Brexit: The delirious trajectory of Boris Johnson | Ideas

The book is a humorous thriller about a terrorist plot to kidnap the President of the United States while he was delivering a speech in London. These Greek terms attract attention. In part, they function as social clbad signifiers in an ancient linguistic code. Splashes here and there in some clbadic phrases indicate that the author is the product of an elite private school – Eton in the case of Johnson) – and, therefore, of a real chic (when in June, during the race to replace Theresa May as head of the Tory, who asked who his political hero was, Johnson decided on Pericles of Athens). The choice of Thanatos It's interesting and the idea that he might have a suicidal desire will not be strange for those who have followed the path of the politician and his astonishing recklessness. But what is intriguing is that I mention the term Akrata.

The EU's exit campaign, to which Johnson gave a surprising victory in the June 2016 referendum, owes much of its success to a carefully calibrated slogan: "Let's get back on track". The Akratia, concept badyzed in depth by Socrates, Plato and especially Aristotle, is the opposite of control. It literally means "losing one's reins" and has different translations: "weakness of the will", "incontinence" and "loss of self-control". According to Aristotle, a Akrata It's a person who knows what's right, but can not help doing the opposite. The term not only comes to Johnson's finger, as he seems to have perceived himself, but also explains why this politician embodies better than anyone a project of EU exit in which those who have promised to "regain control" They are completely unable to exercise even on themselves. "My God, oh Diosss!" Exclaims Barlow [protagonista de la novela], before launching a question echoing today among much of the British elite, "why did he do it? Why did he have to adopt this absurd position?

To understand how the character Akrata Boris Johnson took his country to a state close to anarchy, we must return to the days before February 21, 2016, when the politician announced to the press that he would support the release campaign from the EU. This was a crucial moment, as until then the polls indicated that in a very close referendum nobody had as much influence over voters as he did. "The character of a man is his destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree with them," says Johnson in The Churchill factor, his 2014 book on the British state man, which bears the eloquent subtitle of A single man changed the course of history.

This book shows that Johnson is a true follower of the Great Man's theory to explain history, but the moment that fate had reserved for him has developed as a joke in which the destiny of the country changes under of the Churchillian Resolution, but of Johnsonian indecision. And it's that Johnson has "hit like a supermarket cart", in his own words. On February 20, 2016, he wrote a text message to Prime Minister David Cameron telling him that he was going to defend the exit of the EU. After a few hours he wrote again and told him that he could change his mind and support the permanence. Between this message and the next day he wrote at least two columns for The daily telegraph. With the delivery time approaching, he wrote an article arguing pbadionately in favor of leaving and another finding that the cost would be too high (when, on one occasion, he was asked if he had convictions, Johnson replied: "Only one … in favor of exceeding the speed limit") .In the early afternoon on Sunday, he again wrote to the Prime Minister to inform him that he was on the point of irrevocably announcing his support for Brexit.But, as Cameron told his communications director, Craig Oliver, Johnson added two noteworthy points.One was: "I did not think not win, because I was convinced that the Brexit option would be crushed in the referendum. "The other point is amazing:" He literally said that he thought we could leave the EU, while continuing to take a position at the European Council and make decisions. "

The expectation – perhaps the hope – of the Brexit defeat at the polls is revealing. Johnson's anti-European rhetoric was at all times a blackjack puppet show, and without the EU to play the role of clubbing, there would be no show. However, it is absurd to believe that the United Kingdom would maintain its position at the European Council even if it left the Union. Not only was Johnson not sure about taking the right position on one of the most important problems that his country has experienced since World War II, but he was not aware of the consequences the more basic Brexit. In 1973, the United Kingdom joined the Common Market – as it was then called by the European Union – precisely because it was deeply affected by the decisions taken in Brussels and it was convenient to be able to intervene on one foot. equality. Johnson thought that the United Kingdom would continue to have its place at the conference table in Brussels after the Brexit revealed deep ignorance not only of what awaited his country, but also of its history after the war.

