The honourable Tory. And Boris Johnson

Have you watched the new season of Borgen on Netflix? We enjoyed it a lot. It intelligently charted how one can lose one’s way, or even one’s self, in politics. 

There’s a moment in the show when the former Danish Prime Minister, from the earlier seasons, Birgitte Nyborg, now back as Foreign Minister, visits her old friend and mentor Bent Sejrø, to ask for advice at a moment of crisis. He, it appears, thinks it’s time for her to step down:

“Sometimes in your career,” he tells her, “you face very important decisions. They define who you are and how you’ll be remembered… Resigning takes great courage.”

It may come as a shock to readers of these posts, but I’m not a fan of the British Conservative Party. Or any other Conservative Party. But I have to admit that I have a certain admiration for politicians, Conservative or not, who have shown the kind of courage that Serjø suggests it takes to resign.

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, or Malvinas, back in 1982, a storm of criticism burst out levelled at the British Foreign Office. It had failed to spot what Argentina was preparing. Its behaviour had also suggested that Britain was indifferent to the fate of the islands and would not resist the invasion.

At the time, the Foreign Secretary, was Lord Carrington. His response to the criticism of the ministry he headed was to resign immediately. The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, tried to persuade him to stay, but he wouldn’t. He decided to take full responsibility for the failures of the Foreign Office and as far as he was concerned, that meant he had to go.

John Nott, then Defence Secretary, also felt he had let the country down and submitted his resignation. He, though, was persuaded to stay on. That made sense: as the man in charge of the armed forces at a time when Britain had suffered a military reversal, he stuck around to oversee the response. Before the end of the year, however, he announced that he would not be seeking re-election even as a Member of Parliament and was replaced as Defence Secretary.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Carrington and Johnson
The honourable Tory and the other kind

Yes, I’m going to compare those honourable resignations with another more recent example which was, frankly, rather less honourable.

If a writer created a character like Boris Johnson, readers would reject the novel as ridiculous. “No,” everyone would say, “a serious country could never elect a man like that as its Prime Minister.”

Well, Britain did. Of course, it helped that he was up against a buffoon as laughable and even more inept, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. He was the leader the Labour Party had inflicted on itself as a completely unnecessary gesture of charitable generosity towards the Tory Party.

Johnson screwed up the handling of the Covid pandemic, costing several tens of thousands of people their lives, and claimed – still claims – that he handled it superbly. That’s because on his watch Britain got vaccines out faster than most nations. The fact that it then vaccinated rather fewer than its neighbours he somehow fails to mention. 

While the country was in lockdown, he organised or attended lockdown-busting parties – that’s right, in the plural, not just one of them – in 10 Downing Street. That made him the first British Prime Minister ever to be convicted of a crime while in office. Learning nothing from US President Tricky-Dicky Nixon, who demonstrated that the cover-up is worse than the crime, Johnson lied about whether the parties had really been parties, what he knew about them, and which he’d attended.

His one solid achievement was the generous level of support he provided to Ukraine, in its war with Russia. Sadly, however, it soon became obvious he was using Ukraine as a blessed relief from facing up to his failures at home. Due to face Tory MPs from Northern seats, most of them in danger of losing out to a resurgent Labour Party poised to take back many of its old ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, he preferred to duck out and make an entirely unnecessary trip to Kyiv with plenty of photo opportunities.

Perhaps the most serious of his offences was one of the earliest, when he tried to prorogue – suspend – parliament in the runup to Britain’s scheduled departure from the European Union. No one was fooled. The only purpose was to limit opportunities to challenge the way the government was handling Brexit. And, it turned out, he was acting illegaly, as the British Supreme Court quickly ruled. That alone should have been enough to drive Johnson from office.

He has repeatedly claimed to take “full responsibility” for his shortcomings- But that wasn’t ‘taking responsibility’ in the way Lord Carrington did. He would fire or discipline a few underlings, but as for holding up his hand and taking responsibility personally, himself, that never happened. 

Instead, he clung on until the latest scandal. He’d appointed a known sex pest as Deputy Chief Whip, a powerful position in the disciplining of Tory MPs. When the scandal broke, he was slow to react, and later lied to say he’d acted at once. He then compounded his lies by pretending he hadn’t known about the man’s record.

Suddenly, his colleagues lost patience. Ministers began to resign. Their resignation letters and statements made much of the need for integrity in government. And yet those same people had spent three years propping up Johnson, even defending his behaviour. They did that even though it was clear to anyone following the news, that integrity was an alien notion to Johnson.

It seems clear that the timing of their belated resignation had little to do with integrity, and a lot with giving a successor time to establish a name, in the two years still left before the next election. In other words, it’s as calculated and devious a move as any Johnson carried out himself.

Meanwhile, he resigned. He explained why:

In the last few days I’ve tried to persuade my colleagues that it would be eccentric to change governments when we’re delivering so much, when we have such a vast mandate and when we’re actually only a handful of points behind in the polls … But as we’ve seen, at Westminster the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves it moves, and, my friends in politics, no one is remotely indispensable.

In other words, even now, when he claims to be taking responsibility, he’s still blaming others for his self-made troubles. 

Besides, despite his resignation, he hasn’t actually gone but plans to cling on in Downing Street for a few painful weeks longer, until a successor is named.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a character says of the executed Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

Let’s adapt that to Boris Johnson. 

Nothing in his tenure of office honoured him or it.

Not even the leaving of it.