I’ve been following Boris’s campaign trail and the Tory love affair with him is over
No one is more disenchanted with Boris Johnson than the Conservatives, his own party. That wall of silence emanating from the back benches is not a neutral thing, no matter what he tells himself. I listen to a lot of Tories – I cover by-elections – and they no longer twinkle when they talk about him as they used to do.
Their mouths turn downwards; they mutter; they scowl. In Essex, the spiritual home of the Johnsonite (rules exist to be broken), a few hold out. But for the rest of them, it’s over. They are disappointed, and this disappointment is deeper for its being largely with themselves: for their collusion in, and enabling of, the fantasy that is his political creed. Infatuation dies hard but fast, and the love affair is over.
Johnson’s offer to the voters was never rational. It was explicitly romantic, and that masked a myriad of intellectual and moral contradictions, and absences too. Johnson was not in politics for other people: that’s a fool’s game. It was to make himself feel good, and if making him feel good made you feel good, then come along.
His promise that voting Conservative would bring you a more powerful BMW and a more attractive wife was not a joke, though it was framed as one. It was the closest he came to a genuine manifesto. His politics are unserious, almost anti-politics.
Ask Dominic Cummings, who meant to tackle the urgent business of the state, not watch Johnson spend his days in Downing Street burnishing his loveability and wondering if Big Ben would bong for Brexit and if he would get the headlines that his vanity – his existence – depends on.
Johnson’s dedication to the fantasy of himself is so complete, it convinced others. Even so, no matter what we told ourselves – I had a brief fantasy that he would be a Disraelian, a one-nation Tory and the wind that blows through his heart would be a benevolent wind – it was always going to be this way. We were warned by people who knew him.
If he is not a serious politician – serious politicians have ideas, not fantasies – he is not incoherent either. If you lie all the time, you are telling a kind of truth. I have watched him campaign for years, aghast. I watched him campaign for the London mayoralty, and for Brexit, when I stood at the launch in Manchester as he made jokes about taxis and rolled on his heels, and again in 2019 for the ultimate prize.
He signed T-shirts, dressed up in silly hats – tinker, tailor, soldier, prime minister – and approached female voters like Mr Wickham lurching toward Lydia Bennet with no intention of taking her to Gretna Green ever.
“Promise me,” he told one elderly woman in a shopping street near the North Circular during the 2012 mayoral campaign, “that you will never vote for anyone else”. He pouted. He looked up through his eyelashes. He growled. To call her response skittish is to defame skittish. She defenestrated. I wonder if he overdid it: the dead cannot vote. In the 2019 election campaign he managed to seduce a bakery filled with Orthodox Jews in Golders Green: but to be fair he was facing the monstrous Corbyn, whose dishonesty is no less profound.
His final campaign video of 2019 acknowledged this, and it worked perfectly: the final victory of marketing over content. There he was, standing outside a London mews house with signage, stealing the scene from Love Actually in an overcoat. Was he cold? Did he need a hug? What middle-class woman can afford a mews house? Who cares? This is the Johnsonian dreamland.
He promised to love generic west London woman for ever, I mean long enough to get Brexit done, which was his greatest romantic fantasy. It worked. The country delivered an 80-seat majority into his hands. It was an act of romance, and of hope.
But if you are a Don Juan, and he is, in his politics and his personal life, winning is the only thing that matters, and risk-taking only magnifies his pleasure. What comes, then, after the seduction? I wonder if the Tory leadership who saw only his poll numbers – then, not now – has read the book that is their hero’s internal life? What comes after seduction, reader? Betrayal. Deliberate, though likely subconscious, betrayal. He could have kept a closer eye on his staff. He could have stopped the parties. He isn’t stupid.
When you are betrayed, your anger is greater than it would be with someone you loved less. But Johnson didn’t betray his voters; he did worse than that. He made them betray themselves. They were in it for the sunlit uplands and the ecstasy of the Britain he promised, not to say goodbye to their dying relatives on ipads while Downing Street staff drank the night away before the Duke of Edinburgh’s (socially distanced) funeral. The fantasy of a sovereign England does not include a Prime Minister who lies to Parliament which, no matter what irresponsible elements may say – they are not Tories, though they might call themselves that – is important.
Most people consider themselves honourable and he, promising so much, took them to places they did not wish to go. When Theresa May, whose bones are Tory blue, speaks her disgust for him, it isn’t selfserving or vindictive. She speaks for them. The infatuated, once woken to the truth of something, are an angrier force than the indifferent. Johnson’s disappointed lovers now number millions. That’s quite the political failure, and they will punish him next week.
Johnson’s offer to the voters was never rational. It was explicitly romantic