London Burning (And the Heat Wave Is Only One Reason Why)

When last we checked in on the United Kingdom, a lot has changed.

For starters, there's a new Doctor Who announced as Jodie Whittaker wraps up her tenure as the first official female Doctor. It'll be Ncuti Gatwa stepping up - Good Lord, he's younger (born 1992) than my flip-flops (bought 1991) - to take on the Fourteenth Doctor (which may not be the fourteenth regeneration, they're starting to really wibbly-wobbly with the Doctor's already messy origin story).

Let's see, um, there's been big news in women's soccer oh right football to the European continent. The Lionesses rule!

There's been a brutal heatwave across the UK, as well as much of Europe. It's bad enough that airport tarmacs and roads are melting back into tar.

Oh, and the Tories finally had enough of Boris Johnson's scandal-paloozas and forced him to resign as Prime Minister (although being the cheating git he is, he won't leave until September and even then may back out of it).

The last big scandal Boris was mishandling was the Partygate Affair at the beginning of the year, where his administration ignored the COVID-19 protocols they were enforcing on everyone else. While he skated in public, due to putting a clamp down on the official report before it got completely out, he faced turmoil among his fellow Conservative Tories ranks. A party Vote of No Confidence got called back in June.

Even with Boris surviving that No Confidence vote, the fact it even happened is usually a sign the PM isn't going to last another year. Margaret Thatcher faced a No Confidence, Theresa May faced a No Confidence, and while they both survived they resigned within a year because further intraparty conflicts made their positions untenable.

And Boris only got 59 percent support where Maggie had 84 percent and Theresa 68 percent. He may have been on a lifeboat, but it had 41 leaks already and was sinking like a miniature Titanic.

All it would take was one more scandal - one wafer thin mint of a headache - and it came with the aptly named MP Pincher getting caught a little "hands on" with other members of a social club. As stories of Pincher's behavior going back years got out, Boris Johnson publicly proclaimed he and his government hadn't heard of those stories... except it turned out Boris himself was warned even as he promoted Pincher to a high position.

Basically, Boris had been caught in yet another lie.

This was a problem with him even back in 2019, when I covered his rise to the Prime Minister's post. I relied on Sam Knight's reporting from the New Yorker so let's refer back to that again: 

This is the Johnsonian way. The lies, the performative phrases, the layers of persona—they accrete, one on top of another, flecked here and there with Latin, until everyone has forgotten what the big deal was... In 2001, at the age of thirty-six, Johnson was elected a Member of Parliament for Henley, a safe Conservative seat in Oxfordshire. When he came under pressure to resign from The Spectator, because of the conflict of interest, he demurred, and coined what has become his best-known political aphorism: “I want to have my cake and eat it.” Johnson hates choosing between things, even right and wrong... 

One of the undercurrents of Knight's story was how Boris pushed his persona and his political stances not with facts but with half-truths and empty promises (the title of Knight's article). The Brexit campaign in 2016, in alliance with other anti-EU fringe groups, was the culmination of Johnson's efforts:

At first, Johnson promised that he would not take a high-profile role in the Brexit campaign—or criticize Conservatives who were backing Remain—but that pledge lasted only a few days. The referendum debate was made for him. It pitched the government, which was boring, cautious, and cognizant of the flaws in Britain’s relationship with the E.U., against the Brexiteers, whose very name carried a whiff of japes and derring-do. While Cameron and his loyal ministers presented fact sheets warning of the economic and political risks of Brexit, Johnson and the gang toured the country in a bright-red bus, waving asparagus (to promote British farming) and promising to return three hundred and fifty million pounds a week to the National Health Service, which was a lie...

The jolly feel around Johnson enables him to air sinister ideas and dodge the consequences. When Barack Obama told reporters that Brexit would hurt the U.K.’s trading prospects, Johnson wrote a column referring to “the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” (Johnson has also written of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with their “watermelon smiles,” in Africa, and described Muslim women wearing niqabs as “letter boxes.”) At a climactic TV debate between Leave and Remain figures, on the last day of the campaign, Johnson adopted a line—previously used by Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party and now the Brexit Party leader—describing the day of the referendum as Britain’s independence day, a nationalist slogan that brought the house down...

