It seems quite fitting that Boris Johnson took a huge advance from a publisher for a book about William Shakespeare but never got around to writing it. Johnson’s rise and fall hovers between cheap farce and theater of the absurd. There is none of the greatness of tragedy. The only Shakespeare line that came to mind at his political demise was the first part of Mark Antony’s elegy for Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them.” If the good that Johnson did in his public life is to be buried with his bones, the coffin will be light enough. But evil will weigh heavily in the coming decades.
That’s what’s so strange about Johnson’s place in history. It is hard to think of a figure at once so foolish and so consistent, so frivolous and yet so profoundly influential. His reign was short – his ominous hangover would last long. He was such an incompetent politician that he could not stay in office even with a huge parliamentary majority, a sleazy press and a cabinet specially chosen for slavish self-abasement. Yet he remade the political architecture of Britain, Ireland and Europe.
Johnson’s dark genius was to shape Britain in his own image. His deception has turned it into a rogue state in open defiance of international law. His triviality belittled him in the eyes of the world. His relentless mendacity and blatantly selfish abuse of power have ruined his reputation for democratic decency. His bad jokes made the country he claims to love even funnier.
There is no pleasure in this strange story – not for the majority of Britons, not for Ireland, not for Europe. Another great English writer, John Donne, wrote that “If a lump be carried away by the sea, Europe is the smaller.” Britain was never just a lump, and Europe is indeed the less for its departure. A dense but delicate web of connections and relationships – both with Ireland and the continent – has been severed or badly frayed. As Europe faces two overlapping existential crises (the climate crisis and the invasion of Ukraine), Johnson’s Britain has become a source of further disruption and uncertainty.
The shame is that it’s all so petty to Johnson. His lust for power was real and deep, at least as demanding as his other, more carnal appetites. But what, after all, did he really mean by power? His understanding of it had always been that of a juvenile delinquent. On Desert Island Discs in 2005, he spoke of the pleasure of making trouble that motivated his fraudulent anti-European journalism: “Everything I wrote from Brussels I found was kind of like throwing these stones over the garden wall and listening to this incredible catastrophe from the conservatory next door … and it really gave me this, I guess, rather strange sense of power.”
This is indeed a strange idea of power. The soundtrack to Johnson’s political career is the crash of broken glass as he throws stones at the walls of his neighbors across the Irish Sea and the Channel. The constructions of Johnson’s imagination—Boris Island, London’s Garden Bridge, the fabled bridge that would connect Scotland with Northern Ireland—were fantasies whose very grandiosity made them infantile. But at least they never happened. This was the destructive side, this pleasure in political vandalism made real – a reality in which Britain looks likely to be trapped for a long time after his departure.
The worst aspect of this is his reckless sabotage of the Good Friday Agreement. It is possible to imagine that Johnson was smug enough to think that both British and European political institutions were robust enough to withstand his own cynical abuse of them. But surely even he must have had a basic understanding that peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland was a delicate and radically unfinished business. He must have had some inkling that this was one place where the ramifications of stirring up tribal identity politics were all too apparent.
But he did it anyway. He deliberately trivialized the problems of the Irish border, comparing it to the line between two traffic zones in London. He dismissed Northern Ireland as the tail wagging the Brexit dog – in other words, an irritating appendage. He played on the delusions of his admirers in the Democratic Unionist Party, inciting or abandoning them as the mood dictated. He has repeatedly lied about the meaning of the protocol he negotiated. He introduced legislation deliberately designed to turn Northern Ireland into a source of open conflict with the EU.
This accomplished two things. This has brought relations between Britain and Ireland to their lowest point for decades. And that excited autocrats everywhere. Johnson turned the rule of law and compliance with treaties into another of his bad jokes. On July 1 this year, Johnson tweeted that “25 years ago we made a promise to the people of Hong Kong. We intend to keep it.” The Chinese Embassy in Dublin retweeted this with a reply: “2 years ago we made a promise to the Northern Ireland Protocol (sic). We are determined to smash it.” The terrible thing is that in this respect the Chinese were right: Johnson’s behavior gave them the right to ignore the obligations they undertook 25 years ago.
This is the level to which Johnson brought Britain on the world stage, making her fair game for the taunts of tyrants. Even as Johnson was doing good by supporting Ukraine, he was also giving Vladimir Putin reason to believe that the West was only pretending to believe in the rule of law. This decline is not just bad for the UK. It is bad for the entire democratic world. Johnson turned one of history’s great democracies into a country where his own cynicism, recklessness and lack of honor became official policy. In doing so, he allowed every enemy of democracy to say that it is a hollow system whose rules and values are a fraud.
It isn’t – and there are those who will continue to fight to protect and deepen it. The big question facing Britain is whether it can rejoin that side of the battle as a respectable, law-abiding and serious presence in international affairs. It is very difficult to see a response coming from the ranks of those who allowed Johnson to make such a mockery of their own country. The damage Johnson had done would not be undone quickly—or by those who found it intolerable only when it threatened their own immediate interests.
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