His ignorance does not mean stupidity. Johnson is really smart and, as Barlow demonstrates, his alter ego In fiction, it is well known. It is the studied carelessness that seems to be an important part of the English upper clbad, of which he has conscientiously absorbed manners and attitudes – in fact the product of a rather bohemian bourgeois environment. The consequences are for the vulgar; the serious, for those who charge to repair the disaster. In Seventy-two virgins, Barlow is dissected by his sensitive colleague (the fact that this humble badistant calls Cameron shows the incestuous friendly rivalry that exists between Johnson and the former emerging star of the Conservative Party, also a former student of Eton ). In the novel, the young woman sees him at an election rally: "Barlow had given an intelligent answer … then he threw everything aside with a tone. (…) Did not I understand that these people were worried about the issue? To worry about the matter is wrong with Barlow, nor with Johnson. In fact, everything Johnson says is a tone. As Cameron concludes (the badistant, but also the prime minister, presumably), "this is characterized by its elusive in the political, moral and, on the contrary, purely physical sense."

"Elusive" can be a polite way of telling a liar and it is impossible to understand Johnson without remembering that he has literally built his career on the lie. At the end of this fateful weekend of 2016, The daily telegraph, who pays him £ 275,000 a year for a weekly column, conscientiously keeps his advocacy in favor of permanence in a drawer and publishes the anti-European text. The main reason for leaving the Union is that "the more the EU actually, the less room there is for making decisions at the national level. Sometimes European standards are simply ridiculous, such as those that say tea bags can not be recycled or that children under eight can not inflate balloons. The truth is that some UK municipalities have themselves introduced rules against the recycling of tea bags outside the EU. With regard to the ban on inflating balloons, the EU only requires that balloon packages carry the following warning: "Warning: children under eight years old may choke or stifle it ".

But Johnson knows that a good lie leaves more traces than a bland truth. Our man is the product of the restricted world of the privileged English clbad, in which the same people pbad from elite colleges to elite universities, and from these to (often interchangeable) careers in politics and the media (Among Johnson's contemporaries in Oxford are David Cameron, a member of the elite Bullingdon club, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove, his main rivals in the fight for Tory, and the policy writers of the BBC and Channel 4, who are now reporting on him).

Shortly after leaving the university, Johnson pointed out The times. There, he learned a valuable lesson: inventing stories is profitable. The newspaper had to send it back because he had invented a dull article by inventing rough quotations and attributing them to an Oxford historian (who turned out to be his own godfather). But instead of truncating his journalistic career, this business is the seed that made him prosper. Almost immediately, he was hired by The daily telegraph, who sent him a correspondent in Brussels between 1989 and 1994.

This position is a bit special. It consists almost exclusively of informing about the EU and therefore has a certain prestige. However, most of the time, the information is boring. So Johnson had a very attractive job but with little public projection. His genius consisted in converting to cover information those that should have appeared on page 20, taking advantage of relatively inconsistent regulations and exaggerating them to present them as senseless attacks on British customs. He added that the EU had weighed "plans to establish a maximum width of 54 millimeters in condoms", which, of course, would limit the best endowed English. He also detected a rule limiting the additives that potato chips packaging could contain and made it a matter of national sovereignty. In 2002, he confessed: "Some of my happiest hours have been spent in a state of semi-existence, composing hateful hymns of hate against the last euroinfamia: the ban on flavored potato chips with shrimp badtail ".

His articles were imaginary bubbles of indignation (shrimp-flavored potatoes were never forbidden), but the hymns of hate were real. The performs Johnson's anti-European journalism was a kind of method of interpretation and required its publishers and readers to voluntarily suspend skepticism.

This raises two important questions about the character. A: Does Johnson believe some of his claims? And do his disciples believe it? The answer is yes to both, but it's like an actor who lives in his role and the audience accepts him consciously to pretend. Johnson's call lies precisely in the creation of a comic figure who eludes the difference between reality and representation.

For Greek philosophers, the Akratia I had something mysterious. Why do people knowingly do the wrong thing? Johnson knows the answer. They do it, at least in England, because complicity is essential to gain a sense of belonging. One has to be "in the garlic", and Johnson has just shown how much some Englishmen are able to go as long as they do not seem to know it. In his clbadic studio Watch English (Looking in English), anthropologist Kate Fox hinted that an essential rule of national discourse is what she calls "the importance of not being serious". "At the most basic level, a standard underlying every conversation in English is the proscription of seriousness." Johnson took full advantage, knowing that millions of compatriots prefer to follow their delusional inventions than to be accused of the height of sin, which takes things too seriously.

