As a Brexiteer, I’m to blame for Boris

Anyone who has tracked Boris Johnson’s career, or worked with him, or been betrayed by Bojo by accident or design, will have known why he was so chipper this week. At PMQs the Tory leader was punchy rather apologetic. Having been in so many self-inflicted scrapes since childhood, this is for Boris a familiar point in the arc of a crisis. It’s the “I’m pretty certain I’m going to get away with it” moment.

Time and again since school he’s experienced these disasters and survived. Mistakes are made, pleasure is taken, borderline fibs are told, evasive action is required. If caught, Boris grovels a childlike half apology. Things got out of hand, other people let him down. Boris’s enemies muster, people are furious at his wrongdoing and inability to accept responsibility, and at that precise point there is opportunity. Furious people tend to make poor decisions, or at least they make a few tactical mistakes providing their target some scope for escape. The pursuers tie themselves up in knots. Institutions are demeaned. Everyone ends up tainted and depressed. But Boris slips away somehow in the scramble. He’s okay for a few more months. Boris is okay, and if you haven’t worked out that when it comes to Boris Johnson this is all that matters, really all that matters, then you haven’t been paying attention for the last twenty years.

This is, roughly, where we are now as everyone waits for the sainted Sue Gray report, and to find out whether the Prime Minister and others in Number 10 must pay fixed penalty fines.

A fine isn’t going to stop him, is it? He’ll just have a load of poor sods below him fired or reprimanded.

“He’s not going anywhere,” says a Tory MP who wants him gone yesterday. That doesn’t mean he survives or fights the next election. For the Tory tribe this is becoming existential, as it grows steadily more tainted by Johnson just when Labour is reorganising and attempting to move back towards the centre.

Boris’s personal rating are effectively below Brown, May and Cameron at their lowest points. There are Boris die-hards out there, but nothing like enough to save him or them longer term from electoral immolation if they persist.

The Conservatives have been in power for twelve years, and voters usually come to hate the arrogance that comes with too long spent in office. The party’s best hope is to attempt a reset, a switch that emphasises competence, economic coherence and, good grief, some decency.

While we await the denouement, and the government-designed energy crisis takes hold and the Bank of England’s failure to monitor the money supply does its work, there is time for some reflection about how we got here so that “lessons can be learned” as they say in the executive summary of a public inquiry.

As a Brexiteer, I’m to blame for Boris Johnson. Let me qualify that. I’m not taking all the blame myself, although if it helps with some form of national healing perhaps we should consider nominating an individual most to blame. How about Boris Johnson?

The truth is that many of us who wanted to leave the European Union were well aware of his outsize flaws but prepared to tolerate them, for a time, on the practical or cynical basis that he was a winner.

Getting out of the EU required some political magic, especially after the referendum when a well-funded campaign and parliament fought, and I still find this incredible, to reverse it. Although I would have preferred Jeremy Hunt as Tory leader, I doubt he would have been brazen or devilish enough to get the messy deed done. Johnson has a connection with a certain kind of voter and a gift for driving the Establishment mad. For all he went to Eton, he’s a strange loner and a gifted outsider.

An informal Brexiteer deal emerged. Boris was more than usually imperfect but he could get two things done – Brexit and smashing Corbyn. Beyond that, his personality is not suited to the complex work of government and reform.

Unsurprisingly, as an ultra-competitive person (Eton again) Johnson is reluctant to stand aside now Britain has left the EU. As a child he wanted to be “world king” and here he is doing the next best thing, short of becoming President of the United States. All PMs become obsessed with legacy and longevity, and to get there this one is relying on his enemies failing, again.

Incidentally, I’m delighted we left the EU. While it comes at a cost, the freedom of action deployed in the vaccine campaign and the EU’s disjointed efforts on Ukraine, as Germany strives to protect its gas supplies coming from Russia, make me more convinced it’s good to be out of that club.

