the national story, and that this requires offering people hope and agency, a sense of optimism and pride in place. He has shown that he is a master at finding the story voters want to hear." Really? Thatcherism constructed a narrative in which decline was blamed on pusillanimity towards both the enemy without - the Argentine Junta, the Soviet Union - and the enemy within - trade unions, leftwing councils, progressive culture. What is notable is that these were all genuine opponents. In contrast, Johnsonism has reduced the agents of British decline to cartoon characters - letterboxes, bumboys, doomsters and gloomsters. It is satirical caricature, not hope and agency. This is indirectly acknowledged in McTague's equivalence of Johnson's opportunism with adaptability, as if looking after number one could translate into a national story. But Johnson is no Bonaparte. He's a man who hid in a fridge during the last general election to escape scrutiny.

That weakness for caricature can also be seen in another long-form article in The Atlantic, George Packer's "How America Fractured Into Four Parts: People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?" Packer imagines the country divided by four "rival narratives" that combine into a contemporary political binary: two leaning right and two leaning left. Free America is the alliance of traditionalists and libertarians, which first coalesced under Reagan and then ossified to the point that it allowed Trump to take over the Republican Party. Smart America is the college-educated, liberal, coastal elite, who need to develop their social empathy. Real America is the devastated heartlands that continue to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations", as Barack Obama put it. Finally, Just America is a "rebellion from below" that "assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America", but which suffers from a "dissonant sound, for in its narrative, justice and America never rhyme".

Given that these looks suspiciously like distinct and succeding eras in American history, rather than competing narratives - the post Civil Rights backlash of Free America, the 90s emergence of the knowledge economy, the 00s nostalgia for an already-dismantled proletarianism, the post-2008 revival of the left - why is reconciliation necessary? Won't time inexorably diminish the right and strengthen the left? My guess is that Packer is unwilling to repudiate the search for a unifying centrism. The result is an indulgence of the old right, whom he hopes can be rescued from Trumpism, and a disdain for the new left, combined with a wish for Smart America to develop some humility. For example, he exhibits a nostagia for Ronald Reagan, even crediting him with a pragmatic governmentality, which he then contrasts with Newt Gingrich's commitment to government shutdown. This ignores the continuity. If Reagan sold a popular narrative of "Morning in America", he also articulated a story for the donor class about how his White House would keep government out of their affairs. In contrast, the caricature of Sarah Palin - "a western populist who embodied white identity politics—John the Baptist to the coming of Trump" - oversells the continuity. All the two have in common is that they're grifters.

Likewise, Packer's belief that the young seeking justice is not simply a result of material factors but the product of two generations of critical theory in colleges is as fatuous as any rightwing dismissal of "the woke" as closet Marxists. Consider this snippet: "Things changed astonishingly quickly after 2014, when Just America escaped campuses and pervaded the wider culture. First, the 'softer' professions gave way. Book publishers released a torrent of titles on race and identity, which year after year won the most prestigious prizes." The language used here - "escaped", "pervaded", "softer", "torrent" - is the reactionary vocabulary of conspiracy, a mood reinforced by the petty resentment over prizes. One word that doesn't appear in this is "hegemony", because even a liberal (if not a conservative) would balk at claiming that the ideas of Just America had become the ruling ideas of society. Essentially Packer is advocating reconciliation because he doesn't like the direction that America is taking - i.e. the leftward drift of the young. As such, he is in the camp that hopes Good Old Joe Biden will win back Real America ("I'm a union guy") and restrain Just America. A suitably chastened Smart America will then inherit.

The trope of the storyteller is central to American politics, essentially because of the belief that the nation must constantly reaffirm a collective narrative or risk disintegration. This is because its history has actually been one of uncertainty of purpose, rather than manifest destiny, which was reflected in competing narratives, sometimes pursued to a bloody conclusion. This was not just limited to the Revolution and the Civil War. Consider the fundamental differences between the Federalists and anti-Federalists in the early years of the Republic, or the anti-communist witch-hunts of the late-40s and early-50s. The desire for a collective narrative has fuelled various attempts at reconciliation, from the "Era of Good Feelings" in the early 19th century through the 20th century's Civil Rights movements to the contemporary valorisation of bipartisanship. In this context, an individual politician who can craft an inspiring narrative that stresses both American exceptionalism and common interest, as Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy did, will be at an advantage. For all the talk of polarisation, the appetite for collective uplift remains, as is evident from the sentimentality of Reagan and now Biden.

In contrast, the storyteller in British politics has tended to have a much narrower focus. This is partly because the multi-national nature of the UK has made it more difficult to impose a dominant narrative, and partly because the issue of collective identity has, as a result, been promoted to a supranational and formally apolitical level through the symbolism of the monarchy or the invocation of abstract "British values" such as tolerance and fair play that serve to finesse social friction. But it also reflects that the late arrival of universal suffrage meant that democracy in the 20th century centred on the social question - i.e. class interests - and the consequent need to stymie revolution (the course of British politics in the democratic era was set in 1926). The result of that was a bias in mainstream political narratives towards comfort and stability, hence the Conservative Party's preference for caution, leavened by occasional bonhomie, from Baldwin and Chamberlain to Macmillan (interrupted only by Churchill's Edwardian nostalgia in the early-50s), and the Labour Party's replacement of socialist fervour by Fabian gradualism and the deification of the NHS as the centrepiece of a conservative welfarism. 

Despite her radical impact, Margaret Thatcher's narrative was a quintessentially Tory one: backward-looking and oblivious to the selfish individualism that her policies enabled (ironically, Ted Heath was the exception to this tradition, which in part explains his unpopularity within his own party). Her rhetorical appeals to the virtuous British housewife already had an antiquated air at a time when attention was shifting to the fortunes to be made in the property market, while her nationalism could never fully reconcile either the evolution of the European Community or the end of the Cold War (particularly German reunification). Tony Blair would offer a more energising narrative of a "young country", but it was no less a fantasy than Thatcher's, and one that quickly demoralised large swathes of the electorate as the promise of progressive reform was undone by creeping authoritarianism while the creative destruction of globalisation and neoliberal financialisation was welcomed with something approaching glee. Subsequent attempts by both parties to fill the narrative void by adopting the American style simply produced such narrative clunkers as "the British dream".

The contemporary political scene in the UK is distinguished by triviality (confected "culture war" issues that are as evanescent as mayflies), an ostentatious emotionalism (from the wailing remnants of #FBPE to Tory MPs refusing to watch the England football team if they take a knee), and a widespread cynicism about politics. The last of these has enabled a rapid decline in "standards in public life", such as the barefaced corruption of government ministers, but it has also emboldened the Parliamentary Labour Party to believe that it can kill off party democracy once and for all. This cynicism has inevitably accentuated the devolution of narratives, not just in Scotland and Wales but now in Northern Ireland too, and even embryonically in the North of England. In this context, Johnson's reheated national story is what you would expect: a vapid, feelgood yarn in which tomorrow can be a better yesterday and sacrifices are for others to make. It's success, if you can call it that, is down to the absence of any serious alternative from the Labour Party. A forensic storyteller is a category error and maudlin snippets from a dull biography can't make up for that.