"Boris is Boris" (the phrase that has long been used to excuse) is a pose, a twist, a traveling show. In 1968, Stanley, Johnson's father, was fired from his position at the World Bank for submitting a mocking proposal to grant Egypt a $ 100 million loan for the construction of three new pyramids and a sphinx. His son has cultivated a wider audience in England using the idea, half comic and half convincing, that the EU could be an equally absurd undertaking.

During his years in Brussels, Johnson perfected the practice of political journalism (and later of politics itself) as a sketch of Monty Python. Johnson & # 39; s Brussels is a labyrinth of bureaucratic redoubts in which hides a dangerous balloon ministry, another tiny condoms and a third of tasteless potato chips. In this theater of the absurd, the least is whether the stories are true; The important thing is that they are absurd enough to fly over the likelihood radar and reach the pleasant point where pre-existing prejudices are confirmed.

This joke has not only earned him great popularity as a comic anti-politician, but has also allowed him, in the eyes of many of his compatriots, to represent that patriotic treasure that is English eccentricity. The tradition of accepting eccentricity (though, to tell the truth, only that of men of the upper clbad) bears witness to the English love for freedom and individualism. Nothing less than John Stuart Mill in On freedom (1859) badociated eccentricity with "strength of character", but Johnson has managed to turn the tide: it is precisely his weakness of character (chaos, powerlessness, lying) that gives his fans a full patriotic demonstration. of hope that the authentic English spirit has not yet been crushed by the claws of homogenization of the EU.

We must not lose sight of the fact that Johnson has learned a lot from his childhood hero, Winston Churchill. It was not a question of constancy or leadership, but of a conscious political theatricality. "Era," writes Johnson in The Churchill factor, "Eccentric, excessive, affected. He had a special, distinctive and distinctive way of dressing. The use of the term "affected" by Johnson contains a clever perception. Our man is a good connoisseur of the lineage Tory libertine histriones that go from Benjamin Disraeli to Enoch Powell, intellectual father of Brexit, through Churchill. Johnson also has his "special, distinctive and distinctive way of dressing", although it is an antidandi that grows the skin like a seal.

Johnson uses Churchill to, paradoxically, endow his cynicism with a kind of solemnity. In his book, he argues that the great leader "was not what people would consider a man of principle. He was an opportunist who was waiting for the goal to finish the game and win the glory … As for his political career, say, often a fudge party! (…) His enemies have detected in him a titanic egoism, a desire to find any wave, big or small, and surf it end to end until it has dissolved in foam on the beach. (…) In the early years of his career, he was not only considered unreliable, but also conbadly unreliable. "

It's not just Boris who disguises himself as Winston. It also aims to suggest a delusional logic. Churchill was an unprofessional opportunist, a serial trafficker, and an untrustworthy egotist. As a result, only a person with these qualities in abundant doses can become the new Churchill so coveted by conservative England.

The United Kingdom is symptomatic of the fall of the most serious crisis that the United Kingdom has seen since 1940. Tory Be ready to voluntarily suspend your disbelief at the caricature over the pantomime of the historic leader who breathed the country's courage to "resist" the dark hours of war. What's more than now the V of victory is upside down?

What might Johnson's mandate to government look like? Donald Trump is the obvious reference. In June 2018, Johnson said at an in camera meeting that he "admired it more and more," and hinted that, for the United Kingdom, the president of the states United States would be the perfect negotiator with the EU. "It would enter the charge (…). This would cause nervous breakdowns and chaos. (…) Everyone would think that he went crazy, but the truth is that things could be accomplished. For his part, Trump publicly supported Johnson a week before his visit to the UK.

The two are rightly seen as creatures growing up in chaos. And Johnson shares with Trump a childish fascination for gigantic and illusory infrastructure projects. As mayor of London, Johnson left the city to buy an unbuilt airport on a fantastic island (nicknamed by his fans of the "Boris Island" press) and a "garden bridge" on the Thames, whose abandoned project It cost 46 million pounds.

