Déjà Vu

I haven't spotted a Downfall parody yet, but it's surely only a matter of time. The media has been awash for weeks with tired metaphors of a nautical nature to explain the Prime Ministers's predicament - holed below the waterline, rats leaving a sinking ship, lame duck etc - but that says more about the politico-media caste's lack of imagination (the ship of state goes all the way back to Plato, after all) than the reality of Boris Johnson's position. Even the sight of Bruno Ganz's Hitler railing against Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza would be clichéd, but at least it would make a change. The premise of the media is that Johnson is fatally damaged and his departure from office is a question of when not if. But I wonder if this judgement is premature. Indeed, I wonder why the very journalists who oversaw his rise to power seem to have wiped his history of cyclical scandal and recovery from their collective memory. Johnson's career reads like a reworking of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall in which the protagonist is Captain Grimes ("in the soup again") rather than the naif Paul Pennyfeather, while the current shenanigans at Downing Street inevitably bring Vile Bodies to mind. There is a recurrent pattern to this history that can best be understood by considering Johnson's time as Mayor of London.

The blond beast's victory in the 2008 London Mayoralty election owed much to the mobilisation of voters in the Tory-leaning outer boroughs. His pitch to them was based on a combination of resentments: the supposed privileging of the inner boroughs by Ken Livingstone, the incumbent Mayor, particularly in respect of public transport; and the prominence of what would latterly be known as "woke" concerns, such as Livingstone's vocal support for LGBTQ+ rights and black community groups. This was augmented by a strident campaign in the media, with the Evening Standard to the fore, that sought to paint the newt-fancier as a menace to society. Notable examples of this were the emphasis on knife crime (though crime overall was falling), the fuss over the oil-for-advice deal with Venezuela (used as a vector to revisit the GLC's "loony left" internationalism), and flimsy accusations of antisemitism in which the hyperbole of the Board of Deputies and the Guardian would establish something of a template. Though he didn't use the term, what Johnson had promised the outer boroughs was levelling-up, while his pitch to centrists across the capital was the replacement of Livingstone's radical regime with a convivial liberalism in which his own well-documented libertinism was the guarantee of tolerance. 

Despite the substantial policy achievements of Livingstone over the eight years of his mayoralty, the 2008 election was largely conducted as a popularity contest between a prickly leftist with a history of rebellion against the Labour Party machine (he stood as an independent in 2000 after Blair stitched up the candidate selection contest, only being readopted by the party in 2004) and a media personality who was admired precisely because he wasn't too serious and who enjoyed grudging support beyond the ideological limits of the Conservative Party in London (where stardust was traditionally in short supply and its policies were often viciously anti-working class, e.g. under Shirley Porter in the Borough of Westminster). Livingstone regarded Johnson as a formidable opponent because of his populist manner and the media's decision to largely ignore his track-record of lying on the job, both as a journalist and an MP, and treat his messy private life as a joke rather than a fitness-for-office test. In this environment, Livingstone's attempts to call Johnson out on his racist and homophobic past statements had little effect. 

Johnson's approach to the role of Mayor was heavily influenced by his desire to avoid work, leading to him appointing multiple deputies to focus on the individual components of the job, such as policing, transport and planning. Where Livingstone typically had a single deputy, Johnson typically had six. On taking office, Johnson sacked most of the senior City Hall staff associated with the Livingstone era and brought in his own people, however he was also careful not to allow any one individual to become dominant, notably sidelining Tim Parker, an accomplished businessman and his initial choice of first deputy, within weeks. Though he reversed some of Livingstone's high-profile policies, such as the Venezuela oil deal and the expansion of the congestion charging zone, he mostly continued projects started or mooted in prior years, particularly those that entailed self-aggrandising press opportunities, such as Crossrail, the 2012 Olympics and what became known as the "Boris Bike" scheme. He did take a new broom approach to the Metropolitan Police, forcing the resignation of Ian Blair as Commissioner following criticism over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, however we was routinely supportive thereafter, notably over the death of Ian Tomlinson.

Apart from some crowd-pleasing gestures such as the New Routemaster bus (which proved to be something of an anticlimax on arrival), and crowd-baffling ones such as the single-stop cable car between Greenwich and the Royal Docks, his first stint as Mayor was marked less by policy initiatives or organisational novelty than by gaffes, complaints about the inadequacy of his salary and the fathering of another lovechild. This highlighted the extent to which a generally supportive media found itself running critical or even outright negative stories for want of anything better, a dynamic evident throughout Johnson's career (witness his underwhelming stint as Foreign Secretary). He was criticised for not curtailing a family holiday when the 2011 riots broke out, for the appointment of cronies to various plum jobs, and for a number of expenses scandals involving him and his staff. The overall impression, which hardly came as a surprise to longtime observers of the man, was of a louche regime of metropolitan chums who considered themselves exempt from the normal standards of public life and whose monuments, such as they were, predominantly benefited the inner boroughs. 

