Gamesmanship: Boris is using the School for Scoundrels playbook

Next time you are out on your bicycle and a Lycra-wearing Superman pulls up next to you at the lights, try this.

“Hm,” you say, quietly sizing up his bike. “That’s an Eagle 4000, isn’t it?” At this, your neighbour’s space-age head notices you for the first time.

“Yeah,” it grunts, oblivious to the fact you’ve lifted the information from where it’s printed on the frame. You take his confirmation as an invitation to inspect the machine a little most closely.

“Interesting choice,” you say ambiguously. “I suppose Eagle have finally dealt with the old lateral torsion issue?”

“What?” says the head, leaning forwards.

“Oh, nothing really,” you say reassuringly. “Just that with the wrong body geometry, it can play havoc with your synovial joint. Happened to a friend. Never raced again!”

The head twitches in alarm then transfers its attention to your own bicycle.

“What’s that then?” it asks contemptuously.

“Oh, this?” You glance down as if noticing for the first time the old frame, its humble origins obscured by duct tape. “Just a little something my mechanic knocked together for town work.” You give the brakes a familiar heave, and prime the peddles for departure. As he sizes up this proposition, the lights change. You ride briskly off, leaving your adversary in a welter of car horns and newfound fears for his synovial joint.

Note what has happened. You have arrived at the encounter poorer, less fit and less well-equipped. Lycra-man, by contrast, is a more successful human being. Deep in your embittered soul, you know this: and it shall not stand. So, knowing in your heart you cannot rise to his level, you set about stripping him of that well-earned sense of fulfilment. It matters little that you have only thrown mud at the dam of your own inferiority. For that one precious moment, you are one-up and he is one-down! But the moment will pass. Before long you will need another hit of temporary victory. And another. And another. Yet as a path to the top, the method is illusory; because while you appear to ascend, you are in fact just treading others down.

The name for such techniques is, of course, Gamesmanship: a phrase coined by the comic writer Stephen Potter as the title of his eponymous 1947 book. It is perhaps not a coincidence that it emerged in the depths of the postwar years, from a world defined by rationing and ruled by spivs. Britain’s illusion of easy superiority had been shaken to the core: the book was even written during a week-long power cut. In the same year, the imperial jewel of India was being plucked from her crown. America – whose well-groomed serviceman had flooded the UK at the end of the war – was clearly to be the new cultural standard-bearer. With their material and political stilts kicked away, how could Britons still be seen to win? In his own small way, Stephen Potter provided an answer: they could deploy their intangible assets to bamboozle the world into submission. The British would not necessarily be one-up – but others would still be one-down.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. The ascent of Boris Johnson to within bullshitting distance of Downing Street is a victory of gamesmanship and little else. Like the vulnerable world of the 1940s, his Svengali-like social skills indicate not strength but weakness. Then as now, it is an ephemeral strategy which staves off decline by cloaking shortcomings rather than addressing them. It soon becomes an addiction, only begetting more of itself; and grinds the world down into cognitive dissonance as the illusion becomes more obvious (“Is this person for real?” wrote Jeremy Vine when his own moment of realisation came). As it was in the 1940s, lifemanship is a toxic by-product of the class system – borrowing the attributes of the gentleman not to uphold standards of decency but to subvert them. It is noblesse oblige without the oblige; rugged individualism without the ruggedness.

This is why Boris elicits such an extreme reaction on the Left. Because they intuit something worse even than privilege: namely the aggressive subversion of privilege for personal advancement. Neither is there anything conservative in this world-view: it is fact profoundly anti-conservative, because it disregards the restraint and responsibility on which a self-regulating society is built. Instead Boris prides himself on generating externalities; be they broken marriages, love-children, parking tickets, broken alliances, or diplomatic gaffes. His Libertarianism is entirely false. He could not succeed on a level playing field, and he could not survive without a wider power to pick up after him. The phrase “nanny state” could hardly me more apt than when it comes to cleaning up after Boris. And yet not generating externalities would mean playing by the rules: hence he creates as many as he can – just to show he’s getting away with it.

The obvious question is: why? Why would an intelligent person endowed with the cast-iron confidence of Eton and Oxford need to trample so publicly on the very values which had created them?

First, it is a mistake to say Eton instils universal confidence. Arriving among barons and billionaires – least of all as a “one man melting pot” touting a scholarship, as Boris did – can also instil profound insecurity. Witnessing what Rory Stewart called “the wrong type of Etonian” (namely one who privatises the gains of their position and externalises the costs) they determine to out do them at the same activity. And the more so, the better.

Second, the audience for gamesmanship is never the world at large, who are the mere fall guys. The real audience is the other initiates. In Boris’s case, these are not the snapping Marxists of the Labour Party (who, possibly alone, are likely to take his act at face value). They are instead people from his own background with no scales before their eyes, and yet who are powerless to stop him. To them he lays down the challenge: “Look how far my bullshit has got me. Nearly to Number 10! How far has yours got you?” As a result, the Left’s dislike is echoed even more deeply in the heart of Boris’s own milieu.

Whether by coincidence or not, BBC iPlayer is currently carrying the film version of Stephen Potter’s work: School for Scoundrels. Yet at the most crucial moment, the producers depart from their source material: in the final scene of the film, the hero renounces gamesmanship. Stephen Potter, played by Alastair Sim, is aghast. “Not sincerity,” he mutters. Yet the recrudescence of truth proves more enduring than all the mendacity of the precious ninety minutes. The hero finally gets the girl by honest means – with what appears to be enduring results. If Boris wants to get the girl – us – a similar turn of honesty in the next two weeks might help.