And yet, all those lies Boris spilled had (still have) consequences: The Leave Vote forced then-PM Cameron to resign (Never the smartest or best Tory leader ever, even he knew exactly what the damage would be and fled before he could get held accountable himself). It created a leadership crisis among the Tories that Boris could have easily filled in that moment but even he faltered, overwhelmed by the immenseness of the damage he himself caused. For a politician who never really figured out an agenda other than to fulfill his own crass desires, he still stayed afloat because no one else - especially after Theresa May tried and failed multiple times - could complete the disaster that a full No-Deal Brexit would bring to the nation.

As much as Republicans in the colonies United States have to cope with the reality that their leader donald trump is a consistent (and terrible) liar, the Tories back in "this earth this realm this England" had to cope with the reality Boris is a consistent (and terrible) liar as well. Everyone saw this was coming and still the Conservatives had no one else to turn to. As Helen Lewis over at the Atlantic (paywalled) noted:

As I said, though, this was a long road to an inevitable end point. For years, Johnson has been making his aides and supporters look stupid by sending them out to peddle lines that turn out to be untrue. Back in July 2019—that last blessed pre-pandemic summer—Johnson was the favorite to win the Conservative Party leadership election, and thus to become Britain’s next prime minister, and I had just joined a magazine you might have heard of called The Atlantic. My second-ever Atlantic article explored an arresting modern phenomenon: the political outriders forced to humiliate themselves on behalf of charismatic, chaotic leaders. Think of all the Republicans who thought that, surely, Donald Trump wouldn’t lie to them...

These contortions could be attributed to “Johnson’s own vagueness and hatred of commitment,” as I wrote at the time. But there was a shorter word for the problem. Boris Johnson lies...

Or as noted by Jonathan Freedland over at The Guardian:

Lies and a brazen contempt for the rules powered his rise; lies and a brazen contempt for the rules brought his fall. Which means the political odyssey of Boris Johnson has a curious symmetry. Except that what began as defects in the personality of one man ended as defects in his party and his government, inflicting great damage on the entire country...

None of this was a surprise, because dishonesty has been the one constant through Johnson’s career. Famously, he was sacked from his first job, at the Times, for making up a quote, and later he was sacked from Michael Howard’s frontbench for lying to the then party leader about an affair...

Ordinarily, a reputation for serial deceit would close off the route to the top, or at least prove an impediment. Yet for Johnson it proved no obstacle at all. On the contrary, his route to No 10 was smoothed with lies. How come? What were the forces that propelled a man whose flaws were so clear and well documented into the most powerful job in the land...?

He turned the Tory party away from the values it once held dear, so that Johnson’s party cheerfully jeopardized the union, tramped on parliamentary sovereignty and even insulted the monarchy. He purged it of some of its best people and debased several of the great offices of state by filling them with obvious incompetents. Above all, he drained what remained of the public reservoir of trust.

In the spring of 2020, Britons were ready to follow their prime minister into a long period of collective self-discipline, even at the expense of hardship and emotional pain. They did it because they believed him when he said we would all be doing it, every last one of us. The Queen believed it, which is why she sat alone as she buried her husband of 73 years. But it was not true.

That will leave its own legacy, in distrust and cynicism that will endure long after Boris Johnson leaves Downing Street, his brief but toxic spell in the office he craved since childhood finally over...

Deceitful leadership from the Tories. From Conservatives in general, when you lump them in with trump's deceitful following here in the States. All to extend their political power at the expense of the realities that didn't fit their narratives: To the U.S. under trump, the falsehood of "Making America Great Again" with tariff wars, punishing minorities, and dragging the nation into a theocratic Stone Age; To the Brits under Johnson, the falsehood of freeing themselves from the EU with broken promises, a dysfunctional border system, and the likelihood of both Scotland AND Northern Ireland leaving the UK as Brexit ruins their local economies.

