“I’m dead behind these eyes. I’m dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there”
— Archie Rice, John Osborne’s The Entertainer, 1957
What happens if you put an entertainer into political office? Politics, after all, is famously showbusiness for ugly people.
Ronald Reagan never stopped being a performer, transforming effortlessly from left-wing actor to safe wartime Hollywood star to conservative corporate shill to governor and then, in his greatest performance other than in The Killers, president for corporate America and the military-industrial complex.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, literally actor-turned-politician, cannily co-opted his acting and presentational instincts into a legitimate political wartime leadership style. Donald Trump, the demon spawn of the satanic (and not in a good way) genre of reality television, exploited his showbusiness skills in service of a nihilistic agenda of destruction and rage.
And then there’s Boris Johnson, who has never been anything more than an entertainer. A serial fabulist in life, his “journalism” was a litany of invented stories, his “literature” a glib facsimile of popular history and biography, and his carefully honed television brand that of a self-deprecating, bumbling, classically educated clown — a stupid person’s idea of a smart person — that he rode all the way to No. 10. Johnson has always been about entertainment, not leadership — thus his until recently successful insistence that he never be subjected to the same standards around truth and competence that other politicians are. He’s just pretending to be PM — you’re not taking him seriously, surely?
Like Osborne’s Archie Rice, that second-rate vaudevillian symbol of British post-imperial decline, there’s nothing behind the eyes of Johnson. No substance, no agenda, no goals. On this he’s closer to Scott Morrison, another leader from the entertainment industry (marketing — aka show business for sociologists), than Donald Trump. Trump incarnates a destructive white male rage against the fact that it’s no longer 1861. Johnson incarnates a chap who thinks it’d be a jolly wheeze to be Prime Minister as long as it doesn’t stop him from writing his middlebrow White Man’s Guide to England books (as Dominic Cummings revealed, Johnson complained about having to do his job, like visiting flood victims, when he just wanted to sit at No. 10 writing his Shakespeare book).
This makes the urgings by right-wing UK media outlets to “let Boris be Boris” — which have cropped up routinely during various crises in his prime ministership — particularly silly. There is no inner Boris being stifled by bureaucrats/advisers/the Tory party, because there is no inner Boris. What you see is all you’re ever going to get.
As Australians discovered with Morrison, entertainers make poor leaders. The lack of substance and the obsession with image leads to governing by announcement and media release, while the actual skills required to govern competently are left to wither. And the lack of substance leads to an inability to understand what is genuinely important. The spark for the latest crisis to beset Johnson — the resignations of his chancellor and health minister, along with a slew of parliamentary secretaries and party officials — lies in his mishandling of the scandal of his now-former deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, who is accused by a number of men of being a long-term serial sexual harasser and predator.
Johnson insisted he knew nothing about allegations against Pincher, only for the former head of the Foreign Office to emerge and explain that Johnson was personally briefed about Pincher’s assaults while in the Foreign Office. Just as inevitably, Johnson is now said to have referred to Pincher with the phrase “Pincher by name, pincher by nature.”
Johnson’s scandals are now ossifying into ritual: the initial insistence of innocence, the exposure of the lie, the attempts to explain away the lie, the revelation of some grubby or glib dismissal of the issue by a man unable to determine whether writing his lightweight addition to the Shakespeare library or visiting flood victims is more important.
With a solid chunk of his backbench having already pushed for his departure, and a continuing stream of ministerial defections, it’s clear even his own party understands that Johnson is an agenda-less disaster who will drag the party to defeat in 2024. A man who is dead behind the eyes will soon be dead politically. Whether the era of the entertainer is over is another matter, however.
Bernard the worst thing is everyone knew.
He had already been sacked twice for lying and making things up BEFORE he became Prime Minister.
Trump bragged about groping women and was THEN elected president.
Morrison was sacked from Tourism Australia and THEN became PM.
The parallels with Trump and Morrison are amazing.
In all three cases the issue is not why they are dishonest, imoral reprobates but that everyone knew that….and voted for them anyway.
“Everyone” didn’t know. Only Crikey readers and their ilk take any interest. Many totally ignore politics.
Fair point. I’m in my bubble again.
“… it’s clear even his own party understands that Johnson is an agenda-less disaster who will drag the party to defeat in 2024.”
There may be more Tories than before who have come around to seeing Johnson as a liability for the party, but it’s far from clear that is the view of the party. Many of them still cling to the belief that enough of the public loves Johnson – he makes them laugh! – and they also cannot think of anyone who do a better job. Which is extraordinary, and really damning.
Perhaps the most depressing analysis of the current Tory party I have seen was in The Guardian on 6th June, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but Tory MPs have a new survival strategy: ‘Boris? Who’s Boris?’ ” by a ‘Secret Tory staffer’. The article describes a solid block of backbench Tory MPs who entered parliament at the last election from previously Labour constituencies. They are uniformly dim-witted, selfish and greedy. They can hardly believe their luck at finding their snouts in the trough. They just want to carry on collecting their salaries for as along as possible. They ascribe their good fortune entirely to Johnson and they will cling on to him no matter what. They do not care how bad it gets and what damage is done to their party and their country, anything else is worse. There are also various senior Tories equally committed to Johnson because they know full well they have no talent and no other support, they only have their positions due to his patronage and they will be finished the day he goes.
Removing Johnson will not solve any of the UK’s current problems, even if it might be a start. He is only a symptom of a far greater sickness.
I’ve never been able to understand why so many people will vote for intellectual and moral lightweights.
Yes, me neither, because basically the people who vote for them are voting against their own interests, usually.
People lash out when they’re angry, and they don’t think. It’s why Trump got elected by people who had lost homes and jobs, despite him being exactly the kind of person who had profited from their misery.
