As Shakespeare almost said in Hamlet, “Alas poor Boris! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”
The United Kingdom is still one of the major powers, or at least it was until it voted to leave the EU. It has a long tradition of parliamentary democracy within a constitutional monarchy and is usually on the right side of history, whatever crimes it has committed. Most of the world still buys into the UK´s self-image of a country which plays by the rules of decency, which others only differ from if they have something wrong with them.
Yet until July 9th its Foreign Secretary was a man who has made a career out of abusing foreigners in print and thinking it funny. A man who has milked his wealth and privilege to exploit opportunities not open to others and then refuse to uphold any of the standards rightly expected of him in such a position. The one job where he got away with such infantile posturing was as Mayor of London, a post he was only selected for because he was a celebrity in the home of the media, and because he had lost his government job for making abusive remarks about people from Liverpool, amongst many other things.
If a Third World country appointed such a totally unfit man as its Foreign Secretary it would be assumed that this was some sort of corrupt favour, and that he was there to keep the corruption within the clan rather than to represent his country´s virtues, or anything serious, on the international stage. It would be implied that it was through some inherent defect of its people that they lived in a place where such a man was its Foreign Secretary.
Sometimes people grow into jobs they seemed unfit for when they were appointed – Ronald Reagan, the actor who played irresponsible cowboys, also had a long record of public service accomplishment to his name by the time he became US president. But Johnson behaved in office exactly as his detractors had feared, making multiple gaffes and relying on soundbites to disguise his lack of useful knowledge about anything.
It was a surprise when he was appointed, when he seemed washed up after repeated failures and sackings. But it was an affront to his country that he was allowed to remain in post for so long, for reasons which have everything to do with internal Conservative Party disputes and nothing to do with the national interest of the UK or the public good.
Now Theresa has got rid of him, but at great cost to herself. BoJo the Clown is returning to the backbenches where he can make himself out to be a Brexit martyr, victim of a Prime Minister who has continued implementing the referendum decision but has proved unable to get the outcomes the public wanted from that, because they don´t exist.
Now Johnson can pretend to do what he intended when he supported Brexit at the last minute, and lead all the other malcontents to a bright new future. But he now knows that doesn´t exist either, and he won´t take them there. His only hope is to drag everyone else with him into oblivion, still screaming louder than all the rest – and it seems no one in British political life can now do a damn thing about it
Aunt Sally with people´s lives
It is no secret that Theresa May appointed Boris as Foreign Secretary for the same reason she appointed David Davis, who resigned the day before, as Brexit Secretary. Both of them were troublemakers, who enjoyed undermining other Conservatives by claiming to represent an unseen majority of voices who had been unfairly left to cry in the wilderness. That is what all Brexit supporters were doing for a very long time, and burning down the political house was exactly what the Brexit vote was about, in the eyes of those who cast it.
Complaining is one thing, doing is another. Theresa made these loudmouths responsible for implementing the policies they had advocated to expose their incompetence, and that of their policies. As practical politicians, they did their cause far more harm than good.
It is inexcusable for a Prime Minister to deliberately harm her country by putting unsuitable people in jobs they are designed to fail in, just to resolve internal party problems. But that is how out of touch politicians get when they sit in the Westminster bubble.
That same self-delusion, and callous disregard for the national welfare, led her believe that she could then throw them out when she had made her point, or rather they had made it for her. But that didn´t happen precisely because she had appointed them. Everything they did was laid at her door, and weakened her government, and her authority, rather than theirs.
Theresa has tried to make one reshuffle whilst in office. That ended up being very limited because the ministers she wanted to move refused to go This is unheard of in the UK: people may kick and plead, but eventually they do the jobs they are told to do, even if they had publicly stated they never would a few days before
No one is listening to Theresa. The UK´s ministers are simply using their positions to make up policy on the hoof with impunity. In that respect, Johnson and Davis were doing good jobs. Their primary purpose was to remain in cabinet no matter how bad they were, just to show that their Brexit position was credible in spite of themselves, and thus had to be respected in itself, not because they said so.
Now Davis and Johnson have resigned voluntarily, without Theresa pushing them because she couldn´t do it, while the divided, ineffectual opposition, full of long-lasting Brexiteers like Jeremy Corbyn and scared snowflakes who lost the argument first time round, is even less capable of doing it. It seems the Brexit proposals Theresa tried to gain agreement over were so unacceptable that Johnson and Davis couldn´t sell them to their fellow travellers. But they wouldn´t have resigned in so public a way if Theresa had wilfully created this situation, as standing up to her proposals was the reason they were there.
The UK has nowhere good to go in any Brexit scenario, and those who have to devise and implement policy know that. Johnson and Davis are rats deserting the sinking ship, who are using their opposition to “soft Brexit” as an excuse.
Brexit may have sound arguments behind it, but it has become a poison slowly exterminating political life in a once-great nation. It is this, not the details of May´s approach, which the loudmouths who first spewed it do not want to be responsible for.