I should stop throwing in trump as a comparative model: This should be focusing more on the damage Boris Johnson is leaving behind when he departs (unless he tries to pull off another stunt and cancel his resignation). One last referral to the always-excellent Brexit & Beyond blog by Chris Grey: 

As the dust begins to settle on Boris Johnson’s downfall, it’s worth emphasizing that it was inextricably bound up with Brexit even though Brexit wasn’t its direct cause. Unusually and fittingly, it was his character and conduct rather than any particular policy which ended his premiership. Not, I think, because the Tory Party had some collective outbreak of moral rectitude – they all knew what Johnson was like from the outset – but more because the thumping loss of two by-elections demonstrated that the voters were finally starting to see through him, in large part because of ‘partygate’.

In some ways that’s a good thing. It arguably shows that, eventually and creakingly, the British polity still has some kind of moral compass. But it also means that, even though it ought to be, this is not a moment of reckoning for the Brexit he did so much to promote and shape...

Yet in truth, Johnson’s deficiencies of character are inseparable from Brexit. He was far from the only liar in 2016, but the casual and brazen dishonesty with which he fronted Vote Leave certainly embodied and perhaps swung its campaign. He even embodied many of the particular hues of that dishonesty, in his insistence not just that facts don’t matter but that belief matters more, in his endless sense of his own victimhood, still on display in his resignation announcement and mirroring that of the Brexiters generally, in his refusal to take responsibility for his choices even to the extent of denying choices have to be made, and in his constant bogus and half-baked invocations of the Second World War...

It's now widely accepted, including, if only superficially, by most of the candidates to succeed him, that Johnson’s legacy is a constitution and political culture horribly damaged by dishonesty and immorality, with accompanying public distrust and cynicism. But simply laying this at the door of his own character, without recognizing its roots in Brexit, means it will not be addressed.

There’s actually an even wider point to be made. The referendum didn’t just result in leaving the EU. It also created a massive and ongoing destabilization of British politics. It is not coincidence that we have had two general elections and are about to have the fourth Prime Minister in the space of just six years. That is astonishing in itself, but what is far more astonishing is that at each of the pivotal moments – the general elections and the leadership elections – Brexit itself was only discussed in the most cursory of ways.

This may seem a strange thing to say given how dominant an issue Brexit has been since 2016, but my point is that it has rarely, if ever, been talked about in depth, spelling out its actual practical implications and the choices and trade-offs involved...

So neither at these decisive points nor in the periods between them has there ever been any sustained, honest, realistic political conversation about the practical realities of Brexit. Instead, throughout the May years there were suggestions of securing ‘frictionless trade’ and the ‘exact same benefits’ of membership and in the Johnson years the claim of cakeism and denial of the coming costs, with Labour all the while just talking vaguely of the ‘better deal’ they would achieve. Equally, throughout these years there was virtually no honesty about the actual choices and problems posed by and for Northern Ireland. Instead there was endless nonsense about non-existent ‘alternative arrangements’ and, ultimately, the creation of an Irish Sea border whilst denying that that was what had been agreed. Thereafter, since the end of the transition the political silence about the damaging effects of Brexit has been deafening, whilst all the denial and dishonesty about Northern Ireland has been re-activated...

Boris may be getting kicked out of the Prime Minister's chair, but the damage his efforts to push and achieve Brexit remain ongoing. Not so much because Boris is still lying about Brexit - he is - it's because the rest of the political leadership in the United Kingdom are still lying to themselves about the far-reaching implications that they're stuck with.

Whoever is going to be the next Prime Minister is going to inherit the lies and delusions of Boris' false narratives, and it's not going to end pretty for them either. 

All of London - all of the UK - is going to keep burning hotter than hell for anyone inheriting No. 10 Downing Street.