Ordinary corruption

Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 11th June 2023.

Is Boris Johnson an aberration? A great deal of ink is going to be expended this weekend, arguing that the dramatic end of the former Prime Minister’s parliamentary career on Friday is best explained by the ex-PM’s reprobate personality and the corrupting force it exercised on his party and government.

In Johnson’s head, he still seems to be ­living out the story of the great ­indispensable man brought low by the petty jealousies of lesser mortals. But lots of his critics fall into the same category error, seeing the fall of Johnson as a pure expression of his ­character, rather than telling us something more important about the many enablers in politics and the wider British media who made it possible for him to assume power.

Apart from devoted spear carriers, Johnson’s former cheerleaders and apologists now seem reluctant to take credit for what their creature has wrought. Funny that.

Drama primes us to analyse the world this way. The kingdom is sick because the king is mad. The government is rotten ­because a fish rots from the head. If the politics is going wrong, personalities must be the problem.

If Brexit isn’t working, it must be because the cause has been ­betrayed by the unbelievers and the remoaners. The ­intrinsic difficulty of the task – and the ­contradictions and inconsistency of the pitch – never comes into it. Critics of the great man must be secretly motivated by personal pique or partisan grievances.

If you understand politics this way, structural factors, policy trade-offs and wicked problems barely get a look in. They’re not only complicated – they’re often boring ­­explanations for what’s going right and wrong in public affairs. By contrast, ­everyone understands a good psychodrama.

With his chequered history, messy personal life and unstable finances, Johnson represented an easy hero and villain to identify with. In contrast with Cameron’s studied blandness and Theresa May’s angular ­awkwardness, the predictable chaos of the Johnson administration was a spectacle.

Analysts with a taste for Shakespeare will see hubris chased by nemesis in Johnson’s career – our tragic hero by his fatal flaws. With Johnson – a squirming bag of appetites, personal and political – it goes without saying there are several flaws to choose from.

There’s the unchecked ambition, the unstable relationship with truth, the ­material greed, the egotism, the jokester’s fundamental unseriousness about ­everything which isn’t concerned with his own self-advancement, combined with that ugly hardness which sees not only ­political ideas – but everyone around him – as dispensable in pursuit of the ­wider aggrandisement of self.

Johnson’s particular disposition also makes all these psychological explanations seem particularly attractive. If the child is the father of the man, then ­Johnson’s early years seem replete with the attitudes which helped shove him to the front, carry him into office – and ­ensure he’d make a colossal mess of it once the boy wanted to be “world king” was given the opportunity to live out his childhood fantasy.

He’s the boy in the school play who didn’t bother to learn his lines, deciding to busk his way through Richard II to the ­laughter of his father and the fizzing hostility of the rest of the crowd. He’s the kid whose teacher wrote that he seemed “affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility”, believing that he should be treated as “an ­exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”.

Were this anyone else, you might write this off as teenaged growing pains or a prim schoolmaster’s take on the dark side of adolescence. But the persistence in these traits – the ­mendacity, the egotism, the vein of ice running through Johnson’s heavy good fellowship – makes armchair psychoanalysts of us all.

Lots of politicians get accused of ­being narcissists these days. You can ­understand why. The demands of modern ­politics ­often track narcissistic ­personality traits. Without an inflated sense of your own importance, who’d volunteer to be hosed down with slurry every day for the privilege of holding high office?

A requirement for superficial charm is written into the modern job description. The inability or unwillingness to recognise the needs and feelings of others can look like a strength in the wrong light. Accusing others of harbouring your own toxic traits is a standard debating move in parliaments across the world.

It is difficult to think of another active political figure, who attracts the same savagely moralistic reaction as the outgoing member of parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Much of the indignation is down to Johnson’s own behaviour – the liquor, the women, the money, the ­gormlessness, the lies beyond count – but he’s also an extreme case of familiar ­failings in our politics – the impact of ego, the lack of substantive commitments, the reliance on colourful gag lines and empty rhetoric to blunder through.

As people clutch their pearls about how Johnson corrupted the noble convention of resignation hours – the more unpalatable truth is that Johnson just made the ordinary corruption of British public life look corrupt because he approached the traditional corruption with gusto. He had none of the decorum with made the rot of the client state seem dignified under his predecessors.

It doesn’t take a prince to make a belted knight in the UK. During his time in ­office, Johnson added 94 new members to the House of Lords –which is already crammed to the gunnels with snoozy ­ex-apparatchiks and a few waifs and strays in their forties who either lost their seats or their political careers – and took the ermine as kind of social compensation.

But the basic principle is longstanding. Having resigned, or failed, or been forced from office – the outgoing Prime Minister is constitutionally empowered to reward his toadies and friends.

Johnson has also been accused of “dragging the monarch into politics” – as though the head of state being graciously happy to confer unmerited prizes on the Prime Minister’s chosen circle of cronies wasn’t standard operating procedure for the British state.

Having managed to wrestle control over Downing Street for years, it is taken for granted in British public life that not only should toiling political staffers in the governing party get the benefit of their salaries and the opportunity to shape ­national policy – there must be bows, stars and magic names for the ­primary grovellers and mandarins too. Royal gongs are collector’s items, loyally unearned over long and frequently boring careers. ­Often as not, “for parliamentary and public ­service” is code for haunting the Palace of Westminster promoting assertive ­gibberish in a plummy voice on behalf of the party of government.

Theresa May threw glitter over her faithful servants when she was finally disassembled and shipped out of No 10 – as did David Cameron before her in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum. There’s no unabsurd, uncorrupt version of this practice.

Some elements of the dishonours list are more absurd than others. Sir Michael Fabricant is a socially climbing character lifted from the 18th-century stage. As soon as the sword touches his shoulders, you just know that Rees-Mogg will be berating hospitality staff for failing to call him “Sir Jacob” and genuflecting with appropriate deference.

Special advisers, personal assistants, chairmen of the Tory Party – Johnson’s hairdresser, if such a responsibility can be imagined – all received gongs of various orders of magnitude hours before ­Johnson took his final tizzy.

The idea that Johnson has seriously challenged the existing proprieties is ­radioactive humbug. Seeing him as a cad who trampled over the unwritten rules of the British constitutions spares us the discomfort of recognising that the ­present corruption also thrived under the “good chaps” phase of government with just as much vegetable life as when Johnson was left to tend the No 10 rose garden.

There have always been caterpillars of the ­commonwealth like Bill Cash and Andrea Jenkyns, happy to grow fat on the by-products of brainless political loyalty.

People expressing nostalgia for the good old days of the austerity years – when it was Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander ­accepting knighthoods for destroying their political party and wrecking the public domain, or longing for the probity of May’s regime – need their heads examined.

Every one of these headbangers was promoted into and sustained in national politics by supposedly sensible centrist Conservatives, calculating either that they were a necessary evil, or useful idiots, or both. Cameron gave Priti Patel her first ministerial gig. May opted for Johnson as her foreign ecretary. Rishi Sunak has given Suella Braverman safe harbour as his Home Secretsary.

Johnson’s career is just an exaggerated example of a now-familiar political story. Modern politics attracts people who want to be something – world king, prime minister, first minister – but far fewer folk who want to do something and have the first foggiest how to achieve it.

Johnson won’t be the first – or last – politician to win a hollow crown.