The end, now that it is coming, is coming fast for Boris Johnson. On November 30th, about seven weeks ago, the Daily Mirror, a left-leaning tabloid, published the first stories about parties taking place at No. 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s home and place of work, during Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns. The gatherings we know about, around fifteen of them, happened in the course of a year. The reports, the screen grabs, and the leaked e-mail invitations summon an atmosphere that ranges from incidental, trivial rule-breaking (a glass of wine to say goodbye to a colleague) to a pandemic-era edition of “The Rake’s Progress,” casual and heartless in its pleasure-seeking.
On January 14th, the Daily Telegraph, Johnson’s former employer and most loyal broadsheet champion, published an account of a party in the basement of Downing Street: a laptop played music, perched on a photocopier, and a staffer was sent out with a suitcase to buy wine. People danced and got drunk and moved to the garden, where aides broke a swing belonging to the Prime Minister’s infant son, sometime after midnight on the morning of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, which the Queen, in accordance with England’s COVID-19 regulations at the time, attended masked and socially distanced. She mourned alone. For a while, Johnson was able to pretend that he didn’t know about the carryings-on, that he was as furious as everyone else. But, on January 12th, the Prime Minister admitted that he had gone to a garden party on May 20th last year (to which his personal secretary had invited a hundred people to “bring your own booze”), which he mistook for a work event. “I want to apologize,” Johnson told the House of Commons, in an uncharacteristically sombre appearance. His approval ratings have tumbled since the scandal began. The Conservative Party, which led Labour in the polls last fall, is now ten points behind.
Why has this particular shit show of rule-breaking, lying, and incompetence hurt Johnson, when other mistakes haven’t? He has got away with greater outrages in the past. People say that it is because of the hypocrisy: the Prime Minister and his officials broke the rules (and, probably, the laws) that they had imposed on everybody else. That’s true, but it doesn’t quite explain the peril for Johnson. A big part of his appeal—the sense of possibility that Johnson engenders—is that rules don’t apply to him. He rises when others would crater. An important condition of the idea of Johnson’s becoming Prime Minister, which was first aired in the early two-thousands—when he was a junior member of Parliament, a magazine editor, and a television personality—was that it was a joke. He has piffled and flubbed and shambled his way until there he is, addressing the United Nations General Assembly about climate change, referencing Kermit the Frog.
According to “Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson,” a mostly fond biography by Andrew Gimson, a former colleague, Johnson once entertained his classmates at Eton by failing to learn his lines as Richard III, in the Shakespeare play. He pasted pages from the script onto pillars in the school cloisters and spent his performance darting between them. There is the thrill of jeopardy, and there is the backslapping afterward. People who don’t like Johnson sometimes mistake him for a populist, or a milder version of Trump, but he is neither of those things. There is nothing transgressive about Johnson; there is only Johnson. He shores up the existing order of things, even as he seems to undermine it. In this sense, he is a clown and his political persona is slapstick: nothing is serious, no one gets hurt, he never apologizes. For these reasons, he is a consoling, even cheering, figure. He wins elections and survives scrapes. His staff keep the wine fridge stocked for Friday afternoons.
What is devastating about the parties at 10 Downing Street is that things were serious, the suffering outside the walls was real, and—perhaps most crucial—Johnson has acknowledged this. His persona has cracked. The charisma is torn. The garden party organized by Johnson’s secretary on May 20, 2020, occurred about a month after the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in England. A hundred and eighty-seven deaths were recorded that day. “With hindsight, I should have sent everyone back inside. I should have found some other way to thank them,” the Prime Minister said, of his staff, last week. “I offer my heartfelt apologies.” His remorse hasn’t helped, politically. On a visit to a hospital in north London on January 18th—his first public appearance in almost a week—Johnson hung his head when he was asked about the party on the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. “I deeply and bitterly regret that that happened,” he said. “I can only renew my apologies to Her Majesty and to the country for misjudgments that were made.” It is too late for him to try and be like everybody else now. When Johnson is apologizing, what is the point of him?
He could stay in office for some time. The Conservative Party is considered ruthless when it comes to disposing of its leaders, but the next general election is still almost three years away. Theresa May, Johnson’s predecessor, lost her political authority many months before she announced her resignation, in the spring of 2019. Most recently, the political gossip was that Johnson might be given a last chance to redeem himself, at a set of local elections in May. Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s chancellor—and possible successor—was noticeably absent when the Prime Minister apologized in the Commons. Like other prominent Tories, Sunak has said that a civil-service investigation of the Downing Street parties must be allowed to run its course. The investigators are expected to report by the end of the week.
Johnson’s premiership has been defined by Brexit and COVID. As those immediate challenges ease—or progress to their next stages—there is no other coherent policy platform or higher set of beliefs that Johnson stands for, or which bind him to his political allies. The only big slogan that his government espouses is to “Level Up” the country: a vague program requiring billions of pounds of investment in poorer parts of the country and, most likely, tax increases—both anathema to traditional Tory voters and politicians. Johnson has always been a strange, lone animal in Britain’s collegial parliamentary system. His appeal, when it was there, existed alongside the Conservative Party, and not because of it. Now the Party is imagining life without him.
