‘Unlike Donald Trump, whom I’ve barely seen crack a smile let alone a joke, Boris Johnson makes people laugh. Often the joke is on him’ © Getty Images
Some of my older American friends have evidently watched too much Monty Python. How else to explain why even the most militant anti-Trumpians cut so much slack for Boris Johnson? Unlike Donald Trump, who I’ve barely seen crack a smile let alone a joke, Johnson makes people laugh. Often the joke is on him. Whether he is trying and failing to open an umbrella at a stately event, or embellishing some Rabelaisian tale, even Johnson’s fiercest British detractors find it hard to suppress the occasional chuckle. Which makes him all the more infuriating. As the proverbial father reminded his adolescent son: “If you can make her laugh you’re halfway there.”
Unfortunately, the British are often that easy to distract (to be fair, Scotland should mostly be absolved). In another public climate, say Germany, Johnson would not have been put on a party list let alone given control of the cockpit. Keir Starmer, the diligent leader of the opposition Labour party, would already have become chancellor. But Britain no longer has a serious political culture. As I have observed before, UK politics is a branch of the entertainment industry, and Johnson is nothing if not entertaining. The same, in many ways, is also true of the US. The difference is that Trump is legitimately terrifying. His form matches his content. There is an authenticity to Trump that Johnson manages to evade.
Others, notably my colleague Simon Kuper and The Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole, have written more insightfully about the painstakingly confected frivolity that generations of statesmen have forged in the Oxford Union and from late night essay crises. My point here is to urge American Swampians not to treat Johnson as a laughing matter. The joke is very much on Britain. After a little persuasion, most of my American friends concede this.
They understand the lazy populism of declaring a “freedom day” from the pandemic last July followed by this month’s Omicron-prompted lockdown that exclude pubs and restaurants. The latter is a bit like banning swearing at an orgy, as the actress might have said to the bishop. They also understand the degree to which crony capitalism has been normalised in Johnson’s Downing Street. Billions of pounds of protective equipment and Covid testing contracts have been handed out through VIP lists to friends of senior Conservatives bypassing normal public procurement checks. The British taxpayer loses out twice over — once through overpaying for expensive contractors, many of who have zero experience in producing medical equipment; the second through being overcharged as consumers.
All of which strikes my American friends as lamentable but trivial. The same applies to their response to the ongoing scandal about Johnson’s flouting of his own lockdown rules last Christmas when he allegedly held Downing Street parties while his fellow citizens were confined to their homes. It is hard to take such scandals seriously when you are dealing with a Republican party that is bent on election subversion.
It is nevertheless a measure of Johnson’s values — one rule for ordinary people, another for him and his friends. Just as Al Capone was nailed for false accounting not gangland killings, Johnson’s Christmas parties are a window into his vandalism of far weightier conventions, such as those embedded in Britain’s unwritten constitution. Check out the Conservative government’s plans to reform Britain’s human rights law, press freedom and judicial review. These are Trumpian moves. “At least Johnson is not a fascist,” my American friends protest. That is true. But strictly speaking, neither is Trump. Both Trump and Johnson are unprincipled narcissists who lie and cheat like others breathe if it makes them a buck and will prolong their day in the sun. The collateral damage to the democracies they lead (or aspire to do so again, in Trump’s case) never gives rise to a second thought.
Apparently we get the leaders we deserve. I am sure that’s true in some larger sociological sense. Britain and America are both highly divided societies in which public trust has cratered. It is one of those moments history offers for the shameless to profit. But at an ethical level I don’t think we deserve either of these figures. Either way, they belong in the same category.