Photograph Source: Prime Minister’s Office – OGL 3
Watching the struggle to be the next prime minister, the British public has been in much the same position as the Old Man of Khartoum in the limerick who:
Kept two black sheep in his room,
They remind me, he said,
Of two friends who are dead;
But I cannot remember of whom.
Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak did not differ much on crucial issues like relations with the EU and the war in Ukraine. Both tried to out-Thatcherise each other and pretended that we were back in the 1970s. Since it is impossible to know how much of this reactionary cant was solely designed to coincide with the prejudices of elderly Tory party members, the real views of Truss remain opaque.
Even before Truss becomes prime minister today, it is possible to describe the political landscape in which she will operate. For all Boris Johnson’s boosterism, the British state is less powerful than it was 10 years ago. There have now been four prime ministers in six years, which is the sort of turnover once associated with political instability in Italy.
Nor are the swift entries and exits of political leaders the only problem. As in Italy, British prime ministers now spend much of their time in office fending off rivals and fighting for their political lives. In other words, since 2016, Britain has been locked into a permanent political crisis that ebbs and flows but never disappears. Parties are factionalised and do not provide guaranteed support for leaders.
The inevitable failure of Brexit – leaving the world’s biggest free trade area – to deliver on its promises of greater national control and improved living conditions means that the political pot is always bubbling because the proponents of Brexit claim that deeper changes are necessary. Instead of arresting Britain’s slow political and economic decline relative to other countries, Brexit speeded up the process.
A striking example of this came in the last few days when a calculation by Bloomberg showed that Britain has dropped behind India as an economic power with India displacing it as the fifth largest economy in the world. Britain may still have a respectable place in the rankings, but real wages are lower than in 2007 and foreign investment has stalled since 2016.
Stagnation owes much to David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity years. I had a friend at that time who set up “a precariat club”, which brought together precarious professionals without stable employment. She finally got a full time job and gave up the club, but she may have to reopen it in the next few weeks and expects a flood of new members.
A frustrating aspect of political debate in Britain, even among the most cosmopolitan Remainers, is its insularity. Boris Johnson is portrayed by friends and foes as a uniquely British phenomenon because the British supposedly “love a rogue”, though crushing Tory defeats in safe seats in by-elections show that the opposite is true. In reality, Johnson’s personality and politics almost exactly mirror those of Silvio Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics from 1994 to 2011.
Johnson was denounced as a compulsive liar, but so too were Berlusconi and President Donald Trump in the US. Lies are not just an unsavoury failing of modern-day populist nationalist politicians (“pluto-populist” is another useful descriptive phrase for them). Sustained mendacity is essential glue for this type of leader because they must stick together with false promises a coalition of supporters with contradictory interests. To achieve the same end, they need all their demagogic skills to whip up fears, exaggerate threats and claim non-existent achievements. Berlusconi and Johnson, for instance, both boasted of giant bridges they would build respectively between Sicily and the mainland and Scotland and Northern Ireland. The phantom bridges were never constructed in Italy or Britain, though even then they cost money.
A strong ray of hope in the present political gloom is often underestimated because it is so simple: Truss may be a second rate careerist, but she is not Boris Johnson. She will be unable to emulate his contempt for legality and parliament along with his tolerance of corruption. It is difficult to believe that she will have the strength to repeat his power grabs, like Jonson’s illegal prorogation of parliament in 2019, even if she wanted to.
Johnson retained the support of newspaper magnates and Tory donors until late in the day, but it was not enough to save him. The fact that he failed to cling to power despite such powerful support differentiates him from Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Truss may be a right-wing Tory, but the defeat of Johnson shows that the authoritarian populist formula does not always work.
Not that the threat of it has entirely disappeared. The Tory party has transformed itself into an English nationalist party. It will try to retain the coalition of Leavers that won it the election in 2019. Friction with the EU and France are too engrained and politically useful to be abandoned. Prickly relations with all other parts of the British Isles – Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic – have become the norm.
The problem is that Brexit has swung the balance of power against the UK in its relations with other states, but this cannot be publicly admitted without putting the feasibility of the whole Brexit project in doubt. But theatrical bellicosity towards foreigners makes negotiating with the EU over the Irish Protocol, or with France over asylum seekers crossing the Channel, very difficult. Truss will presumably continue to resort to headline-grabbing non-policies, like deporting migrants to Rwanda.
Britain will continue to have weak and divided governments that devote much of their political energy to not falling apart. This was true of May and Johnson and will probably be true of Truss. Such faltering, self-absorbed governments can prove dangerous because they may convince themselves that greater engagement in a foreign conflict like Ukraine will give a much needed boost to their patriotic credentials.
But the swift turnover of British prime ministers inevitably erodes their authority and turns them into a national joke. I was walking over the weekend past a market stall selling dubious-looking fruit for one pound a punnet. “Going as fast as British prime ministers,” shouted the stall holder encouragingly about his bruised apples and pears, but he was not getting many takers.