Dumb but redoubtable

It’s never easy to tell when someone’s apparent dumbness is fake, because he thinks it’s endearing to people he wants to influence, or reflects a natural inborn incompetence he can’t hide.

Lots of people tell me that I shouldn’t underestimate Boris Johnson’s intelligence. An interesting notion. It’s worth approaching it from the point of view of the two political roles people have to play to achieve much in power. 

The first is the pure skill of the politician, to win the votes that get you into power in the first place.

The second is the far rarer ability of the statesman, which allows a successful politician to govern well.

Johnson has the first of these in spades. But it isn’t the one that requires much intelligence. It doesn’t even require much hard work. You just need to find the right message, one that connects with voters. Take “Get Brexit Done”. That worked for Johnson in 2019, especially with voters who felt Brexit was taking far too long to implement, and even that it might be snatched from them by some last-minute stitch up.

Governing, on the other hand, is a different challenge. Whether we like them or not, Thatcher and Blair had the skills for that job. Johnson simply doesn’t. That’s why he keeps taking senseless decisions which he has to reverse within days. Just look at his public announcement that he would not isolate after a Covid contact, reversed within hours in the face of the outrage it provoked. 

Governing requires careful study of information, listening to the views of people who know what they’re talking about, and picking the approach most likely to succeed out of that mix. Johnson’s lousy at all that.

Johnson: a heavyweight maybe
but perhaps a little lighter in the brightness department

So we get decisions like getting tough on travellers from France, because the beta variant of Covid was allegedly rampant there. Since that simply isn’t the case, people suspected that the government had been thrown by the fact that the Island of Réunion had large numbers of cases. Technically the island is part of France. It is however over 9000 km from what most of us think of as ‘France’, i.e. our closest neighbour in mainland Europe, rather than the Indian Ocean. Properly informed, it might have been intelligent to tighten restrictions on travellers from Réunion, but not on those from France, where the beta variant is responsible for a tiny proportion of the cases. At first the government denied it had confused Réunion with mainland France, but it has recently admitted that it actually had. Johnson always prefers a lie as his first line of defence, only abandoning it when the weight of evidence forces him to. 

Another curious decision was his appointment of Dominic Cummings as his most senior adviser in Downing Street. Eventually he had to dismiss him, another major U-turn and, rumour has it, one driven by the woman who is now his wife, another example of the idiosyncratic way Johnson reaches his decisions. Since his dismissal, Cummings has repeatedly rounded on Johnson with highly damaging revelations based on private communications. Most of us would never have expected any other kind of behaviour from Cummings, a man put on earth to make tarantulas look tame, so the great question is, what was Johnson thinking of when he appointed him in the first place? 

Was he thinking at all?

Finally, and most damning, Johnson somehow came up with the extraordinary notion that he could make it look like he was getting Brexit done, by signing an agreement over Northern Ireland which he had no intention of honouring. Now that has come back to bite him at least as viciously as the Cummings revelations. Again, I’m left wondering how an intelligent politician could take such a step without foreseeing the consequences. Is it just the behaviour of a man who only thinks about the immediate electoral gain from an action and is entirely reckless about its longer-term effects?

Add to this mix of ineptitude the revelations that the Tory party is once again providing privileged ministerial access to any donor giving at least £250K a year to the party. This means we’re back with the ugly practice of members of the government providing special treatment no one else receives, to those prepared to help fund their careers. And now we discover that Cummings – yes, him again – organised for well over half a million pounds worth of polling to be carried out for Johnson’s partisan purposes, but funded by taxpayers.

It does rather seem that this bunch makes up in underhand behaviour for what it lacks in wit.

Underestimate Johnson? I try not to. I think a dirty street fighter so at ease with dishonesty is a formidable opponent.

Intelligent, though? I see no evidence of it.