Johnson at 10 (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

Boris Johnson was Britain’s most iconoclastic and outlandish Prime Minister since David Lloyd George a hundred years before. Johnson saw the country through one of the most historic resets in Britain’s relationship with continental Europe, the worst health epidemic and the severest challenge to Northern Ireland’s continuation in the United Kingdom since Lloyd George was at No. 10. Both succeeded failing Prime Ministers of the same party with one great objective to fulfil. Having achieved that, both won landslides in the month of December after leading unstable parliamentary majorities. Both saw themselves akin to the US President, with a direct mandate from the people, and had little love for their party or Parliament. Both were captivated by international affairs abroad and building infrastructure at home. Both tried to use the power of the state to spread opportunity more equally across the country, the attempts of both to ‘level up’ faltering. The vaulting ambitions of both were thwarted by lack of money, with cost of living crises overshadowing their end. Russia dominated their latter premierships. Both fell because they lost trust and credibility with the public, amid accusations that they had tarnished the office and public life.

Lloyd George nearly died of the Spanish flu in September 1918; Johnson came equally close to death from Covid in April 2020 at the very same age, fifty-five. Both men cast caution aside to travel to see war zones at first hand: Lloyd George to the Western Front, Johnson to Ukraine.

Both fell in similar ways, having lost the trust of the parliamentary Conservative Party. While the Cabinet remained mostly loyal to both, it was the desertion of junior ministers that built momentum, with the ultimate fall in both cases triggered by the decisive actions of key figures – in Lloyd George’s case, the former Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law; in Johnson’s, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak.

Their characters were strikingly similar too. They lit up the room, were beguiling orators and giants among their peers. They injected raw adrenalin into the political system and, for a while, made the weather. Lloyd George’s character was captured by his friend the newspaper owner Lord Riddell, but he could have been talking about Johnson:

They shared a willingness to take enormous risks with the constitution, as with their casual relationship with the truth and malleable principles. Their ferocious sexual and financial appetites led them into deep and repetitive trouble. Both thought nothing of using powers of patronage to make outrageous appointments which were nakedly to their own benefit. Both indeed rather enjoyed being outrageous.

Johnson wrote a book about Winston Churchill. But it was Lloyd George who he resembled far more. The title of Lloyd George’s book, Where Are We Going?, could have been Johnson’s leitmotif.

The comparisons are not endless; as with mere mortals, no two premiers are exactly alike. Lloyd George was much better at appointing close advisers, choosing Maurice Hankey as his Cabinet Secretary, Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian) as his private secretary and W. G. S. Adams as his chief aide. A Prime Minister is only as good as their personal team: Lloyd George knew that, Johnson didn’t. Lloyd George created the Cabinet Office and post of Cabinet Secretary; Johnson all but eviscerated it and his Cabinet Secretaries. Lloyd George chose a broad-based, accomplished Cabinet and let them achieve extraordinary success; Johnson went narrow and weak, and never trusted or used them. Lloyd George was an outsider desperate to be regarded as an insider; Johnson, an insider wanting to be seen as an outsider. Above all, Lloyd George held to a seriousness in his objectives, a trait absent in Johnson.

The similarities, though, provide a helpful framing for the examination of power and success in British politics. Why did Lloyd George achieve more in his premiership? How did Johnson squander a great landslide election victory within little more than two years? Was his premiership destined to splatter to an early end overtaken by events? These are the questions we address in this book.

Johnson was an unusual leader, governing at an extraordinary time in British history. Unlike other Prime Ministers, he was not underpinned by religious faith or ideology or a fixed set of party beliefs. Nor was his premiership bolstered by strong, loyal relationships with colleagues in Cabinet throughout his time in No. 10. A close relationship with their spouse has supported every great Prime Minister in history; Johnson’s wife Carrie was a source of both great joy and great conflict for him. Johnson was the most isolated premier for fifty years since Ted Heath, the Prime Minister who took Britain into the EU; nor did Johnson have close relationships with the leaders of France, Germany or the United States, which have affirmed other PMs. Though constantly surrounded by people, he remained a deeply lonely figure: seeking affection yet despising his own vulnerabilities, demanding complete trust from others yet drawing them into his web, leaving many feeling compromised and used.

He was no ordinary Prime Minister.

Prime Ministers generally have one defining event landing on their time in office. Johnson had three: resolving Brexit, the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine. He governed at a time when the Conservative Party lost its way, the public discourse was in turmoil over culture wars, when Britain’s place in the world was insecure, and the cohesion of the United Kingdom was in doubt.

His was no ordinary premiership.

Johnson tried to bounce the monarchy, had his actions judged unlawful by the Supreme Court and knowingly put forward proposals to break international law. He was the first Prime Minister to have been found by the police to have broken the law. Johnson was not alone in his chaos: had he lost the 2019 general election, Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister would have been differently destabilizing and unconventional. Abroad, the global figure to which Johnson had been compared the most, US President Trump, denied the legitimacy of the electoral process and the constitution for the first time since 1787.

These were no ordinary times.

The Johnson premiership poses a challenge to contemporary historians. Even more so than his immediate predecessors, many decisions around which history turned with this anarchic Prime Minister did not take place in minuted meetings or round the Cabinet table, but through WhatsApp messages and private discussions. Where memories of crucial witnesses are still fresh and moments remembered in context, contemporary history has a particular role to provide a meaningful contribution.

Contemporary history is important so we can learn from the recent past while memories are fresh, recapture the truth of events and hold governments to account. This book is in part a cautionary tale which highlights individual and institutional failure. Our hope – naïve maybe – is that the conclusions within might be drawn on to prevent them from recurring.

The course of a premiership is always skewed by the noisy and powerful when they are in office, who further compound the distortion by publishing their memoirs or diaries in which their own role is magnified and personalized. This book draws rather from the testimony of over 200 witnesses, the great majority of whom are silent, merely referenced as ‘an official’ or ‘an aide’. Few, if any, will write their memoirs or publish their diaries. Sometimes we refer to interviewees by name, but for serving officials, by far the greatest majority, going on the record is not an option. The occasion on which we may depart from verbatim accuracy is in the quotations liberally deployed in the text emphasizing how much of importance to this administration took place outside recorded meetings. The quotations, which were always related to us by interviewees, aim nevertheless to capture the spirit of the conversations. As always with historians, we are only as accurate as our sources. To enhance the book’s accuracy and fairness, we have sent individual sections to witnesses who saw the particular stories at close hand.

We have sought to break new ground. Where others have written books, such as about the crises and scandals that led to Johnson’s resignation, or the politics and personalities of Brexit, we avoid covering these areas in detail. We have equally weighted the book towards the accounts we have been told afresh in interviews or have otherwise discovered for ourselves, rather than recounting secondary sources. For the purpose of clarity where surnames overlap, just three...