{"id":471167,"date":"2022-01-15T13:45:27","date_gmt":"2022-01-15T13:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2022\/01\/boris-johnson-tories-partygate-covid-scandal\/"},"modified":"2022-01-15T14:00:28","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T14:00:28","slug":"boris-johnson-has-outlived-his-usefulness-for-britains-ruling-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/01\/15\/boris-johnson-has-outlived-his-usefulness-for-britains-ruling-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Boris Johnson Has Outlived His Usefulness for Britain\u2019s Ruling Class"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Boris Johnson has always been a liar and a hypocrite, but he was British elites' liar and hypocrite. As he sinks deeper and deeper into a COVID-related scandal, those same elites may have lost their use for Boris.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic during a virtual press conference on January 4, 2022. (JACK HILL\/POOL\/AFP via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Ambling around unconvincingly in a police outfit to promote his\u00a0new war on drugs<\/a>, in December Boris Johnson proudly declared: \u201cThose who break the law have nowhere to hide.\u201d I doubt the so-called county lines gangs flinched at his show of bravado, but for Johnson and those close to him in Number 10, these words might come to haunt them.<\/p>\n

Having already lied about\u00a0Christmas parties<\/a>\u00a0taking place at the center of government when COVID restrictions, backed by the force of the law, clearly stated they were not allowed, the principal private secretary organized a socially distanced soiree in May 2020 and invited one hundred people, just as the country was enduring its most stringent lockdown. The emails leaked to ITV News could, and should, be the end of Johnson\u2019s political career.<\/p>\n

If that wasn\u2019t bad enough, the prime minister himself has admitted<\/a> attending. With the government hoping the issue would get forgotten over Christmas amid brussels sprouts, gift giving, and a restriction-free New Year, an unwelcome spotlight on his hypocrisy is a less than optimal start to 2022.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, this moment of danger for Johnson raises wider questions. Of all the things the Tory government are responsible for \u2014 the\u00a0unnecessary deaths<\/a>\u00a0and the light-minded and seemingly reckless approach to public health, for a start, and the rest, like the\u00a0betrayals<\/a>\u00a0over his \u201cleveling up\u201d agenda and the\u00a0National Insurance increase<\/a> \u2014 the question is not so much why the partying scandal has taken lumps out of Johnson\u2019s poll ratings but why some of his erstwhile allies, particularly in the media, have chosen this moment to find their knives and plunge them in.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0first argument<\/a>\u00a0is that Johnson has served his purpose and has now outlived his usefulness. This purpose was comprehensively besting Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s Labour Party in an election after the fright the British establishment got in 2017. Not only were anti-cuts politics mainstream to an extent unthinkable before and during the election two years earlier, but socialist and left-wing ideas came surging back long after it was common sense to believe them buried and forgotten. In this reading, getting Brexit done was cover for peeling off a section of the Labour vote and putting the Left back into its box. With Johnson\u2019s primary objective achieved, there is no longer any need to suffer his antics.<\/p>\n

The second is the seemingly growing threat from Labour itself. Having trailed behind the Tories and achieved nothing but woe with\u00a0terrible by-election results<\/a>, it was Keir Starmer\u2019s leadership that had a question mark hanging over it going into the 2021 party conference season. But debacle after debacle cannot but affect the politician presiding over them, and so with the\u00a0Owen Paterson corruption affair<\/a>\u00a0and \u201cpartygate\u201d finally tilting the polls in Labour\u2019s direction, Johnson is not looking like the electoral asset he once was. Getting rid of Johnson now might appeal to some Tory MPs concerned about the whiff of\u00a0corruption<\/a>\u00a0and scandal, and give his successor plenty of time to settle in ahead of the next election.<\/p>\n

The final argument is an establishment backlash against his extreme and often authoritarian behavior. Johnson\u2019s efforts to prove he was serious about seeing Brexit through prior to the 2019 election played fast and loose with the law of the land, including his attempted closures of Parliament and a cheerful willingness to risk the integrity of his own party by unceremoniously booting out grandees and otherwise loyal Conservatives. This might have been excused by the exigencies of the situation and the priority of defeating Labour, but the\u00a0creeping authoritarianism<\/a>\u00a0of Johnson\u2019s government and its contempt for any measure of accountability came to a head with the Paterson scandal.<\/p>\n

The move to shield the former North Shropshire MP from a minor tap on the wrist while overhauling parliamentary standards to make it\u00a0even more toothless<\/a>\u00a0concentrated some establishment minds on his potential danger to the modicum of democracy we have in this country, and therefore Johnson\u2019s threat to a chief prop of the state\u2019s legitimacy. Other establishment figures might have had their material interests in mind too: a regime of unaccountable cronyism could mean they might miss out on government-backed business opportunities. Therefore,\u00a0getting shot<\/a>\u00a0and replacing Johnson with someone a bit more in tune with the wider interests of their class would be a better outcome than letting him continue.<\/p>\n

But these arguments only go so far. Given the numbers of people invited to the parties and how leading journalists and editorial offices must have known about the extent of Johnson\u2019s flagrant contempt for the rules, why have they chosen now to report on partygate? Why have they belatedly discovered the chief rule-maker was also the chief rule-breaker? Are they in cahoots with behind-the-scenes shadowy forces who have it in for the prime minister? Occam\u2019s razor suggests not.<\/p>\n

The Westminster media game overlaps with but is not identical to the politics it reports on and influences. In the first place, its commentary on who\u2019s in and who\u2019s out is dependent on access to the leading personalities of the day. If one\u2019s criticisms have to be tempered by the desire to keep their contact list current, the lobby has an incentive to muzzle itself<\/u>. The leaks will keep coming provided the boat isn\u2019t rocked too much.<\/p>\n

Additionally, for almost the entirety of the pandemic, the Tories have been well ahead in the polls, partly because they\u2019ve been the undeserving repository of a spirit of national solidarity that was particularly prominent in the early phase of COVID and has had a lingering effect among some layers of voters. For journalists, reporting on Johnson\u2019s partying a year ago, and especially not long into the restrictive period in 2020, might have had knock-on effects on confidence in the government\u2019s competency in managing the pandemic and the rollout of the vaccine program. This would undoubtedly have had career implications for any reporter or editor who blew the whistle, with the threat of action by the Tories against any programming that stuck its head above the parapet.<\/p>\n

With this immediate danger passed, and thanks to movement in the polls, it\u2019s significant it was the\u00a0Mirror<\/em>\u2019s Pippa Crerar \u2014 the paper least compromised by associations with the government \u2014 that broke the initial story and opened the floodgates. The initial revelations were a hot story that captured the public\u2019s attention, and as the media are in the business of competing for attention, the rest have now followed suit \u2014 some of them in tune with the growing Tory hostility to the prime minister and getting egged on for their own purposes, but all of it to be relevant to audiences old and new.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s difficulties are entirely of his own making. His hubris has brought him low, as it was always going to do. This episode reminds us that our opponents are not a monolithic bloc, and divisions among their ranks can open up political opportunities for the labor movement. This is such a moment.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ambling around unconvincingly in a police outfit to promote his\u00a0new war on drugs, in December Boris Johnson proudly declared: \u201cThose who break the law have nowhere to hide.\u201d I doubt the so-called county lines gangs flinched at his show of bravado, but for Johnson and those close to him in Number 10, these words might [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8583,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8583"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471168,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471167\/revisions\/471168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}