Johnson was a staunch supporter of the City throughout the financial crisis, and also of Rupert Murdoch during the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson Inquiry. This was repaid with financial and press support for his re-election in the 2012 contest in which Ken Livingstone was once more the Labour Party candidate. Johnson's campaign, informed as in 2008 by Lynton Crosby, was highly personalised, dismissing Livingstone as yesterday's man (not without justification by this point) and accusing him of tax dodging: a dubious claim (Livingstone pointed out his tax affairs were no different to Johnson's) but one that dominated much of the media coverage, along with another antisemitism scare against the former Mayor. Though his winning margin over Livingstone was reduced, Johnson was re-elected. His second term in office was notable for not much at all, outside of his zip-wire antics at the Olympics. He even had time to write a biography of Churchill and indulge his interest in IT with Jennifer Arcuri. There was a sense he was getting bored. Even his famed liberalism was starting to crack, as when he bought some second-hand water cannon in 2014, only to have their use banned by the flinty-hearted Home Secretary, Theresa May.

If you're the sort of person who reads this sort of blog, little of the above will be news. My purpose here is not to convince you that Boris Johnson is a lazy, conniving egotist but to note the recurring features of his career: his shamelessness, his symbiotic relationship with the press, and his desire to be the centre of attention. From his earliest days, he has been indulged and given preferential treatment. He has been over-promoted into journalistic and political roles that he invariably sabotages through indolence, deceit and sexual incontinence. Yet he also manages to hang on well beyond the point where most people would have been dismissed. The very fact that he has been sacked on multiple occasions is evidence not of his incompetence but of a lack of shame: he isn't the resigning type. He won't take a hint, or even an ultimatum, as Michael Howard discovered. Those imagining both that Tory MPs will have the integrity to unseat him and that he will read the room and go without a fight are ignoring history. He is probably the only Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher who could split the party, and unlike her may be tempted to do so.

His shamelessness is reinforced by his close supporters: the admiring cronies and hangers-on, the self-interested advisors (many of who, like Cummings and Mirza, apparently thought they could use him more than he used them), and above all the media. The role of the press in this is ambivalent for reasons I've already touched upon: that when the good news stories dry up, they are reluctantly drawn to the perennial scandals about his moral failings. The normally mutualistic symbiosis becomes temporarily parasitic. This is something that his idol Churchill experienced too, at various times, which leads me to suspect that Johnson isn't dismayed by the current turn against him and will simply bide his time. He knows the press will come back onside well ahead of the next election, and he also knows that his rivals for the party leadership are reluctant to become Prime Minister during a cost of living crisis when all they can deliver is bad news on the economy. A leadership challenge is more likely in 2023, assuming a spring 2024 general election, but by then partygate will be stale news.

Johnson's Jimmy Savile slur against Keir Starmer is a repeat of the tactic that worked so well in 2012 when he slurred Livingstone, but it's also a message to Tory backbenchers that he is up for a fight with both Labour and any possible party leadership contenders. In contrasting Starmer's supposed inaction over Savile with the CPS's prosecution of journalists, Johnson is also telling the latter that it is time to return to the mutualistic mode, and we shouldn't underestimate the desire of the Tory press to do so and focus on the Labour leader's shortcomings. Johnson appears to subscribe to Oscar Wilde's dictum that "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about". While the liberal media, with the pearl-clutching Guardian and Observer to the fore, thunder about standards in public life and his unfitness for office, the truth is that they're simply giving over the bulk of their political coverage to him, yet again. Labour's oscillation in the polls reflects the latest turn in the Johnson saga, not popular satisfaction that Rachel Reeves has ruled out nationalising utilities.

It would obviously be foolish to predict the future course of events too confidently. Johnson's career has had moments when he ended up flat on the canvas, notably after he withdrew from the Conservative Party leadership contest in 2016, and eventually one of these will see him counted out, but the current moment doesn't feel like that. What it feels like is 2011, when Johnson's popularity in London fell in the wake of the riots but then recovered in time to see him re-elected the following year. His period as Prime Minister has obvious echoes of his time as Mayor. Though he initially succeeded to the office by means of a party coup, the election of 2019 was based on a programme that emphasised the periphery's contempt for the centre. It was pushed over the line by an indulgent media and the preference of centrists for stopping a leftwinger (even at the cost of a hard Brexit). Since then, his time in office has been distinguished by a lack of drive, backbiting and jockeying among his staff and coterie, and a series of scandals in which the common elements have been cronyism and a disregard for the rules.  

While the pandemic has taken up much of the government's bandwidth, the lack of progress on levelling-up, trade and Northern Ireland points to a regime with few aims beyond self-preservation. Michael Gove's white paper is a long-winded admission that the government has no new ideas, let alone new money. Liz Truss's eulogies to global trade may enthuse Conservative party members but for most voters the reality is increasingly expensive shopping baskets. Meanwhile, Brandon Lewis has all but washed his hands of Northern Ireland as the DUP seeks to void the EU protocol negotiated and subsequently disdained by the Conservative government. Assuming no change in party leadership before the general election, Johnson will not have as easy a ride in the media as he enjoyed against Livingstone and Corbyn (though we all know there are more slurs to come about Starmer's history in respect of grooming gangs). Yet despite all this, self-preservation may still be an achievable goal, if only because it is Johnson's sole focus. Never underestimate the power of rampant egoism.