24 July 2019 (Chania, Crete) — DUDE. It’s all going to be so easy: “Deliver Brexit, Unite the country, Defeat Jeremy Corbyn. Energize Britain.” That’s how Boris Johnson described his job ahead as the UK’s new prime minister.
Strikes and gutters, ups and downs: “Dude, we are going to energize the country,” Johnson said. “We are going to get Brexit done on October 31. We are going to take advantage of all the opportunities. It will bring in a new spirit of can-do and we are once again going to believe in ourselves and what we can achieve, and like some slumbering giant, we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self-doubt and negativity.”
But will the dude abide? Energy, excitement and entertainment aside, which the new PM will no doubt give Britain, not all of Johnson’s goals will be easy to reach simultaneously. “Deliver Brexit” and “unite the country” — seems unlikely that one will follow from the other.
My house guest this week is a long-time British friend who just retired from the British diplomatic corps. Over the last three years he worked at the UK Mission to the EU – and was a valued source for much of the toing-and-froing inside the EU institutions. I shall miss him. So this morning we tried to tie the room together by attempting to answer the age-old question: Boris Johnson, the dude or a dud?
Johnson’s main problem
My friend put it this way. Boris has yet to make people believe he is, or can be, serious:
Even in a political landscape accustomed to the likes of Silvio Berlusconi and Viktor Orbán, Boris’ outrageous style and Conwayesque relationship with facts make him stick out like his trademark cowlick. But as he showed during his campaign to become prime minister, whether by using that vacuum-packed ‘kipper’ as a stage prop or guzzling beer, Johnson is more than happy to be seen as a clown. And so his biggest challenge in dealing with the EU in the coming weeks and months will be to prove there’s more in his repertoire.
As a longtime fan of P.G. Wodehouse and Chaucer, and a student of history, Boris surely understands the way bumbling plays in both the public mind and the British character narrative. He learned that to win you don’t just break the boring old rules – you stick your middle finger up at them. His schlubbiness is both a product of his privilege and its antidote. It’s a balancing act that leaves his opponents at a loss.
Look: recent history has shown us rogue leaders can win elections across the globe. Yes, the UK’s new PM can be unfit for office but effective at staying there. Boris has an irrepressible knack for failing upwards.
The bigger picture
It is impossible to look at the rise of Boris and Donald Trump and not fully realize it is time to start rethinking all the traditional wisdom about what it takes to convince people that candidates are leadership material. Or at least what they should look like if they are to convince everybody they are leaders. On the world stage there are few national leaders who can compete with Trump in the indelible image-making sweepstakes of the new social media order. With his tangerine skin and white-circled sun-bed-goggle eyes, his candy-floss blond comb-over and too-long bright red ties and blowzy Brioni suits, he is a cartoon of a politician straight out of late-night TV: risible and seared into your retinas at the same time. It’s funny … until you realize it’s also unforgettable.
And Boris is certainly the only other head of government who has had multiple stories devoted to the evolution of his hair. As Vanessa Friedman, Style editor at the New York Times, puts it:
It is a unique mop of very fine electric blond that has on occasion resembled a medieval bowl cut but more often is standing on end in confusion after having been tugged willy-nilly by its owner.
It even has its own Twitter account (@Boris_Hair).
In the debate over whether his clowning is a sign of authenticity or pure genius calculation – or, most likely, a bit of both, in that he came by it naturally and then learned very quickly how to exploit it to his advantage – less has been made of its potential wider impact. Because at some point the music stops, the clown acts stops. Regarding Boris, my friend says:
Inside the EU establishment there is a little hope Boris will be any different. And the lies, the deceit will continue. Just one example: in this morning’s Guardian we already had his bullshit claim that crashing out of the EU with no deal “would be less painful because of a series of side deals that the UK has already done with Brussels”. Utter bullshit. I was involved in the negotiations. The EU was correct in its rebuttal. It is pure rubbish. There were no side deals.
Or that false claim about kipper smokers being forced by “Brussels bureaucrats” to include ice packs with their products, that producers in the Isle of Man were “furious” at the extra costs caused by EU red tape. No, those are UK rules because, as the EU pointed out, that is purely a UK national competence. The EU had no involvement.
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it: the Isle of Man is not, and never has been, part of the United Kingdom, nor is it part of the European Union. It is not represented at Westminster or in Brussels. The Island is a self-governing British Crown Dependency – as are Jersey and Guernsey in the Channel Islands – with its own parliament, government and laws.
In the U.S. the danger is far greater, and needs a more detailed discussion (I will have a more detailed piece on Medium next week) so just a few points.
Trump is building an engine of chaos. In 2016, it was common for everyone watching the presidential campaign – operatives, pundits, journalists, voters – to remark that the whole thing was just crazy. Trump had smashed all the spoken and unspoken rules about how a mature democracy was supposed to conduct an election, leaving much of the country shaking their heads in wonder, alternately amused and bemused, when perhaps more of us should have reacted with horror and panic.
If anything, the 2020 Trump reelection effort will likely be even more randomly organized, a seething carbuncle of misinformation oozing out in all directions. Some of it will come directly from Trump himself, some will come from his campaign, some will come from the army of trolls and bots that Russia will likely employ on his behalf once again. At times it will seem formless and random, with no clear intent other than the creation of mass confusion and uncertainty.
Much of it will be directed at the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, in a cloud of conspiracy theories and ludicrous allegations intended to follow them wherever they go. I’m sure the Trump campaign will be happy if it can create a new version of “But Her Emails”, a single unifying attack that the mainstream media enthusiastically amplify.
The media … and the Democrats … are in no way prepared for it. The Democrats counter with “policy points” and “truth corrections”. Yeah, they “control” the House of Representatives but the Republicans have neutered any power they have (should have). There is a fundamental mismatch here: Trump cutting every corner, trampling on every ethical guideline. Just like Mueller who primly weighed up the legal niceties and nuances, the Democrats have lost the plot. The Democrats are thumbing through the rulebook of the monastery while in front of them a mafia don creates havoc.
It is the lesson of both Boris and The Donald: a populist’s great strength is to break all the rules and lie, banking on the fact that their opponents will stick to the rules and not know how to counterattack, and be weaker as a result.
Whether Boris will have a tougher time in a parliamentary system (the U.S. has reached “peak democracy”; that part of its history is over) only time will tell.
