Boris the columnist’s dishonesty will be the ruin of us
In 2019, on Boris Johnson’s ascension to the leadership the Tory Party, in a piece entitled “Boris the columnist may regret he went into politics,” I wrote that Johnson’s journalistic career had been fired along by “lots of Big Opinions, peripatetic mental rhythms and silly, basically unserious takes on current affairs.” Being PM is different, I argued, and a project that would test, perhaps break, Johnson’s merrie England journalistic persona.
Over two years on, the PM’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester was pure Johnsonian optimism. Lots of fun references – Thomas Gray, Beavers, Hereward the Wake, and Churchill. And a vast terrain covered. Highlights included regional inequality, the state of the Labour Party and wage growth. Boris is in a great mood. He joked about “locking up the public” contributing to a fall in crime. He’s on top, bouncing along, and believes he can solve problems at pace.
Johnson may not be quite as at risk of his speech appearing in the years to come as a period piece to be exhibited alongside Fred Goodwin, CEO of RBS, being informed mid-speech to Merrill Lynch investors about the Scottish bank’s bright future that its share price had plummeted 35 per cent in a morning, or Harold Wilson’s post-devaluation of sterling speech of 1967 when he claimed: “That doesn’t mean … that the pound here in Britain … has been devalued.”
A wonderful mish-mash of Boris can-do attitude might go down well in the conference hall – but Boris is also PM. And in the British system, the PM occupies an “exceptional and peculiar authority,” as one 19th century observer puts it, and in an emergency assumes a role “not inferior to that of a dictator”. In a crisis, to function adequately, the British system needs a prime minister who pays attention, who takes the process of government seriously, who empowers officialdom to go to work.
In his speech to conference, he mentioned gas once. In reference to scientists who had started working in the wind energy sector after leaving “the world of oil and gas.” The word shortage did not appear at all. He did, in passing, reference the ongoing global energy crunch. He promised to “sort out our energy supply – more wind, more nuclear, becoming less dependent on hydrocarbons from abroad.” This would “hold costs down and save you [the consumer] money.” He did give a short explanation for supply chain disruption. The “stresses and strains” were “mainly a function of growth and economic revival.”
This is the wrong message to be sending to consumers who are understandably very anxious about the prospect of shortages in basic necessities, like food and energy. Employing boosterish optimism over and over again will eventually convince a broad swathe of the British public that our political class including Boris is lying to them. That’s bad news if the situation deteriorates: trust is thrown away easily; hard to earn.
Even more worryingly, Boris simply isn’t taking the warning signals flashing up across the world economy seriously enough. Our PM isn’t paying attention. The supply chain issues will take a long time to work out – port congestion, which has been a problem for months, is not yet abating. The energy crunch is only in its early stages. While oil stocks are relatively healthy, gas inventories in the UK and across the Continent are extremely low. China’s coal stocks are way below their historic averages for this time of year. India gets the majority of its electricity from coal – its power stations are reporting that they have on average four days’ worth of stock left.
Boris is right that some of the supply problems in basic necessities, like food and energy, are temporary and have domestic solutions – a shortage of haulage drivers, for example. But there is significant downstream potential for a cascading series of disruptions in global supply chains, exacerbated by structural problems specific to the UK.
We are an island on the edge of a continent. It is hard to transport gas. It is too expensive to fly it in. Our closest neighbour has shown no compunction in seizing critical resources in a time of crisis (France redirected five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March). In an energy crunch, that is a problem.
In times of economic crisis, we need honesty from our leaders. But Boris the columnist is unable to deliver hard truths. We may all suffer as a result.