Just like twat: Boris Johnson hasn’t changed, hacks have simply stopped pretending he’s remarkable...
The newspapers have decided it's no longer in their interest to keep putting rabbits in the hat.
Thanks for your patience with the longer than expected gap between newsletters. I’m still waiting on broadband at the new flat but there will be nearly normal service running up to Christmas Eve. There’ll also be some special editions after Christmas running up to the New Year.1
The essence of Tommy Cooper’s act was being a brilliant magician playing a terrible one. Boris Johnson is a terrible Prime Minister who most of the British media conspired to pretend was brilliant. Time and time again we have been told that Johnson is capable of “defying political gravity” — as if he was a chimeric Fly-style combination of Les Dawson and Idina Menzel — but now the press has decided to ditch that trick, we’re expected to forget the sleight of hand.
Sleight of hand which continued even after the Allegra Stratton video leaked, as The Sun and Daily Telegraph both attempted to ignore it, confining coverage to the inside pages and resolutely keeping it off their front pages. Even as the rest of the press was pulling new party revelations out of the hat with increasingly excitable flourishes2, Christoper ‘Chopper’ Hope, the Telegraph’s Chief Political Correspondent and self-respect burning royal yacht simp tweeted:
… a trusted source familiar with the Number 10 operation [said] not a single MP or minister (inc the PM) was at the Dec 18 party. It was organised by the staff of one department in No 10, some spads were there. Someone brought in cheese and wine. That was the extent of ‘they party’.
But Sun and Telegraph alike soon joined the outrage as more and more stories about various ministeries’ miserable-looking, rule-breaking bashes came out, with Johnson himself pictured presenting a quiz during one and Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, stepping down as Fun Finder General after it was revealed that he too had worn a paper hat and consumed some lukewarm Lambrini.3
And while last Sunday’s Mail on Sunday tried to redirect the ire towards the BBC — a trick the Telegraph also later tried and The Sun on Sunday repeated today — with a headline so transparent even a reality TV star after some cheap tabloid column inches wouldn’t slip it on (Boris Blast At BBC Over Partygate4), even papers that usually pretzel themselves into embarrassing shapes to protect the Prime Minister are now treating him like a disgusting meat-filled piñata.
Last weekend, the Sun on Sunday, desperately playing catch-up with the Mirror titles, claimed Johson and his wife Carrie broke lockdown rules while having dinner at a “fashionable” London restaurant — is there any other kind in tabloid world? — last year, leaving after the 10pm curfew and mixing with other households during their visit. No. 10, of course, denied the claim.
Like the party revelations and the Stratton video leak, the conspicuous question that these reports don’t include is: Why now? And why did Michael Gove buy all those wigs and comical moustaches?
Following the result of the North Shropshire by-election, in which the Tories lost a seat they’ve held nearly 200 years, the battering being received by Johnson from outlets that can usually be relied upon to spin in his favour has stepped up a gear. But the big mistake is to see this as anything other than a commotion in the court; there are two sorts of calculation at work here and “Keir Starmer” isn’t the answer to either of them.
Right-wing papers and their columnists are either trying to scare Johnson into picking up their pet policies and strategies, demanding that he act like a “real” conservative or kicking him harder in the hope that he does go, allowing them to push for their proprietor’s preferred successor to take the job.
In the opening of his piece for last Saturday’s Times (Boris Johnson is the ultimate escape artist. Even he will struggle to wriggle out of this one), the paper’s former political editor, Francis Elliott, wrote:
The thing about Boris Johnson is that he’s like a rat,” a former ally said last week. “He bumbles on amiably enough until he’s trapped. Then he’ll chew through bone, kill anyone, do anything to get free.”
It has never been hard to find people with a bad word to say about a man who has left a trail of broken friendships, colleagues, families and lovers in his wake. Time and time again, however, he defied the rules, including those of political gravity, to achieve a landslide election victory two years ago today, his crowning glory.
The press has told us for years that Johnson is something special, a “different” type of politician. But he only “defied the rules” because the media allowed him to do so. That landslide election victory was achieved in collusion with his old trade and with the awareness that he will one day return to the pack.