I guess they’re bamboozled by those two words “tax cuts” when Blind Freddy could see that as average wage earners they’d just amount to a cappuccino a week.
And they didn’t think about how many people’s lives he had destroyed with his greed.
Think of it like this “When an alleged pedophile isn’t speaking to the president of the US, there is something really wrong with the president (now former)”, don’t you think?
Possibly because the lightweights are no challenge to their own intellectual and moral shortcomings. All three of these, plus Tony Abbott among others, give their supporters the excuse to be their worst selves.
“You have the right to be a bigot” was a big hint, I thought.
Bookshelves?
Eton+Oxbridge may form part of the answer.
All Male private schools in Australia?
Places can be obtained by influence rather than results in both places.
Boris is reputedly as thick as a couple of short planks (friend’s gossip).
A triumph of hope over experience?
…. “Someone to blame” – for when their own lack of (too hard) research comes home to roost.
Look how long Howard lasted (when he/they should have been a one-termer :- if only Beazley/Labor had been able to get a uniform swing in the ’98 “GST referendum” election?) – and what they eventually did to him when they woke up to how wrong they’d been for too many elections.
But by then the damage had been done – self-inflicted, by ‘enough’ of the electorate
If you want to see what a pathetic fool Howard was you need to hear his appearance on Jack Davey Quiz Show in 1955. To say the least he was beyond ignorant. Unbelievable that a man with such little talent made it to be PM at all. https://australianpolitics.com/2002/06/09/john-howard-jack-davey-quiz.html
I beg to differ. He had an extraordinary talent for lying, racism, rorting and pork barrelling.
Yes, he’d give the proverbial dunny rat a run for his money in the cunningness stakes. I’m reminded of a letters exchange in the local Murdoch rag: First letter expresses outrage at the moniker ‘little Johnnie Howard’ for insulting someone because of their physical stature. The reply writes something along the lines of ‘but we’re not commenting on his physical height, we’re commenting on his vision, compassion and integrity’.
Lest We Forget he also had the cognomen… The Lying Rodent…bestowed upon him by Senator George Brandish a Liberal Senator for QLD.
John Howard had a public servant willing to lie, regarding “the children overboard” saga. Then the lying little rodent (Peter Costello’s description”) got sneaky and meaner and trickier.
Most Australians should hang their heads in shame.
actually children overboard was correct but the evidence was hidden by the navy so they wouldn’t be dragged into the politics of it- there is a video it hasn’t been destroyed
Curious assertion lacking any evidence. Am sorry to have to spell it out but I for one don’t believe this.
The Lying Roden was bestowed upon him by Senator George Brandish a Liberal Senator for QLD.
Because most Voters follow the herd… I mean Media.
Because most people don’t follow politics and they always excuse “the charming, bumbling fool”, until it becomes obvious that it is a ploy rather than a sad state.
There’s an odd disconnect there isn’t there?
As if “Voting is something we have to do so I might as well just do it and get it out of the way. Nothing I do will make a difference. Like going to the crapper. Another ‘bodily function'”? Doesn’t take much thought or research, go with your gut feeling.
As if “government doesn’t have anything to do with me” – until it does.
That no matter who they vote for – they’re going to get self-serving crooks – so why change their monochrome voting habits. If ‘they all do it’, why bother researching that “fact” and challenge a life-time voting habit?
Among that barnacle voting colony there seems to be a mind-set of “Why disrupt a government that doesn’t work – by cutting short their reign – by voting against them to get rid of them – to disrupt their lives, like they do everyone else’s – to see what another mob might do…. I’ll vote for them again. This time they might get something right”?
.. God help the world if the mob they’d spent all their lives voting against, could get the opportunity to show that they could do a better job than the mob they’d voted for and supported for all that time.
“What if I’ve been wrong for so long?” seems too scary to contemplate and so doesn’t register.
Great article Bernard! I especially enjoyed your description of Boris: “a stupid person’s idea of a smart person”. Funny how an upper class buffoon can get away with so much more than a lower class idiot.
I loved the comparisons with Morrison, at least we have pulled down that circus tent.
Unfortunately he and most of his prayer group are still in parliament, ready to destroy the last of what was in name only the Liberal Party.
Yes and they are at it again behaving like the Early Christian Church wherein those Fathers of the Church, Eusebius, Clement , Jerome, John Chrysostom, had no compunction concerning lies and were all adept at justifying deceit/lies for the good of the poor sinner.
Smirko et al. obviously believe in such, as it will set the people of Australia on the path of righteousness of the Lying Nasty Party.
As John Chrysostom, he of the Golden Mouth, given the name as he was so eloquent in his preaching. is also credited in leading the mob which carried out the second and final destruction of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,
“…For great is the value of deceit, provided it be not introduced with a mischievous intention. In fact action of this kind ought not to be called deceit, but rather a kind of good management, cleverness and skill, capable of finding out ways where resources fail, and making up for the defects of the mind … “
“…And often it is necessary to deceive, and to do the greatest benefits by means of this device, whereas he who has gone by a straight course has done great mischief to the person whom he has not deceived…”
Chrysostom, Treatise On The Priesthood, Book 1.
So when we think of Spin Doctors let us recall those early ones they who set the standard, The Doctors of the Church
I’d regard that as a positive.
The aptly described “stupid person’s idea of a smart person” has been described by Greg Sheridan as a genius. Even today in the Oz Sheridan laments his demise as tragic.
So funny. Even bad entertainers can raise a sniggle at career end. Not laughing with but at…
The Tory Party like our Coalition is bereft of talent. Think Dutton, Morrison, Abbott, Nelson, Downer, the two silly Billys McMahon and Snedden. In the corporate world they would all be out the door very quickly.