Kings in waiting
The point Davis and Johnson find so unacceptable is that under the “common rulebook” proposals the Prime Minister is making, which are not legislation or set in stone, the UK will not be “taking back control” after all. The agreement she tried to get all her cabinet colleagues to accept states that the UK will still have to abide by EU laws and regulations after it has left the bloc, without having any vote on what they are. Clearly therefore the EU will be dictating to the UK even more than at present, and sovereignty will once again be lost, not gained.
But what is the actual issue here? If two countries want to trade, or have any other sorts of relations, they have to abide by each others´ rules. Citizens of one place must obey the laws of the other if they are there, and vice versa. Products made in one country must meet the standards of the countries they want to export them to in order for them to be sold there. Did anyone really think this would be different after Brexit?
The only way the UK can avoid abiding by EU regulations is to cease trading with it altogether. No one voted for that, and it will never happen. This is simply one of many areas where the British public is slowly beginning to see what their politicians, of all parties, would not explain to them: that as a leading member of the world´s largest trading bloc, the UK had much more sovereignty than it will ever have outside it, now all the leverage it once had – its former empire, its manufacturing strength, its regulatory environment, its global reputation – have long gone.
Commentators are presuming that Theresa´s hand has been strengthened, with the big beasts gone. But what is that hand? The EU has no reason to give the UK a single thing. Anything it might want from the UK it can get from other members.
The UK can´t replace what it gets from the EU elsewhere because the other countries which produce those items would rather sell them to the EU than little old Blighty. Nor can the UK produce what it wants locally, or employ locals in preference to overseas staff, because it ruined its own industrial base in the Thatcher era. The locals won´t do the jobs most migrants do, because they want to return to the days of secure and decently paid employment which that same Thatcher era swept away because the UK couldn´t afford them any more, or so it was said.
The only question now is how long it will take for the Brexit supporters to admit that the best way to “take back control” is to be a leading player in the EU and other international bodies and make them work the way the UK wants. Here the UK DOES have a competitive advantage – more of the current world map is a result of British diplomacy than anyone else´s
Most other countries couldn´t achieve this, but the others who try don´t have the UK´s skills, as the great power interventions in the trouble spots of today amply demonstrate.
Johnson and Davis have given themselves a way out by failing in their jobs, and then walking away and saying that they left because they saw up close that the way to fulfil Brexiteers´dreams is to get more, rather than less, involved in the EU. If they really want to undermine those who remain and take over themselves, that is the way. But they are unlikely to pursue that path for now, because they share a British failing which for once really is an inherent national characteristic, not one invented by a more powerful people as a stereotypical smear.
All over and done with
In any field of human activity, the British, including the Scots, Welsh, Irish and other indigenous people who are sometimes offended by that term, have a particular reputation. No matter whether they are leading exponents or hangers-on, they are notoriously uninventive. They get to a certain point, and then keep doing things the same old way, unable to embrace or assimilate new ideas.
The English invented rugby football. England remains the country of the orthodox, doing things the way they have been done since the 19th century. Sometimes this works well, sometimes it doesn´t. But everything introduced into the English game from around 1880 onwards, including simple technical things like the dive pass and spin pass, originated elsewhere, and was initially resisted in England until some brave souls saw its potential, and fought their corner.
Soon after Theresa May took office she announced an end to the long-running austerity programme designed to get the public finances, and most particularly the structural deficit, in order. This was before she went round telling people that there wasn´t a magic money tree, whilst bribing the Ulster Unionists to prop up her minority government with the fruit of the same non-existent money tree.
But Theresa can´t abandon austerity, and neither can any of her opponents. Other countries, such as Iceland and Portugal, are addressing their problems in different ways and generally succeeding. But in the UK a certain idea has taken root, and therefore everyone has to accept it for fear of being foreign.
Those in government know austerity doesn´t work in the UK. The country is still only kept afloat by borrowing obscene amounts of money, far more than was ever borrowed when different ideas held sway, despite recent improvements.
Jobs are not being created, and public services are creaking because no one understood that certain manning and investment levels are essential, not luxuries.
But they can´t think of anything else, or listen to other ideas, because those ideas are foreign. Neither can the opposition parties, which have done the same or advocated the same themselves, because this is a national disease, not a partisan one.
Theresa can´t abandon Brexit for the same reason, even though she campaigned against it. The British have always bought the idea that the EU is somehow bad because it is full of people who don´t speak English. People in the Empire abandoned their local deviances and accepted British rule, language and culture, with varying degrees of willingness. EU members never had any intention of doing so, or saw any reason to, and were therefore inherently suspect in the same way Christians in the Roman Empire were.
No British politician can ignore such entrenched views for too long; much less they can embrace contrary ones which seem to derive from elsewhere. Theresa is on the road to nowhere, but so would anyone else be. Johnson and Davis will now be sitting outside bellowing “we told you so”, even though they themselves had the chance to turn things round, and knew themselves that they would never be able to do it.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Source