London Mayor Boris Johnson makes his big move by backing Brexit.
The Boris moment has come around at last. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, mayor and bad- boy mascot of London, MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, announced on Sunday that he will be voting for Britain to leave the European Union in June’s national referendum. The official position of the Conservative government to which he belongs is that the British people should vote to stay in the EU. But ministers and members were turned loose by Prime Minister David Cameron to speak their own minds and follow their consciences.
This is the second British referendum on EU membership; the first was held in 1975 a few years after the U.K. joined the precursor to today’s superstate, the European Economic Community. The referendum was embraced by the ruling Labour Party then for the same strategic reasons Cameron made it a campaign promise in 2013. Attitudes to European integration did not, and do not, map well onto workaday party politics. It is its own dimension, at right angles to the classical spectrum.
The closeness of the British union itself is yet another political dimension, a third, creating even more fragmentation and complexity; and with the supremacy of Scottish nationalism, British politics are more headachy than ever, full of thickets and traps and potential for instant crisis. Political leaders like Cameron prefer simple tug- of- wars, fights for the “median voter” fought on familiar linear ground.
Promising an EU referendum was Cameron’s method of neutralizing the Euroskepticism that has always been strong at the parliamentary level of his own party — what we call the caucus. He deposited the European question in its own little time capsule, a future period in which ordinary Westminster- style cabinet government would be suspended and the traditional parties would practically cease to exist, being replaced by heterogeneous “Leave” and “Remain” camps.
It worked. Cameron won an outright Conservative majority last year that nobody ( including him) expected, even when the polls closed. The Euroskeptic splitters of the U.K. Independence Party, neutralized by Cameron, laid an egg. And helped save his bacon.
When Labour’s radical Tony Benn came up with the idea for the first EU referendum in the late sixties, his colleagues reacted with disgust. They squashed the idea so many times that only a person of Benn’s infinite truculence could have overcome them. It took years. Consultative referendums were then unknown to the British constitution, and they are still held in some suspicion. Some think they savour of totalitarian theatrics — even of distasteful European- ness! — and they conflict with the Westminster principle of the supremacy of Parliament.
But in extreme circumstances, a direct appeal to the people can become attractive even to people who have attained power through t he apparatus of Parliament. Even as he helped to slap down Benn again and again, the future Labour prime minister James Callaghan remarked: “Tony may be launching a little rubber life raft which we will all be glad of in a year’s time.” So it proved.
British history’s second life raft, this one Conservative- launched, set forth on Saturday when Cameron returned from a European conference with vague assurances of special, or even- more- special, status for Britain within the EU. The PM called a cabinet meeting to explain the deal to important Conservatives, then threw open the door of 10 Downing Street and turned them loose.
Boris, who is not formally a member of cabinet, was absent. He let it be known that he would declare his intentions the next day: he had promised to do so, using a characteristic Boris- ism, “with deafening éclat.” By sunrise his house was already encircled by journalists.
Boris Johnson is that rare bird, a politician with a genuine, popular personal following. It is hard to find any figures at all like this in Canadian history. Diefenbaker, maybe. Henri Bourassa, William Aberhart. Britain, individualist and eccentric, breeds them in slightly greater numbers: you could name dozens, from John Wilkes to Enoch Powell — and, of course, Tony Benn.
Like many of these independent powers who appear, comet-fashion, from time to time, Boris is comic, occasionally foolish, and has well- known streaks of cruelty and impatience. No one is sure of the precise strength of his influence, but his defection was sincerely feared by the Remains. ( Though one supposes they won’t like being referred to that way.) His t urn against Cameron is thought to be an opportunistic, cynical ploy to complete his political ascent and remove the last, obtusely persistent obstacle to occupancy of Number 10. But what else is the referendum itself but a cynical ploy, and who else but Cameron can be blamed for providing the opportunity?
As a columnist and editor, Boris has been churning out anti- European Union diatribes for decades. As a multilingual, classically educated cosmopolitan whose father’s original surname was Kemal, the self- described “one- man melting pot,” descendant of Jews and Muslims and even Frenchmen, is equally well known to be proEuropean at heart. And in the fullest sense of “at heart.”
You could see his dilemma in the hours leading up to his declaration. If he had gone for Remain, people would have asked how he could suddenly treat a million or so words of anti-EU polemic as just so much straw. If he opted for Leave, as he did, many would ask — and they have asked — how he could betray his own European sensibilities and roots so shamefully.
The Daily Telegraph column Boris issued in the evening to explain his support for Brexit tries to address this head- on, emphasizing the difference between the reality and heritage of Europe and the unattractive political tumescence that is the European Union. It is not much of a column by his ( high) standards: it says nothing that any British voter has not heard a thousand times, going back 40 years. It’s the stakes that have changed.
LONDON’S MAYOR IS COMIC, OCCASIONALLY FOOLISH, AND HAS WELL-KNOWN STREAKS OF CRUELTY AND IMPATIENCE. HE IS ALSO POPULAR, AND WANTS BRITAIN OUT OF THE EU.