When a political crisis reaches a certain pitch, emergency and absurdity start to sound the same. “The main message is: please don’t travel to Kent,” Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, declared in a live press conference on Monday evening. It made perfect sense in context. Kent is the hotspot for a new variant of the coronavirus. France had sealed its borders. The prime minister offered reassurance that the nation’s food supply was secure.
This used to be the stuff of science fiction or satire. Only with the full run-up of 2020 could such a script land in a news broadcast. The acclimatisation to extreme events is becoming more shocking than the events themselves. There is a numb horror on realising that the preposterous has become normal.
Boris Johnson tried to sound unperturbed that the M20 had mutated into a lorry park for obstructed freight. He reminded his audience that the government had been “preparing for a long time for exactly this kind of event”. As luck would have it, a monstrous snake of traffic on the approach to UK ports mimics the scenario in which Britain leaves the European Union without a trade deal. A calamity inflicted by fate turns out to be indistinguishable from something the prime minister was planning to inflict as policy. This was meant to be comforting. When asked about the state of Brexit negotiations, the prime minister laughed.
It was an eloquent moment. Nothing about the situation is funny, except when Johnson’s touch makes it darkly ridiculous. He has a quality of anti-gravitas that extends to the whole cabinet. Their collective inadequacy is hiding in plain sight. It is not even hiding. It fills the screen completely, obscuring even the memory of competent administration.
When Priti Patel was asked about failures of pandemic management today, she declared: “The government has consistently this year been ahead of the curve in terms of proactive decisions on coronavirus.” It is hard to draft a more precise inversion of the truth. The home secretary’s calculated cynicism comes from the same place as the prime minister’s spontaneous laughter. They express the same contempt for the audience.
This trend did not begin with Johnson. He stands at the end of a trajectory away from seriousness on a line that originates in the decision to leave the EU. That ambition, predicated on so many fantastical notions of what was available and at what price, uncoupled British politics from economic and strategic reality. The divergence became more extreme over time, generating a tension that made Theresa May’s tenure as prime minister unbearable. She wanted government that was still tethered to pillars of sensible statecraft, but without resisting the Brexit current that flowed fast the other way. It was an impossible combination. By picking Johnson as May’s successor, the Tories cut the rope.
Unmooring from facts proved to be a successful model, at least in campaign terms. Last December’s election victory seemed to confirm that Johnson’s methods would work. Brexit would be done. The distant shore that had been Britain’s natural political habitat for generations could be forgotten. There was no going back. That confidence deferred any sense of urgency about bridging the gap between the leadership qualities needed for responsible government and the character of the prime minister. Johnson and reality had competed for the loyalty of the Tory party and Johnson had won by a landslide.
Then the coronavirus turned up and the challenge it posed was qualitatively different to the political problems associated with Brexit. In theory, the value of EU membership to Britain could be empirically measured but the numbers could be disputed. Mostly the argument played out in the realms of culture, history and identity, where rival sides can dig ever deeper into rival trenches without hitting a bedrock of hard science.
That was not the case with a virus. And in a pandemic, the consequences of bad government are felt fast. The Tory leader’s Brexit repertoire of rhetorical flummery has no utility when people need urgent, practical guidance. The disease could not be tamed by optimism. The tide that swept Johnson to power marooned him on a fantasy island. The public messages he issues by way of reassurance have started to look more like distress flares.
Many Tory MPs know that Johnson is unfit to lead the country in the current circumstances, but they cannot admit the bigger fraud in which they were complicit – selling him to the public as someone who was fit to lead in any circumstances. There is much grumbling about the direction of pandemic regulation. There is residual whining about compromises with Brussels in any final Brexit settlement, but that is displacement activity. The Conservative party is not giving up on Johnson. There is no route back along the way they came, and his plan is as good as any other.
It has three elements: wait for mass vaccination to tame Covid; hope the public mourns its losses as the cost of a freak disaster and not government negligence; blame all the downsides of Brexit on the pandemic. The resilience of the Tory rating in opinion polls throughout 2020 suggests there is some mileage in that strategy.
It still leaves the problem of Johnson’s manner – his unshakable habit of crass levity. Even in the midst of national tragedy he adopts the sombre pose awkwardly, like a football mascot observing the minute’s silence on Remembrance Sunday. Some Tories are embarrassed by it, but for the cabinet it is a kind of defence. He is the one Britain chose. Everyone knew who he was; what he is. Caveat emptor. You don’t hire a clown and then complain that his nose is too red.
This government has tested to destruction Mark Twain’s maxim that “no church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field and live”. Johnson’s capacity to brazen out ridicule, to co-opt it to his service, is his secret weapon. I have heard it said that the outlandish character of British politics in 2020 has made satire redundant, but it is more accurate to say that satire has been turned upside down. The traditional satirical model uses mockery as a weapon against authority. But we have a prime minister whose whole career makes a mockery of the idea that power should be wielded by someone serious. He has turned Downing Street into a stage on which he performs a pastiche of traditional authority.
The longer that show goes on, the harder it gets to remember what good government ever felt like. The deeper we go into this emergency, the more it shades into absurdity and the absurdity starts to feel like normality. The clown sets aside his red nose. No one is laughing at him any more. But he is surely laughing at us.