The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s leadership: the years of a clown

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/23/the-guardian-view-on-boris-johnsons-leadership-the-years-of-a-clown

Version 0 of 1.

The Conservative party has finally got a leader it deserves. As the UK’s next prime minister, Boris Johnson won’t be able to outrun boring facts and hide from bad publicity. He faces the most daunting challenge – that of how the UK can leave the European Union – on entering No 10 since Winston Churchill in 1940. It is fitting because Mr Johnson is largely responsible for the mess he now has to clear up. The signs are not promising. His pledge that the UK will leave the EU on 31 October “deal or no deal” is as politically expedient as it is destructive. His bravado helped to win the leadership. But it did not unnerve the EU and only hardened opposition within the party. Burning bridges to Europe is an act of arson not statesmanship. Leaving the EU without a deal threatens to wreck the UK economy, break up Britain and rekindle violence on the island of Ireland. No wonder Mr Johnson says he can avoid a hard Brexit, though he can’t say how. He thinks he will be protected from harm if, and when, things go badly wrong. Yet his praetorian guard are from the Tory hard right who, he will find out, prefer to give rather than obey orders.

Mr Johnson’s victory is the culmination of more than two decades of Conservative folly, which began when the party embraced populist Europhobia 20 years ago. The Tories decided that to win power they would need to fuse attempts to politicise immigration for electoral gain with Eurosceptic propaganda of the kind Mr Johnson revelled in dishing out. It is worth recalling the absurdity of William Hague warning in 2001 that the UK risked becoming a “foreign land”, pitting “the people” against the “liberal elite”. A year later Margaret Thatcher bizarrely urged Britain – and the hapless Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith – to quit the EU because the continent continually needed saving by the Anglosphere, adding, “Nazism was a European ideology, the Third Reich an attempt at European domination”. Mr Johnson made a similar ridiculous point when fronting the 2016 leave campaign.

In this radicalising process a referendum became the chosen political device to avoid the Conservative party having to reveal its splits over Europe. Mr Hague campaigned to save the pound and offered a referendum on any further extension of EU powers. By 2005 Michael Howard was pushing hard for a referendum on an EU constitution. When David Cameron became Tory leader he parked the populism, marooning voters who had been whipped up into a frenzy by his predecessors’ rhetoric. Nigel Farage seized the opportunities presented and the rise of Ukip forced Mr Cameron into first shelving key elements of his modernising project before, in 2013, committing to the Brexit referendum – a decision that did not shoot Mr Farage’s fox and led to the UK’s vote to leave the EU.

The lesson for Mr Johnson to learn is that when centre-right politicians adopt the language and policies of populist nationalism, the only victory is for the hardliners. Mr Farage now leads the Brexit party and is riding high in the polls. If Mr Johnson thinks he can sup with the devil he might find that he sits down at the table as a guest and ends up as dessert. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Donald Trump, whose friendship comes at a steep cost. The price will be to bearhug the hard Brexit that Mr Johnson wants to avoid. Without that, Mr Trump cannot secure the US-UK trade deal that he prizes. Scooping up the votes of hard leavers can also repel more people than it attracts. Early polling of Mr Johnson’s appeal appears to bear this out. Populist movements want to overturn constitutional governments so that the groups they define as enemies of the people can be targeted. That’s why they need to be confronted, within and without the Tory party. Mr Johnson plays the clown. But the circus will move on, only to leave a broken country in its wake.