Before my Remain friends start jumping up and down, and shouting and pointing out that we Boris facilitators should be prosecuted or flogged now we’ve acknowledged our mistakes, let me point out that politics works on a spectrum of believability. Some of those who thought Blair wonderful when he was trying to stop Brexit branded him a liar and a charlatan a decade previously in the aftermath of Iraq. Ted Heath and some of the officials who took us into what became the EU did so by a process of evasion and downright deceit about the loss of sovereignty. It’s all there, recorded in Hugo Young’s This Blessed Plot, the history of the campaign to get Britain in and then embed it deeply so by the time voters noticed leaving would be too difficult. The Europhiles fibbed their way in. Boris is hardly the first morally conflicted character to become Prime Minister and he won’t be the last.

With human frailty a given, and virtuous leaders rare, what matters most are robust institutions and proper process. There’s the big problem. In the classic Boris manoeuvre for getting himself out of a crisis almost everything gets smashed or damaged when he attempts to save himself. In this case, in the attempted clean up after the illicit parties in Number 10 what gets trashed is parliament, government, the media, the civil service, the Tory party, and the police too. It’s all so very Boris.

Turkey imploding is next threat

In the 1970s there was media fascination with the efforts of power mad autocrats trying to develop new theories of economic management, or building vast, new utopian cities with motorways that ended up virtually empty. Convinced of their personal brilliance, and having removed all challenge, they embarked on crazy schemes defying common sense and the laws of economics.

There’s just such an experiment underway in Turkey, where President Erdogan decided he has developed a unique, new insight into monetary policy. His policy runs contrary to established theory, which holds that if inflation takes off policymakers need to raise interest rates to increase the cost of borrowing, in the process cooling activity and dampening inflation. Erdogan has done the opposite. He has cut interest rates.

The results have been calamitous. Officially, inflation is reported to be 36%. There are unofficial estimates and reports suggesting it is much higher than that, maybe as high as 80%.

Turkey’s exceptional economic revival in the 2000s was down to the government handing over considerable power to technocrats and central bankers to control policy. After the failed coup in 2016, Erdogan removed anyone he regarded as a threat, and that spread into all areas of policy. Ministers and central bank governors who tried to challenge him were sacked.

The currency at one point had lost 44% of its value. Recent efforts by the government to exchange rate proof bank accounts brought a little respite. None of this fiddling can disguise for long the doomed efforts of a leader who thinks inflation can be tackled by lowering interest rates.

Then there’s energy. Turkey, like Europe next door, is experiencing a supply crisis. Its industry is dependent on Russian gas. This week Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, said it exported 15.98 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas to Turkey in 2021. That’s the highest annual volume exported via the Blue Stream trans-Black Sea gas pipeline built twenty years ago. If the Kremlin cuts off or reduces supply, inflation will go even higher. The US, awash with cheap gas from fracking, will need to help Turkey with shipments if that happens, although western Europe is also queuing up for help.

Russia and Turkey are not natural allies, having fought a dozen wars in three centuries. In Syria, they’ve clashed in recent years. Turkey is also a critical member of NATO. It has aided and backed Ukraine. Autocratic states with leaders cornered can do strange things in a crisis, however.

In the refugee crisis, a crisis that reshaped European politics a decade ago, Turkey was a gateway. Erdogan used this is in the most exploitative way. Now, if Erdogan’s strange approach to economics combines with war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, Turkey could become a pinch point again, a failed state or even more autocratic. Western Europe will be compelled to pay much greater attention.

What I’m (re)reading

Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. I can’t think what has drawn me back to this short masterpiece of research, storytelling, and historical analysis. As a psychological profile of the bunker mentality, and the tendency of populist leaders to go round the twist, it has few equals. The occupants of the bunker throw wild, booze-fuelled parties. Die-hard supporters make increasingly preposterous statements. The leader, accompanied by his new wife, blames everyone else for what has happened. Enemies are closing in. There is a dog. The leader refuses to accept his rule is all over, until suddenly one day it is. As I said, I cannot think what has drawn me back to this book. Something did.

Have a good weekend.