I think we in the U.S. can understand.Lies and a brazen contempt for the rules powered his rise; lies and a brazen contempt for the rules brought his fall.
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The last, fatal lie was his claim that he had not been told directly of complaints of sexual misconduct committed by the former deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, a claim rapidly exposed as false in a rare intervention from a former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Simon McDonald. It turned out that Johnson had indeed been briefed about Pincher, and that once again Johnson had not told the truth.
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But though that newest dishonesty was the last straw first for Sajid Javid, then minutes later for Rishi Sunak, and, over the dizzying 36 hours that followed, dozens of others, triggering a wave of resignations and withdrawals of backbench support that ultimately brought Johnson’s removal, it was hardly what broke the Johnson premiership.
Instead it was the pattern of repeated mendacity that proved too much to bear both for Johnson’s previous chancellor and his hastily installed successor, his health secretary and a slew of more junior colleagues, a pattern so firmly established in the public mind that even his closest lieutenants could deny it no longer.
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None of this was a surprise, because dishonesty has been the one constant through Johnson’s career. Famously, he was sacked from his first job, at the Times, for making up a quote, and later he was sacked from Michael Howard’s frontbench for lying to the then party leader about an affair.
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Yet for Johnson it proved no obstacle at all. On the contrary, his route to No 10 was smoothed with lies. How come? What were the forces that propelled a man whose flaws were so clear and well documented into the most powerful job in the land?
Guardian
Whoever was writing the story of Johnson's trajectory, plaigerized it for Trump's. Or vice-versa.Bored with a leader who was dutiful, diligent and deathly dull – whose wickedest youthful transgression had been running unauthorised through a field of wheat – Conservatives were ready for someone with some swash to his buckle.
That was bound to be Johnson. For more than two decades, ever since he had stolen the show on Have I Got News for You, Johnson had been the Tories’ guilty pleasure. They would mob him at party conference, giggling at his every scripted gag, delighting in every studied ruffling of the hair.
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For this form of populism Boris Johnson was a perfect fit. His personal brand had long been a breezy disdain for the worker bees and “girly swots” who felt duty-bound to go through their papers, to read their briefs and master the details. He had long been a familiar English archetype, the gentleman amateur offering fluency, confidence and swagger in place of effort, experience and attention to detail, and Brexit-era populism lent what had been mere character flaws – arrogance and laziness – a patina of ideological intent.
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In the age of Trump and Brexit, to be a congenital bullshit artist – as Johnson always had been – was to define yourself as a man of “the people” and their “instincts”, unrestrained by pettifogging niceties, heedless of the boring naysayers and their tedious facts, ready instead to take a stand against the know-all elites, establishment and experts.
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According to the election analyst Peter Kellner, “Johnson’s victory in 2019 owed less to his popularity than Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity.”
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It might even have worked, for a while at any rate. But then came coronavirus. Populists have no answer to a pandemic, for it requires the very things Johnson and his ilk lack and despise: hard work, a forensic grasp of detail, the wisdom of experts, human empathy, a spirit of self-sacrifice and, above all, rules. Of course, he would not follow them. He never had. It had once been part of his appeal.
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He turned the Tory party away from the values it once held dear, so that Johnson’s party cheerfully jeopardised the union, tramped on parliamentary sovereignty and even insulted the monarchy. He purged it of some of its best people and debased several of the great offices of state by filling them with obvious incompetents. Above all, he drained what remained of the public reservoir of trust.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Sir John Major, the former Conservative prime minister, has intervened in the debate about how long Boris Johnson should be allowed to remain in Downing Street. In a letter to Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, Major says it would be “unwise” to let Johnson hang on until the autumn.
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Major says he can see two possible solutions. One would be for Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, to take over as acting prime minister until a new party leader is elected. The other would be for the rules to be changed so that only MPs elect the party leader (the system that used to be in place until William Hague changed the rules). Major says MPs could choose a leader who could then be endorsed by party members.
Major accepts that neither solution is ideal. But he says with so many critical issues facing the country “an imaginative response - even at the risk of some bruised feelings within the party - is most definitely in the public interest”.
Guardian
