Hopeless Boris is a menace to the Union

Boris is crumbling. This might seem both paradoxical and unfair, because his incoherence is in tune with public opinion. According to the polls, a majority of the populace is in favour of tougher measures. But when these are imposed, the reaction is often mutinous. Yet people expect a stronger line from their PM. They are allowed to be anxious and afraid. They expect him to lead – which he seems incapable of doing.

Hindsight is an easy luxury, but Boris was given excellent advice at the beginning, which he chose to ignore. The four living former Prime Ministers all wrote to him with the same message. (That was an achievement by somebody: to persuade gloomy, glowering Gordon Broon to come to the help of a Tory PM.) All four told him to put generals in charge of the practicalities. Generals understand logistics. They also understand improvisation. After decades-long constraints on the defence budget, they know that there is no point in behaving like a ten-year old in Hamley’s. Generals know how to take decisions and to give leadership, which inspires followership. With them in charge of the ground war, Boris could have concentrated on the high politics, explaining the situation to the public and deploying an underused political stratagem: candour. But that does not come easily to Bojo.

This brings us to the psychology of the individual, and to another paradox. The very qualities which propelled Boris to the Premiership rendered him unfit to do the job. Tom Bower’s new biography of the PM tries to be sympathetic. He writes like a defence counsel, aware that there is no hope of an acquittal, but striving to highlight mitigating circumstances to secure a lower sentence. For Bower, the principal villain was Boris’s father, Stanley. Who knows? Although Stanley has always struck me as a genial old cove, there are closed rooms and dark corridors in many families’ lives. It may be that the young Boris spent too much time in both.

Whatever the reason, the child does appear to have been father to the man. Early on, Boris developed the qualities which run through his personality: secretiveness, selfishness, wariness, insecurity and ambition. To conceal the first four of those while promoting the ambition, he also created a persona: goofiness and charm. These enabled him to get away with a great deal over a great many years, especially the fact that he had no interest in other people except as a means of his own gratification That was the cake era of Boris Johnson. He had an apparently endless talent for having his cake and eating it, whatever the effect on others.

In many contexts, many people came to realise that there was no point in relying on Boris’s word. There is a Latin cliche: meum verbum, meum pactum – my word is my bond. In Bojo-Latin, that would have an addendum: for about a quarter of an hour. If, say, on a Wednesday, anyone quoted back at him a commitment which he had made on Monday, Boris would be bewildered. Surely the interlocutor/complainer would understand that it would be absurd to think that anything he had said to dig him out of Monday’s hole might still apply on Wednesday?

Moral short-termism was reinforced by the intellectual equivalent. Over fifty yards, Boris is as fast as anyone I have ever come across. Thereafter, he would rapidly begin to flail and flounder. By one hundred yards he would be at walking-pace. But fifty yards is neither an Olympic distance nor a Prime Ministerial one. Confronted by a problem, Boris would always respond in the same way: Let’s do “a”. When the difficulties were pointed out, often stretching a long way into the alphabet, he would also respond in the same way: peevishness.

This is not how Prime Ministers ought to behave. If there had been no virus, it may be that Boris could have continued to get away with it. But there are three qualities which he entirely lacks: an ability to grasp detail, a capacity for hard thinking and a willingness to trust able colleagues. That explains why he rejected his predecessors’ advice. It would have required him to hand over control to others and make up his mind: both impossible. There, his insecurity kicks in. This is a man who does not believe in himself and is constantly surprised by others’ willingness to do so.

He also faces another problem, even harder for him to solve than Covid: Scotland. North of the border, he is toxic. The Bertie Wooster act which still endears him to a surprising number of Englishmen simply does not work up there. It merely arouses anger, and chippiness. Far too many Scots are obsessed by the relationship with England, and it would not appease them if they realised that The English give the matter hardly any thought. This unease about England is even prevalent in the higher social circles. Important lawyers, stock-brokers and accountants, who own splendid residences in the New Town, from which it is a gentle stroll to the New Club, and who are apparently masters of all they survey still have a hidden anxiety. Would they have been able to hack it in London? Or would the English have turned out to be abler? Surely not: surely the English must owe their success to family and school connections (unknown, of course, in Edinburgh)? Then along comes Boris, this bumbling confection of privilege and entitlement, to justify all their suspicions of the English. This is not a Premier to speak for the Union.

Fortunately for that great and noble cause, equally unfortunately for Boris, a significant number of Tory MPs have woken up to the risk to the Union. That relieves a fear which has been nagging this writer. It could be that the final threat to the Union will come, not from Scotland, but from England. If the English do pay more attention to Scotland, they might well conclude, with some justice, that the Jocks are perennially ungrateful. When it comes to the hard choice, they might well not vote to separate themselves from England’s cheque-book, but if England were playing Saddam Hussein, they would continue to cheer for him. The English are one of the politest races on earth. Stand on an Englishman’s foot, and he will apologise. A second time, a second apology. Only at the third offence would he punch you on the nose. The Scots must be in danger of miscalculating.

It is cheering to know that so many English MPs are rallying – though this is not the way to explain their goal – to save the Scots from themselves. But they will come up against the Boris factor. It seems that a lot of Americans who have benefited from Trumpian policies and who are in favour of his economic views are still going to vote for Biden, because they cannot stand Trump. There could be a similar outcome in Scotland. The Nats’ economic programme was implausible when it was based on oil at $113 a barrel. For “implausible” now read “nonsensical.”

There is a formidable negative campaign to be made against independence. Boris is not the man to make it.

He owed his victory in the Tory Leadership campaign to the widespread belief that he was a winner. Parliamentary colleagues suppressed their doubts about him in pursuit of the all-important goal. After the general election, their judgment appeared to have been vindicated.  Now? He cannot fall back on affection or respect. His only hope is to recover the 2019 election spirit. At the moment, that seems on the impossible wing of unlikely.