It was hard not to feel sorry for Boris Johnson during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Question Time.
It began with one of his backbenchers, Christian Wakeford (yes, I had to google him, too) defecting to Labour and being cheered into a seat behind Keir Starmer just as Johnson was preparing to come in. It continued with Starmer playing whack-a-mole with his head while Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss and Priti Patel pretended to have something vitally important to deal with on their mobile phones. And it ended with David Davis (once very close to him) telling him to go: “In the name of God, go.”
As I say, it was hard not to feel sorry for the man. And yet I managed it. He’s not worth feeling sorry for. He’s not worth the emotion and empathy required to feel the sort of sympathy you’d normally feel for someone being heckled and bullied by a mob (particularly when most of his mates were examining cracks in the walls and pointing out cobwebs). He deserved every blow and barb that rained down upon him. He brought them all upon himself. An embarrassment to Downing Street. An embarrassment to the House of Commons. An embarrassment to UK politics. An embarrassment to the national and international stage.
There was a time when an embarrassment like him would have been thrown from office. There was even a time when an embarrassment like him would have possessed the integrity and sense of honour to apologise and resign of his own accord. But he’ll cling on, believing, as each finger in succession is prised from the window ledge, that a grateful nation will storm the barricades of criticism against him and carry him in triumph through the chambers and corridors of the Houses of Parliament.
Watching him on Wednesday I was reminded of those Saturday morning cliffhangers when the hero was left strapped to a railway track as the train thundered along and we had to wait a week until we saw what happened next. What happened next was always the same: a miraculous rescue as a masked rider slashed the rope and, just in the nick of time, hauled the hero off the track and rode off to sort out the bad guys.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Johnson actually thinks. Nothing can be ordinary or predictable for him. There must always be drama. A week of wondering if he really has used up all of his lives and will finally be crushed by the wheels of fate. He likes drama because he likes all of the attention and spotlight focused entirely on him. Like the Gods of Greek and Roman mythology, he believes that the audience will always root for the guy who defies the odds and continues with the quest.
Like Donald Trump, he is the perfect politician for the age of reality TV and social media bear pits. It’s not about being loved, or even being the most popular kid on the block. All that matters is winning. Winning by any means. Winning by heaping lie upon lie, fear upon fear, broken promise upon broken promise and former friend upon former friend. Because as long as you’re winning (which in political terms is defined as ensuring your MPs retain their seats) your party will let you away with almost anything.
Right now the party isn’t quite sure what to do with him. There are elections due in May and some will want him to stay on as leader, take the predicted hit and then throw him to the wolves. Yet his enemies—a growing presence—fear that he might still rally the election troops and pull off an unexpected victory, meaning they’d be stuck with him for another couple of years.
His immediate fate hangs on Sue Gray (tasked to lead the inquiry into what he did or didn’t do during lockdown) and Dominic Cummings, who seems to have boxes of damaging files on anything and everything Johnson did during the past six years. The killer blow will be any hard evidence of him having lied to Parliament: even his cabal of die-in-the-ditch for him coat-tailers would have to abandon him at that point. Although I reckon he’d still try and hang on, albeit stopping short of suggesting his supporters invade Parliament buildings.
This hobbled, unpopular, unreliable, narcissistic prime minister (with successors plotting around, behind and beside him) will now do and say anything to keep himself in the Downing Street flat that his mate refurbished for a hefty wad. So expect a few weeks of buns, circuses, courting of populist causes and rowing back from some threats to tax us more. Johnson enjoys the title of prime minister and the bells, whistles, pomp, circumstance and toadying that go with the title. That’s he’s utterly, utterly rubbish at the job, is neither here nor there for him. He just likes being prime minister.
