Boris Johnson’s meagre philosophy comes down to one thing: Brexit
WHILE Thatcherism could be defined by a coherent set of conservative values, what we might call Johnsonism is perhaps most notable for its complete lack of them. Contradictory principles such as free trade and nationalism sit side by side draped under a union jack, bouncing around in the ideological vacuum that is Brexit.
However ill-defined it remains even now, Brexit is nevertheless the single reliable conviction one could attach to Boris Johnson. That he would make a hard Brexit a live issue in the midst of a global pandemic speaks to his faith in the almost supernatural powers he believes the issue bestows upon him.
Mr Johnson is good at Brexit. He has been on the winning side of the argument since the 2016 referendum, allowing him to collect the scalps of his political rivals before skiing off a cliff and parachuting to general election triumph, like Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me.
The problem is that he has been appalling at almost everything else, his premiership at times feeling like a satire of governance. Now Britain is in the grip of a second wave of the coronavirus, and even Johnson loyalists are beginning to waver in their support.
It’s a cruel irony, then, that the attributes of Johnsonism that the public once found so endearing – his disobedience, his scepticism – are the traits that have allowed the virus to thrive. The Covid crisis has been exposed by a cabinet selection process that prioritised ideological commitment to leaving the EU over competence.
This has been painfully acute in the case of the health minister, Matt Hancock. The most impressive trait the man has displayed during the saga so far is his capacity to absorb relentless public humiliation. Faced with growing public uproar over testing, he has served as Mr Johnson’s political equivalent of a human shield.
This fiasco around testing has been revealing. Just weeks after the British government blindsided Ireland and the rest of the EU with the Internal Market Bill bombshell, the NHS was reduced to contacting the HSE and begging for help.
Nothing could better encapsulate the meaningless sloganism that is the cornerstone of Johnsonism, where it is possible to posture as a repressed superpower breaking free from the international order while simultaneously posing as a good neighbour needing help.
Unfortunately for Mr Johnson, the Brexit balm may not be the easy remedy for the reputational rash slowly enveloping his government.
A special embarrassment was reserved for his other favourite bulletproof vest, foreign secretary Dominic Raab. In the wake of the global condemnation that followed the Internal Market Bill and Britain’s attempt to break international law in a “specific and limited way”, Mr Raab was sent to Washington DC to smooth things out and help lay the groundwork for a US trade deal.
The trip quickly descended into Alan Partridge-esque farce when the Democrats confirmed no trade deal would be possible if the Good Friday Agreement was not honoured. The infamous ‘special relationship’, it appeared, was actually between the US and Ireland, not the US and the UK. Mr Raab began to look like Tom Hanks at the end of Castaway, landing on American soil only to find that the woman he loves is with a new man, his island fantasies exposed for their naivety.
Still, we should not expect any significant climbdown from the British government on this issue, no matter how toxic it becomes. While logic might suggest that a global pandemic would make a trade deal with the EU more vital than ever, in the contrarian world of Johnsonism, the opposite may also be true.
If the economy has already hit rock bottom, how much more harm could a hard Brexit do? With the economic consequences of no-deal disguised under the cloak of the Covid-19 crisis, we could be at the start of Brexit, not its final chapter.
Dragging out trade relations with Brussels gives Mr Johnson a permanent ogre against which to deflect his failures, an enduring antagonist against which to rally his supporters. Rather than securing a ‘Canada plus’ deal as promised, Mr Johnson is more likely to bring home ‘Switzerland minus’: endless negotiation, a perpetual Brexit.
Much like we may have to learn to live with the virus, so too may we have to live with endemic acrimony and incremental compromise between the UK and the EU. Mr Johnson and his strategists have no other cards to play.
It had been theorised that he was employing the ‘madman’ tactic of negotiation, where one behaves so erratically that one’s adversaries are scared into giving concessions.
His style might now be better characterised as that of the ‘sad man’: too lazy to be unpredictable and too shambolic to project menace, this one-hit wonder of a politician may have already given up.
Now Britain is in the grip of a second wave of the virus, and even Johnson loyalists are beginning to waver