(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Neville [Chamberlain], by his imagination and practical good sense, has saved the world.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Diaries

Phwooarrrr! I mean phwwwwwwwwwooooooarrrrr! It’s only bloody Boris again. He’s only bloody gone and done it! Again! Surely he won’t get out of it this time! Again!

Yes, on the other side of the world, as winter digs in and the shivering Brits approached “Blue Monday” (January 17, said to be the unhappiest day of the year), have-a-go, gotta-love-him British PM Boris Johnson appears to have really really stuffed up this time, in a manner that has at least some of his fellow Tories preparing the chopping block (no tumbril; too leftish, continental).

The Tories are in freefall in the polls, with uninspiring Labour besting them by 10 points. What can the blond bombshite have done?

Had a party, of course. Well, not one party. Several parties. Actually more than a dozen, it would seem, during Britain’s chaotic long lockdown — called late, and squelchingly imposed, even as the hospitals and ICUs were being overrun, the infected reached six figures, and the wholly unnecessary dead reached into the thousands. Because the numbers were so large, so too were the numbers of stories of people dying alone, having their last birthday or Christmas alone.

So when photos of Tories lolling around in the spacious garden behind No. 10 Downing Street surfaced — my, how Tories can loll — none of them social distancing, the numbers well beyond the acceptable, Boris and baby mama Carrie Symonds holding court in cane furniture with their preppy SPADs in attendance.

Then there were stories about end-of-session parties in various government departments, photos of such — a bit more The Office, middle-class types getting squiffy on bubbles — and then, after all the apologies, another party! This one was the goods. This was a No. 10 party, with invitations, instructions to keep shtum about it, bring-your-own-bubbles — and Boris walking into the middle of it, staying 25 minutes and then leaving.

The fury this final round of revelations aroused appears to have ripped apart the final fusion between Boris and the great British public, the red wall of working-class Midlands and northerners who voted him an 80-seat majority in 2019 on the guarantee that he would finally push Brexit through.

The “Boris myth” has always been that he’s a bit of a prole-whisperer, capable of cutting through the class divide. There’s some truth to that, and a lot of right-wing media hype. When the first news of parties broke, it was with video of a practice press conference by No. 10 spokeswoman Allegra Stratton — performed in a ridiculous pseudo White House briefing room Boris ordered up after bingeing on The West Wing — in which she broke up giggling at a question about whether they were doing any work at all. 

She was gone 48 hours later, and that was just about enough — until the next wave of revelations broke. Even the Tories could see then that something had gone errrrrk. The numerous “partygates” have come at a time when the combined effects of COVID-19 and Brexit have come together to create havoc with local industries, supply chains and food and essential costs. Farmers have lost markets, fishing has not reopened, the NHS has not got its 350 million quid a week, and food prices in poorer cities have soared.

And, well, there has been no great Brexit transcendence. After all the palaver leading up to it, Brexit hasn’t changed the nature of anyone’s daily life — except to make it worse. 

There was no shortage of people willing to share the ghastly events in their lives at time — TV interviewers whose adult daughters had died on the day the party was held, a bereaved DUP MP breaking down during question time. When bloody Ulster nationalists are in tears, you have a problem.

Boris responded with his usual judgment. He claimed that he had walked into the party and believed it — crowded with bottles and snacks and British people acting like slags — to be a “work event”. By this point, Tories on and off the record were saying that he could not survive. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer nailed him in question time, the Scottish Tory leader denounced him, and only the even greater problems of Prince Andrew and the Windsors interrupted the pain. 

Boris has survived scrapes like this before — the sum total of all such scrapes is his life — but the obloquies are really being read over the beshagged one this time.

Bluffing his way through Oxford and the Bullingdon, sacked from The Times for making up stories (some of them about fake EU “atrocities” such as the discarding of excessively “bendy” bananas), offering to supply a friend with an address of a journalist the friend wanted to beat up (which didn’t stop the MEAA from inviting Boris as an honoured guest to the Melbourne Writers Festival), absentee editor of The Spectator, absent local MP, wastrel London mayor spinning off expensive failed projects, terrible novelist, the man who wrote a “leave” and “remain” op-ed for the same slot… it goes on and on.

With his literary skills, a sort of charm, and an image cultivated in Britain’s vast middlebrow mediascape, Boris was able to rise to the top on that greatest of British virtues, looking amateurish, while being connected to networks of power. Along the way, he took the “animal spirits” Manchester liberalism of his university years and fused it with the Prometheanism of the UK’s then-futurist Revolutionary Communist Party, which gave him a pitch to the working class. Some of his current troubles are due to the virtual cancellation of much of the “Powerhouse” booster program for the north, now shown to be a con. 

Truth is, Boris is a nihilist. One example suffices. For decades Londoners (and the world) have loved the “Beck” underground map, the revolutionary geometric map of the tube. Felt to be a symbol of London, its unity — and for Boris, a marketing opportunity. Building a ridiculous cable car across the Thames at the east end, Boris paid for it by selling Beck map naming rights for the cable car to Emirates airlines (the famous shot of Boris dangling from a zip line is from the launch of the cable car). Boris later said that he’d sell every slot on the map if he could. He is a whirling dervish of destruction of anything anyone else might care for. 

Now that very nihilism, that inability to think of anyone else from their point of view, might have done for him.

He is being leaked against, almost comically. His plan to sacrifice some lesser figures to protect himself has been leaked — including its name, “Operation Save Big Dog”, which he had approved. The only thing on his side is the firm backing of a section of the Tory party right, the gap until the next election (due in 2024), and his own peerless ability to bluster his way out.

What stands against him is the other side of nothingness. In his rise to the top, he has sought to make his careering career into a virtue, the whole shebang consecrated by his triumphant premiership. Churchill is the model.

But Churchill’s errors were at least grandiose, like Gallipoli, or causing the 1926 general strike. Boris’ errors are returning to his marital home after an afternoon shag, covered by going for a run, and finding paparazzi waiting to film him finding the locks have been changed.

If he is defenestrated in the next few months, he goes from the sublime to the ridiculous; he will be a joke PM, like Douglas Hume or Tony Abbott, his benighted tenure a huge punchline. 

At the end of all this, one question remains: why all the parties? What a hell of a thing to get hung for! A few drinks and party hats? How was it that a group of people who are meant to be tough and disciplined put themselves on film, left a paper trail, at a time when the nation was going through both the real and pantomime collective struggle — evening clapping for the NHS, etc.

The answer has something to do with tension, release etc, but in the UK it’s all about doing what the others can’t do. By coincidence, as Boris has slowly unwound, I’ve been reading the voluminous diaries of Henry “Chips” Channon, the high Tory MP and socialite of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Never a minister, “Chips”, an anglophile Chicagoan and noxious idiot who married into the Guinness fortune, was known as the “lord of hosts”, the perpetual party-haver. Here’s what interesting: as the ’30s slid into World War II, the parties continued; smaller, more ad hoc, but with “excellent” (i.e. black market) food, servants etc. In between, Channon would visit his Southend constituency, and reflect on his voters’ miserable lives, without the slightest trace of sympathy, or any sense he shared any fate with them.

At some point one gets it: even when it wearies them, they keep on partying. Partying is the business of the ruling class, the celebration of their distinction as the ultimate amateurs, and their god-king Boris rising on a champagne tower.

Will he now cash in his chips? Phwoarrrrrrrrrrr.