Later in his piece, Elliott quotes a former aide saying:
[Johnson’s] got an interesting relationship with the truth. If he can convince himself he’s not lying about a topic that can be a powerful political tool. But he seems in the last year to have moved on from that to just outright lying.
In the last year? Boris Johnson’s history of lying — personally and politically — goes back to his school days and tainted his professional career from the start when he was fired from The Times for fabricating a quote from his godfather. Implying that “outright lying” is a new trait for Johnson is about as believable as saying he’s only just encountered the idea of infidelity.
Elliott’s piece concludes by contrasing Johnson with Silvio Berlusconi:
Voters who had laughed with [Berlusconi] in the face of the elite’s disapproval of his financial and sexual misdemeanours turned on him partly because it became obvious that the rest of the world was laughing at the country. As he was driven by limousine to hand in his resignation, thousands of people lined the streets chanting: “Buffoon, buffoon, thief, thief”.
We are about to see what Johnson, cornered and fighting for his political life, can do to escape a similar fate.
Boris Johnson has been Prime Minister for 2 years. Berlusconi led Italy for 9 — across three periods as Prime Minister — and returned to politics as a member of the European Parliament in 2019, after being convicted of tax fraud. I only hope we’re not lumbered with Johnson for that long.
Meanwhile, in last weekend’s Sunday Times, Camilla Long went for Johnson in a way that will become very familiar if this turn against him continues: It is not that the Conservative government is broken, callous, and corrupt but that ‘Boris’ — this character that the right-wing press co-created — is bad. She writes:
Don’t say you didn’t see it coming: the sloppiness, the mayhem, the lies. One look inside the prime minister’s prophetic Toyota Previa and you could see messy bags, dirty clothes, lost shoes, cheap, worn rubbish. It was the most un-Conservative vehicle I have ever seen.
And, well, isn’t Boris turning out to be just about the most un-Conservative politician we have ever had? He is so un-Conservative it is staggering — no boundaries, no structure, no respect. Scan every story that emerged last week and you’d imagine the country was being run by someone who was 1,000 per cent liberal, like Alec Baldwin.
The animals flown out of Afghanistan instead of people; the gold wallpaper and other offensive tat bought by donors from the posh interiors firm Soane — the “l” is silent — for the prime minister’s flat. How un-Conservative is borrowing money? And then saying you can’t remember you did it? Isn’t lying about loans something Labour is supposed to do?
Notice the conflation of the adjective “conservative” — small c — with the noun Conservative — massive c… — there. The time has come for a new Tory PM and so Boris Johnson must now be considered a grotesque anomaly, as if his traits of laziness, sloth, cruelty and contempt cannot be observed all over his party’s benches and parliament generally. Long continues:
Tory voters crave reliability, efficiency, pragmatism; no one wants to feel permanently cheated on, never mind their political stripe. And yet that is where the country is now: in a toxic marriage, just listening to the excuses. We are all one of his broken wives.
It’s obvious bollocks. Boris Johnson no more represented “reliablity, efficiency [and] pragmatism” in 2019 than he does now and that election result made it clear that a significant slice of the electorate wasn’t looking for them. He was expedient and had the full-throated backing of the press. The unspoken line in Long’s column was that it’s time to remarry and the new bride will wear blue.
In Saturday’s Telegraph, the paper’s former editor, Thatcher biographer, and rotting Sam the Eagle impersonator, Charles Moore, offered up one of the “if only he follows my advice” columns (This is not the end of Boris Johnson, if he stops kowtowing to the interests of the Blob).
The 'Blob’ — a conveniently elastic term for civil servants, teachers, doctors, experts, the judiary, and anyone who doesn’t get a hard-on from reading Hayek — is beloved by Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Paul Dacre and Moore alike because it allows them to imply that there’s a shadow establishment beyond the one in which they are all members.
Moore concludes his column by arguing that Johnson can continue as Prime Minister if he “takes on the blob” — here meaning ditching net zero targets, long one of the columnist’s obsessions — and that is this mythical monster ruining everything rather than the man in Number 10:
Despite Boris’s compliance with its views, the Blob still hates him as much as ever, and strives daily to get rid of him. It has successfully interposed its morbid obesity between the Prime Minister and the voters, slowly suffocating him.
