'Boris Johnson is a vacuum of integrity'. Would that be a Hoover, Dyson, Zanussi or Acuri?
Why is anyone surprised?
Chris Johns
Former Attorney General of the the UK Sir Dominic Grieve today said on the BBC that Boris Johnson is ‘a vacuum of integrity’.
How is this news? It’s a fair question, given all that is in the public domain about Johnson:
A well-known journalist has written a book which documents in detail the lies, the lack of integrity, the Trumpism:
At least two former employers of Johnson have seen fit to fire him:
I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister
So, what is the ‘news’? Johnson has attempted a tried and trusted Dominic Cummings tactic aimed at news management. ‘Throw a dead cat on the table’. It’s about replacing uncomfortable headlines (in this case ones about Tory sleaze) with one that is more congenial.
The dead cat: an allegation, by a ‘10 Downing St. spokesman’, that texts by James Dyson (a billionaire maker of, appropriately, vacuum cleaners), asking Johnson for bit of tax help, were leaked to the press by Dominic Cummings. This was a cack-handed attempt to make Cummings the story and to get the Dyson tax texts off the front pages. But like a lot of things Johnson tries to do, he messed it up. He tried a Cummings tactic and made a balls of it. Not least because at least one prominent journalist has said that the ‘spokesman’ was someone who personally phoned a number of Fleet St editors. And that someone was, according to Sam Coates of Sky News, Johnson himself.
To imagine that Cummings wouldn’t fight back was naive in the extreme. Bullies, we should always remember, lack imagination: they never think through the possible responses to their punches. And, of course, Cummings has fought back.
Why on earth did Johnson pick this fight? With a double-digit opinion poll lead he can sit back and wait for the May local elections while Keir Starmer struggles with his invisibility cloak. Johnson’s unnecessary war with Cummings has the hallmarks of a bored, lazy bully having a go simply because he can.
Cummings has responded with several incendiary allegations against Johnson that may or may not be investigated. Who paid for Johnson’s flat renovation? Did Johnson really ask Cummings to conceal potential gifts from Tory donors? £200000, £50000 - lots of numbers flying around. If, as is now being spun, Johnson ended up paying to ‘remove the John Lewis look’ of the decor, where did the money come from, given his many pleadings of poverty?
As Alastair Campbell has noted, Cummings’ blogged response is in a very different style to his usual ramblings. Do we see someone else lurking in the shadows, someone else who wants to be Prime Minister? The usual suspect certainly has form when it comes to putting a knife in Johnson’s back.
The substantive points to be made about all this are:
Nobody should be surprised
History teaches us that nothing ever sticks to Johnson - he is the ultimate lucky, teflon, politician. I will be pleasantly surprised if something sticks this time
Johnson is hopeless at both forming a plan and its subsequent execution. Everything he tries to do is lazily put together and subsequently falls apart at great cost to the taxpayer. Garden bridges over the Thames and Presidential-style press briefing rooms. The one thing done well on his watch - vaccination - is down to Kate Bingham and her team.
This is all performative, utterly unserious politics. It’s the way the UK is run these days. Whatever it is, it ain’t proper government. Johnson is simply not a serious politician - or even a serious man. It all stems from his personal philosophy, born out of a little learning at Oxford. Or maybe listening to the words of Freddie Mercury: ‘nothing really matters’.
The contrast with the deeply serious, ambitious, well-thought-out policy initiatives announced daily by the Biden administration couldn’t be starker.
Finally a question: how on earth did these clowns, Johnson and Cummings, persuade the British people to vote for Brexit? Maybe that is Johnson’s one, true success. If it can be called that