Trump and he are racist, although Johnson's variant is much more malicious and deliberate. In 2002, he wrote that during his visits to the Commonwealth countries, Queen Elizabeth had received greetings from "the bold "waving flags" with "smiles of watermelon", I reproduced (probably consciously) the famous tirade Rivers of blood of Enoch Powell, pronounced 35 years ago, in which the same insulted racist insult was used. The term itself defines racism as an archaic, outmoded and baroque idea. It seems that the epithet is not pronounced by a contemporary English politician, but by the southern beauty of an old novel about plantations

In Seventy-two virgins, the journalist who looks into Barlow's scandals is of Asian descent, and Johnson calls him "The Debbie Gujaratne Plague". He also gave us a Nigerian traffic officer with a comic accent: "The law is the law. (…) I can not hasel the legs ". Unlike Trump's racism, everything here is wrapped in an affected and flirtatious joke. When a group of Serbs badault the Nigerian, Barlow thinks: "A typical scene of our modern multicultural society with its dynamism, a group of asylum seekers fighting with a Nigerian traffic control officer." Johnson takes the privileges of the clown while exercising the power of the politician.

Trump and Johnson are two women in series. According to Sonia Purnell, who worked with him in Brussels and wrote Just Boris: A blonde ambition tale (Only Boris: a story of blonde ambition), once, Johnson told another man that even though he was married, he had to live many adventures because he "literally burst of cum". However, in his shopping – and this explains why his bad life is politically relevant – the only important element was conquest; The consequences mattered little. When her lover Petronella Wyatt aborted, the politician refused to pay the medical bills and the boyfriend of another lover had to bear the hospitalization costs when she gave birth to a baby. [cuya paternidad ha sido atribuida a Johnson en un caso que pasó por los tribunales]. The same thing happens with political power and bad: the conquest of Downing Street number 10 was what Johnson wanted; The consequences of what you do are a very minor problem.

However, in this respect, there are two important differences between Trump and Johnson. The first is that Trump was able to mobilize visceral American nationalism. But Johnson can not express the powerful but nascent English nationalism that Brexit has led, in part because he's not a true nationalist. Born in New York and raised for several years in Brussels, his fantasy world looks much more like a "global UK" than small england imagined by many of its supporters (this division is one of the irresoluble contradictions of Brexit, whose leaders, including Johnson, are globalist while their adherents are English nationalists). In part, it is also explained why Johnson can not part with the UK. Prime Minister insists that the "union [de Gran Bretaña e Irlanda del Norte] That's the first thing, "even though it's clear that the majority of those who voted for the Brexit, as well as the Conservative Party members, would be very happy to see Scotland leave and Northern Ireland. There is no indication that Johnson has any idea of ​​how to channel English nationalism into British patriotism or to give it wide freedom without destroying the United Kingdom.

Secondly, Trump feeds his base by tirelessly repeating the same slogans. It's brutally coherent. Johnson, especially on the issue of Brexit, who monopolizes everything, continues to "hit like a supermarket cart". When he exercised, with disastrous incompetence, the post of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he was part of the government that negotiated the exit agreement with the EU, including the controversial safeguard clause, which should avoid the creation of a "hard border". "Between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In 2018 he resigned and denounced the agreement stating that he would make the European Union our colonial master. In March of this year, he voted in the House of Commons in favor of the agreement, with the safeguard, the colonial masters and all the rest. He then competed with conservative leaders with the promise to break the clause, even though it was a catastrophic Brexit for the brave.

Thus, while Trump's anarchism acquires features of authoritarianism, that of Johnson adopts those of a kind of carefree nihilism. The elusive nature of the clown who has brought him to the doors of power will not help him if he crosses the threshold and must make vital decisions. In the end, Brexit began to go beyond the joke. But what does Johnson expect to find in these waters?

His best joke was not to be. In November 2016, he declared that "Brexit means Brexit and we will make it a titanic success". At this strangely uncritical moment in British history, most of Johnson's supporters know very well that Brexit is the most Titanicand that the elusive actions of the Prime Minister are worthless. But if the ship will sink anyway, why not have a little fun with Boris on the bridge? The idea of ​​Boris imitating Churchill in the approach of the iceberg contains a fatalistic joy at the end of time. When things are too serious to be sober, let the clown out.

Fintan O'Toole Critic and Irish columnist, he won the Orwell Award in 2017. © "The New York Review of Books", 2019.

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