Boris Johnson: goodbye, and good riddance

Last weekend, the former prime minister Boris Johnson stepped down from parliament in anticipation of a committee report that was expected to find that he had misled parliament over his activities during the Covid lockdowns (in other words, holding parties at 10 Downing Street while everyone else was still under restriction and unable to meet friends or even hold things like funerals) in 2020 and 2021. Another MP also stepped down, and Johnson’s ally Nadine Dorries, the MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, claimed she was stepping down but did not, and is seeking to mount some kind of investigation as to why she did not get a seat in the Lords as Johnson had intended in his list of resignation honours, parts of which were blocked as inappropriate. He has now secured another columnist’s job with the Daily Mail, also in breach of ministerial rules that state that he must consult with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) for two years after leaving a ministerial job.

ACOBA cannot prosecute Johnson or do anything more than issue a rebuke, but it’s one final act of contempt for parliamentary rules (which are there for good reason) and indeed the rules everyone else has to live by. Johnson was facing a 90-day suspension from the Commons, but this would not have prevented him defending his seat at the next general election, unless his local party decided to stand someone else; however, his seat, which remained blue (Tory) through the New Labour years, is increasingly marginal and it is feared (or hoped) that it will be lost to Labour next year. Other Tory MPs have announced that they will be standing down, including the Telford MP Lucy Allan who yesterday tweeted, “today’s Conservative Party is just not interested in seats like Telford anymore”. Johnson’s fans in the party are screaming betrayal; they insist that their man got them an 80-seat majority and delivered Brexit and they believe he is the election winner. The other day, a fool from the Darlington Young Conservatives told a BBC presenter, unchallenged, that Johnson was an honest man; in fact, he lost jobs in the media for things like making up quotes. Only last week, in his post-resignation letter, he told us he had been an MP since 2001. This is a lie. He has had two separate periods in parliament, one from 2001 to 2008 (for Henley) and the second from 2015 to 2023 (for Uxbridge). In between, he was mayor of London. He just cannot help himself.

My suspicion is that the Tories know that he is no longer an electoral asset. He won a single general election, where the major opponent was Jeremy Corbyn, whose party was bitterly divided, and where the issue was Brexit which had been hanging over the country for three and a half years. Corbyn is now an independent back-bench MP and Brexit is in the past, and we are dealing with the consequences, which the Tories like to pretend are anything but, and anyone’s fault but theirs. Covid was not yet a thing, as far as we were aware, in December 2019; there would be no signs of the cost of living crisis for nearly two years; the river pollution scandal had also not happened, which will start to matter even more politically as people unable or unwilling to travel to the Continent because of Brexit bureaucracy find they cannot swim in the sea at British coastal resorts because of pollution. In the forthcoming general election, the Tories will be facing a wholly different set of issues to 2019 and cannot fall back on discontent over Eastern European migrant labour and myths about the EU anymore; they also face a credible Labour leader for the first time since at least 2015 while people no longer trust them.

While it may be easy for me to say as someone who did not lose any family to Covid (so I wasn’t one of the people who could not attend a family funeral, or be with a dying relative, or whatever), I feel that this offending is by far not his worst. Johnson was editor of the Spectator in the 2000s and much of my content back then consisted of rebutting the inflammatory nonsense he filled his pages with, often containing demonstrable lies and geographical howlers that played on his overseas readers’ ignorance. In response to riots across northern Europe triggered by police brutality, he published a front page labelled “Eurabian Nightmare”, with a crescent overlaid across the continent with burning “flash points” and a star on London. Another article he published claimed that Muslims “sacralised whole neighbourhoods by means of marches and processions”, which have no such purpose; they are sometimes political and sometimes celebrations such as of the Prophet’s (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) birth, which is not even a mandatory part of Islam unlike the two Eids. There were pages and pages of this kind of drivel, some of it by Johnson himself and by Mark Steyn and a couple of others, but much of it by Patrick Sookhdeo, touted as a ‘scholar’ on Islam, whose profile dropped somewhat after he was convicted of a sexual assault in 2015. When I heard the claim that Boris Johnson was not serious about his racism (in contrast to Jeremy Corbyn) in the 2019 election campaign, I could not believe what I was hearing.

I watched with horror as this man, already a Tory MP by the time of his disgraceful Spectator front pages, was given shadow cabinet roles by David Cameron and then allowed to run for mayor of London. I should add that he won largely because the Labour mayor, Ken Livingstone, had become unpopular partly because of his extension of the Congestion Charge to residential areas of west London; he had certainly got arrogant after a fairly successful first term. To be fair, neither his mayoralty nor his term as PM were as disastrous as I had anticipated (there could have been no good Brexit that satisfied demands for a withdrawal from “free movement”), but he was still an unfit person to hold ministerial office, let alone be PM. He is a bigot on many fronts, a liar, an unserious man who thought the rules that govern everyone else do not affect him because of his wealth, and this aspect of his character is what has, for now at least, ended his political career. I am glad he is gone, but perhaps political parties should think more carefully before promoting open racists and serial liars to high office in the future.

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