A journalist says 'Boris Johnson is Trump's clone'. He's wrong. Johnson is worse than Trump.
Trump's beliefs may have been vile, but at least he had beliefs.
Chris Johns
In a car-crash interview with Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon - thank god there are still one or two proper journalists out there - Johnson was accused of being ‘Donald Trump’s clone.’ Gibbon alleged that the other G7 leaders view Johnson as a mini-Trump and that nobody trusts the British prime Minister, nobody believes a word he says. The short interview is well worth a watch - it gets really feisty after about the early skirmishes about Covid.
It’s hard to disagree with Gibbon’s characterisation of Johnson. It’s easy to believe that the G7 leaders hold the UK prime Minister in contempt. My thesis is this: while Trump and Johnson do share many characteristics - constant lying being just one - Boris is not a clone of Trump. He is much worse than that.
Take that point about lying: the comparison here is quantitative rather than qualitative (I’ll come on to the latter). Johnson has observed the lies at the heart of Trumpism and gone all-in. Peter Stefanovic has gathered together a collection of Johnson’s lies and regularly challenges the BBC (and other mainstream media) to report them.
Below is Stevanovic’s report, now viewed over 22 million times. (Another link, for non-Twitter users is here.) Johnson’s lying is off the scale and under-reported by the British media. For all their faults, the New York Times, CNN and others did report Trump’s lies.
Where Johnson is different to Trump rests with the deep, almost philosophical, question of belief. Whether or not we agreed with him, it has always been clear where Trump stood, what he believed in. Nobody really knows what Johnson believes in.
I think that’s because he believes in almost nothing at all. From everything he has done, probably rooted in his classical studies at Oxford, Johnson’s behaviour is consistent with only one belief, namely existential nihilism. A philosophy that holds that nothing really matters. Or, to quote the late great Freddie Mercury from the last lines of Bohemian Rhapsody:
Nothing really matters, Anyone can see,
Nothing really matters,
Nothing really matters to me
Any way the wind blows..
I say ‘almost’ nothing matters because there is one thing that does. The only question Johnson asks is ‘how does this play with the electorate?’ If the answer is positive, then there are no restrictions on what he will do. There are focus groups and broader opinion polls. In the short term, there is the Telegraph and the tabloids. But not Channel 4.
It doesn’t matter that Johnson is revealed to lie about desiring a ‘Global Britain’. Uniting the rest of the G7 against him and provoking a major public international row on the question of the Northern Ireland protocol hardly qualifies as a ‘Globalist’ approach. Fighting with M&M, Macron and Merkel, plays well with the tabloids and the electorate. Undermining the integrity of the Belfast agreement will not matter to Johnson for as long as it doesn’t matter to the electorate - which, for now, it simply does not.
He can make mistakes. He failed to realise that rejoicing over Keir Starmer’s invisibility blinded the Tories to the existence of a most effective leader of the opposition: Marcus Rashford. A young man who has taken on the government on at least two occasions and won. A Manchester United footballer. Go figure.
A clear similarity with Trump is the stoking of the culture war. But, again, it’s being done on a much bigger scale. The row over England footballers ‘taking the knee’ is but one example. Wading into anti-racism, student politics and the controversies of an English cricketer’s teenage tweets are part of a much broader strategy. There is nothing that they won’t politicise, nothing that can’t be cast in terms of the culture war between the Tories and a mythical Marxist elite bent on applying critical theory to what we eat for breakfast.
Ponder that thought. The Tories pushing the line that Marxists and other subversives are behind English footballers protesting about racism; are behind much of the output of the BBC; have taken over Britain’s universities; are on the brink of power in the UK. All this from a right-wing populist government with an 88 seat majority.
The aim of the culture war is straight from the populist playbook: create an enemy, behind which an unlikely majority of voters - mostly English - can unite. A brilliant piece by Nick Cohen describes that culture war in excruciating detail.
It’s a piece well worth reading in full. Here’s just one excerpt:
Like many of their counterparts on the left, second-rate Conservative politicians have become culture war mercenaries. Their careers depend on a war without end. Gavin Williamson is a failed education secretary. But he secures his position by condemning obscure students in an Oxford college and pledging his allegiance to the Queen, who can manage perfectly well without it. Oliver Dowden was once a moderate Conservative. The culture secretary was a Remainer who worked for David Cameron. Transforming himself into a thuggish censor is his way of assuring the new regime that he is an obedient soldier worthy of promotion out of his backwater department.
Cohen captures just how complete is the populist Johnsonian takeover of the Tory party. That, of course, replicates the Trumpist transformation of the Republicans, the ‘Grand Old Party’ of Lincoln into something that even the Bush presidential dynasty wouldn’t recognise. That’s cloning Trumpism - but a clone on steroids.
Politicians have to be popular to get elected. As Jean-Claude Junker said during Europe’s financial crisis:
We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.
One definition of a great politician is one that recognises this but, occasionally, does the right thing. Once in a while makes the moral choice as opposed to electorally appealing one. At least now and again. Johnson clearly never asks the moral or ethical question. He doesn’t have to because in a world where nothing really matters, there are no moral choices to be made. Ethics are a man-made construct that are just another set of non-existent gods. In Johnson’s world it is a false dichotomy, a non-question.
That means there are no constraints on Johnson. There is nothing he wouldn’t do, provided it plays well with the electorate. The only hope, for those of us who stand utterly opposed to all this, is that he really is a clone of Trump and will make a fatal error and lose an election. The fear is that he has absorbed the lessons of Trumpism and that the only way to repeated electoral success is to out-Trump Trump.
Many people support Johnson. Many do not. Sitting in the latter camp, I will not make the mistake of passively accepting the creeping destruction of our values. Quiet acceptance of what has been visited upon passive populations has much resonance with Europe’s history, particularly during the 1930s. Gibbon and Cohen are lonely voices. I only have this platform but I add my voice to theirs.