Within the Cabinet, Michael Gove used to be the Blob’s doughtiest opponent. Now he has become the most obedient follower of the experts whose credentials he once famously questioned. Yet Boris has charged him with the task of “levelling up”.
Boris Johnson got a long way in life by living up to the famous line in adventure stories, “With one bound, he was free”.
Why, then, has he now allowed himself to be tied down?
Johnson has given Gove the “levelling up” department for two reasons: 1) He has not forgotten Gove’s betrayal in the 2016 Conservative Party leadership contest and 2) he knows full well that “levelling up” means whatever he says it means on any given day and is therefore impossible to actually achieve.5
Just as “levelling up” is an empty promise, Moore’s idea of Johnson is a fiction, a rhetorical construction that has no connection to the living, breathing, endlessly mendacious man. And Moore knows how Johnson really is; after all, he was one of the other Telegraph alumni at the dinner to which the Prime Minister raced from Cop-26 to attend and was one of the voices who persuaded him to “stand by” Owen Patterson, starting the chain of events that led to the by-election.
In The Sunday Times, its Political Editor, Caroline Wheeler, delivered a long piece detailing the problems that beset the Prime Minister and giving lots of space to leadership contest contenders like — shudder — Jeremy Hunt. The article is a car crash of briefings and counter-briefings with blame flying around faster than Omicron on a commuter train. Its conclusion reads…
One option being floated is a ministerial reshuffle in the new year to reset relations with the back benches. Mark Spencer, the chief whip, and Rees-Mogg are thought to be vulnerable.
The prime minister is also understood to be considering changes to his closest advisers. Declan Lyons, his 27-year-old political secretary, is considered out of his depth and Rosenfield has been accused of having “no political antenna”.
As ever, much of the ire is reserved for Johnson’s wife Carrie, a former Tory press officer who has been repeatedly accused of using Machiavellian tactics to assert control over No 10. One source said: “The problem is, he can’t reshuffle his partner out. She is Carrie Antoinette and we all know what happened to her. It all ended with the guillotine.”
If I were any member of the Tory Party, I’d probably be less free and easy with the guillotine metaphors. You might start giving people ideas.
And now, in an act of word association, onto Dan Hodges in the Mail on Sunday, who thinks — though thinking is too grandiose a word for what leads to his ouput — that “Boris” can survive if only he defies any future demands for lockdown. It’s another of those “if only he listens to me” columns, with Hodges offering lashings of drama to cover the meagre morsels that pass for analysis:
Well, [the vaccine’s] here now. And it doesn’t represent Plan A, it represents the only plan. If Boris sticks to it, then reports of his political demise will prove to have been premature. If he can show this time next year he really did guide the nation securely through its Covid nightmare, then the events of the past few days will be forgotten.
No one will care about Downing Street Zoom quizzes, or a temporary return to masks in the supermarket.
But if he breaks his pledge and we are plunged into another lockdown, or the NHS collapses despite his booster boosterism, then there will be nowhere to hide.
Because, for Boris, there is not really any Plan B. There is his road-map. Or there’s oblivion.
Hodges will forget this with the speed of a guppy of its second lap of the bowl if it doesn’t fit with what happens next week.
Tommy Cooper died in Westminster. Boris Johnson’s career probably will too, but it will not be a sudden shock as Cooper’s passing was.
While The Daily Express — owned by the same parent company (Reach) as The Daily Mirror, which kicked off the whole “partygate” affair but designed to appeal to a different red-faced constituency — told readers “Down but not out! Why we must put faith in Boris” even the Telegraph has been running lines like PM's bid to move on from poll rout is derailed.
The papers and media in general may decide to start doing the trick for Johnson again for a while — if he gives them what they want — but if they’re done with him, they’ll move onto the next act…
… just like that.
This edition was written in less than ideal circumstances so if you spot typos, let me know.
Funny how that information took a year to emerge, isn’t it?
And just as I was putting this newsletter to bed, there’s this:
It’s 49 years since Watergate, please put a bullet in the -gate suffix, I’m begging you.
Johnson giving Liz Truss responsibility for negotiating with the EU after the resignation of Lord Frost is a similar situation; a Secret Santa gift of a bucket of shit and a trampoline.