Boris Johnson is an unprincipled, opportunistic fabulist and political buffoon. He’s poised to win this election, secure an exit from the E.U., and perhaps show the U.S. just how to get out of our political mess. sullydish writes
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In the politics of this, he has been helped by the British winner-takes-all electoral system; by a very unpopular Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn; and by an opposition split down the middle on Brexit. But he deserves credit for getting the E.U. to change a final deal it long said was absolutely nonnegotiable and for seeing an opportunity that others didn’t — in the U.K., across Europe, and in the U.S. — to become not more ideological in a tumultuous era of uncorked populism but less so.
But there is another story to be told about him: that he has been serious all along, using his humor and ridiculousness to camouflage political instincts that have, in fact, been sharper than his peers’. He sensed the shifting populist tides of the 2010s before most other leading politicians did and grasped the Brexit issue as a path to power. But he also understood how important it was not to be fully captured by that raw xenophobic energy.
That Johnson sometimes appears as an outsider is largely a function of his personality and how he has skillfully marketed it: extremely smart but constitutionally lazy; upper class with a real feel for and delight in ordinary life; sexually promiscuous to an almost comical degree; a defender of rules as long as he is entitled to break them from time to time; a humorist and pun merchant who has succeeded in making his own aristocratic idiosyncrasies part of the joke; a ruthless careerist with a...
But Boris wore his class as a clown costume — never hiding it but subtly mocking it with a performance that was as eccentric as it was self-aware. He made others feel as if they were in on a joke he had created, which somewhat defused the class resentment he might otherwise have been subject to and which, like many from the lower ranks of British society, I mostly shared.
But this time, the stuff he embellished or concocted — about the overweening ambitions of the E.U. and the absurdities of various E.U. regulations, on, say, the size of condoms — was almost designed to tickle Tory Telegraph readers. In all this, he is no socially conservative hypocrite and rather a bon vivant. Boris defended Bill Clinton’s shenanigans in the 1990s, blaming Monica Lewinsky for the affair, excoriating the press for its prurience, and defending the desirability of lying about extramarital dalliances. And he did indeed lie about his. Confronted by rumors of an affair with Petronella Wyatt while he was editing the Spectator, he denounced the story as “an inverted pyramid of piffle.” It wasn’t.
Islamophobia? Johnson had previously favored the entry of Turkey, with 81 million Muslims, into the E.U. He is hostile to the illiberalism in contemporary Islam but has defended the religion as a whole: “Everything that most shocks us about Islam now — the sexism, the intolerance of dissent, the persecution of heresy and blasphemy, the droning about hell and shaitan, the destruction of works of art, the ferocious punishments — all of them have been characteristics of Christian Europe.
This encodes a very clear understanding that, in the wake of the 2008 crash, the global elite in London has thrived but the working and middle classes in the rest of the country have been, at best, treading water. Johnson has defended the bankers in the City of London and, as mayor, presided over the glitterification of the city.
What struck me in these conversations is how little he seems to have changed over the years since I knew him — as if his emotional development were arrested in college. What’s different now is that a series of lies and betrayals has alienated many. “The British people are going to have the same experience with Boris that everyone who has known him have understood,” says the former ally. “They will feel hugely let down.
Near the end of his second term as London mayor, Johnson broke yet another promise that he would not seek a parliamentary seat while mayor and reentered Parliament in the 2015 election, when Cameron shocked himself and everyone else by winning handily. This was not good for Boris’s career, as Cameron’s right-hand man, George Osborne, was widely regarded as the successor-in-waiting, and Boris was, in the words of one pol, “desolate” at the result.
2019: At the NATO summit. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images When May resigned, Johnson easily won the Tory leadership contest to succeed her. But it was a decimated party. May had backed “remain” in the referendum, and her failure to get Brexit done had made the Tory base furious and suspicious and the Conservatives almost a laughingstock. Public support tumbled from around 40 percent to 22 percent in the first half of 2019, its lowest share in recent history.
So far, the gamble appears to be paying off. A huge poll of over 100,000 Brits by YouGov last month, using the same methods that had rightly predicted a hung Parliament in 2017, showed a possible Tory majority of 68 seats. In the poll, the Tories held on to their traditional base in the South but made striking gains in the North, turning long-held Labour seats into Tory ones overnight. It is the same dynamic that saw the Democrats lose the Rust Belt swing states in 2016.
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