Boris did one of the least conservative things imaginable: He turned citizens into prisoners.
Boris did one of the least conservative things imaginable: He turned citizens into prisoners.
B oris Johnson’s bumbling Bertie Wooster act helped him transcend political drudgery and become a bona fide comedy celebrity. His amusing columns in the Daily Telegraph and his many appearances on popular shows such as Have I Got News for You enabled him to win two terms as mayor (a largely ceremonial post) of the devoutly left-wing London. Perhaps he’ll go down in history as the last Conservative to do so.
Winning over London marked Boris as a new kind of Tory, the only one of whom even stern Guardianistas would concede, “Oh, but he does make me laugh.” Getting stuck hilariously in that zip line, waving his two little Union Jacks, while promoting the 2012 London Olympics, provided the country with an indelible image and reference point. Who could hate such a harmless buffoon? The many instances in which Johnson had exaggerated the truth by providing sensational reports about the latest European Union outrages, such as when he claimed the Eurocrats were out to force fishermen to wear hairnets or ban prawn cocktail crisps, were indulged as part of the fun. Even Johnson’s notorious mistreatment of his first two wives and his open infidelity, in the context of a country where taking note of such misbehavior is seen as “American-style moralizing,” were waved away.
But to be Bertie Wooster, your deceptions must be limited to cute, harmless fibs. A sinister, cruel, cold Bertie Wooster is not tolerable. Those who had closely observed Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson — whose intimates know him as “Al,” not Boris, his “stage name” in the words of columnist Peter Hitchens — knew that the man was composed of lies.
The general public shrugged, until those lies began to matter. The state of lockdown imposed by Johnson’s supposedly freedom-loving party was nightmarish, far beyond anything that any political leader would have dared try to impose on Americans. A pair of women were stopped and fined for going for a walk five miles from home, and told that the hot drinks they carried with them constituted a further violation for making them guilty of having a picnic. From before Christmas of 2020, and for months thereafter, it was illegal for people from different households — even families — to socialize together indoors. Even outdoor gatherings of more than six people from different households were illegal.
And what was happening at Boris Johnson’s office? People gathered again and again for drinks, just as you’d expect. There may have been as many as 100 people at one (outdoor) affair. During the 2020 Christmas season, when the country was in a black cloud of despair comparable to nothing since World War II, Boris and Co. toasted themselves at No. 10 Downing Street.
This wasn’t Wooster-ish innocence; it was willful, imperious behavior that made an evil joke of the government’s lockdown rules. Naturally, Boris lied about all of this. First he claimed no parties had been held, then that he didn’t know about the parties he’d attended, then that the parties he’d attended weren’t actually parties but just “work events.” All of this came to light last spring when, conveniently for Boris, the British public’s attention turned to the invasion of Ukraine. Sensing an opportunity to deflect, Johnson poured rhetorical and financial resources into the battleground in Eastern Europe. It worked, for a while, until Britons got bored with Ukraine and remembered that Johnson had failed them in nearly every way conceivable.
His nominally Conservative government had not just done one of the least conservative things imaginable by turning its citizens into prisoners, it had eagerly taken the progressive agenda as well. By the time Johnson finally pushed through Brexit in 2020, his conservatism was no more visible than his waistline. As right-leaning columnist Allison Pearson put it in the Telegraph, “Tory voters have realised that the man who was once their hero is Cino — Conservative in name only. No wonder people are upset. We thought we were voting for Winston Churchill and we got the shifty offspring of Edward Heath and Greta Thunberg.” Pearson added, “For months, I have been hearing from lifelong Conservatives (members and donors) who say they will never vote Tory again until that ‘charlatan/buffoon/Net Zero numpty/green socialist/habitual liar’ (take your pick of angry epithets) is removed.”
By the final, appropriately farcical scandal — Johnson was found to have lied yet again, about whether he had been warned that a cabinet member aptly named “Mr. Pincher” liked to grab other men’s bottoms — Johnson had managed to unite the country in despising him. In local elections last month, Britons who never voted for anyone but Tories were voting for anyone but Tories. Even in the U.K., being funny can take you only so far. Boris Johnson immersed himself so deeply in the mulligatawny that a regiment of Jeeveses couldn’t pull him out.