The brains behind Teflon must have thought they were in for another good few years. The famous product that ensures the food doesn’t stick to frying pans has also become shorthand for that veneer of untouchability displayed by gifted politicians everywhere. Over the years we’ve had Teflon Bill (Clinton), Teflon Tony (Blair), and, most recently, of course, four years of Teflon Don(ald), a politician so immune to the sticky stuff that he once claimed he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”.
The next candidate for Teflon’s accidental advertising might well have been Boris Johnson. Johnson is another populist reliant on a big personality rather than a detailed policy. He was also no stranger to scandal long before he entered Number 10, and in many respects, was elected precisely because of his dubious history. Boris was always “just Boris”, a lad and a laugh. There was nothing malicious about the chancer in the shabby suit.
The continuing tendency for Conservative MPs to look at the Prime Minister and think of him as “Teflon John(son)” is perhaps understandable. Yet, Johnson’s performances in the Commons this week show signs that the non-stick coating has been worn thin by succeeding scandals. The base metal is now exposed and increasingly tarnished by deceit, incompetence, and moral failings.
After Keir Starmer’s speech on Tuesday – perhaps the Labour leader’s best in a series of improving performances – Johnson stood up and tried to make the point that his opposite number hadn’t spoken about the dire situation in Ukraine. It was a defence already prepared by Johnson’s allies, with Nadine Dorries predictably leading the charge on Twitter where she condemned commentators for thinking that “uneaten cake is the chief issue before the nation”. Johnson repeated the performance at PMQs, on Wednesday, but with even more bluster. Calling the Labour leader a “Corbynista in an Islington suit” might play well somewhere but for many who don’t understand the geopolitics of London, it sounds like inside-the-bubble-gobbledygook, as empty as his claim that the “intellectual bankruptcy of the Labour Party” lies in its inability to move on.
Call it “intellectual bankruptcy” if you wish but Labour is doing what any good opposition would do in the circumstances, focusing on the moral bankruptcy of an ailing government. The defence seems to be that since the hugely popular Volodymyr Zelensky likes him, Johnson can’t be a bad bloke. It is part of the grand “either/or” strategy that politicians often employ when they believe the British public incapable of holding two facts in their minds simultaneously: that Johnson might well have been exemplary when it comes to supporting Ukraine’s defence but also lousy when it comes to parts of his domestic agenda.
His supporters insist that everybody concentrates on the “bigger picture”, but it is risible given the course of events. Whether Johnson saw Ukraine as a convenient distraction from domestic problems or a calamity that stirred some righteous Churchillian anger (and, again, both are entirely possible and probable), he has deployed it shamelessly – as Peter Brookes succinctly expressed in his cartoon in Wednesday’s Times – as a shield to deflect criticism. Yet, as every Tory MP surely understands (though few seem willing to admit), this has never been about Ukraine or cake or how many SPADs constitute a drinks party. It’s about a pattern of behaviour in which the Prime Minister has shirked the individual responsibility he has been demanding of the nation.
A more self-aware leader would have realised when stepping into those Downing Street gatherings that something was amiss. They would have known that they and their staff were perilously close to (if not already) breaking the rules they had themselves imposed on the nation. That fact alone is damning and Peter Bone’s futile attempt to compare it to a speeding ticket ignored the rather obvious context that this “speeder” was also the person who set up the radar gun. On the scale of hypocrisy, this would be up there with Prince Charles joining the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Pope caught packing contraceptives.
MPs will spend much of Thursday debating whether to investigate the Prime Minister for lying to parliament and many on the Tory benches will understand that, in the eyes of the public, Teflon Johnson has become the badly stained skillet. Muck from his many scandals has stuck and stuck well. The aroma of slowly burning careers fills not only Downing Street but taints the Conservative stew. More worrying for Tory grandees is that the party seems to have lost the knack of protecting its brand from the more corrosive figures.
Not that this should be about electability or how a desperate government regains the public trust by pedalling some cheap policies, condemning religious leaders, or (as it is rumoured to be considering) shaking up the trans debate. Electability is rarely a good measure for political expediency. That way madness lies. It leads to a situation, as in the US, where a former president’s popularity gets in the way of the execution of the law. This is also about the nature of British politics, the balance of power between the parliament and the executive, and, indeed, whether politics is about a process or a potentate.
Boris Johnson is not entirely wrong to claim some victories, but this isn’t about the man and his achievements. It is about the standards we expect of those in the highest office. If this scandal doesn’t stick, then what scandal will, for either this prime minister or those that follow him?
The question Tory MPs must now ask themselves is: how low can they set the bar and continue to fool themselves into believing that honour has any meaning in public life?