Nothing I write in this article will change your view of Boris Johnson. You already know what you think of him, and are inclined, quite understandably, to prefer your opinion to anything which may be urged here.
A conspicuous feature of the present argument about him is the tendency of commentators (myself included) to express, as forcefully as they can, whatever view they already took of Johnson.
If they considered him the greatest scoundrel ever to sully the pure waters of public life, who must be cast into outer darkness, recent events are taken as confirmation that they were right all along.
A fine example of the genre was produced earlier this week by the admirable Rafael Behr in The Guardian, who wondered what “sickness in British politics produced the hallucination of merit in Johnson’s candidacy for No 10?”
A mob has formed, consisting of people who are, and know themselves to be, serious and upright citizens. They regard it as their duty to drum Johnson the frivolous reprobate out of politics.
This is not a new phenomenon. Here is Macaulay, writing in 1831:
“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
Macaulay had in mind the hounding of Byron, who had behaved no worse than any number of other men, but became the target of outraged virtue.
One sees, well before Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the dawning of what came to be called Victorian morality, with its much stricter and more middle-class notions of what constituted respectable behaviour. Dr Arnold began reforming Rugby School in 1828.
Today too, we see the pendulum swinging in the direction of greater respectability. A kind of reformation in progress.
Sexual behaviour which until a few years ago was permissible can now wreck a career with savage abruptness.
“And a good thing too,” the Puritans retort, and sometimes they are right, but their insistence on perfect obedience to the rules leaves no room for mercy, tolerance, a second chance.
The Puritan assumption is that anyone who breaks the rules must be punished. Only then will those of us who take the trouble to obey the rules be vindicated. We the righteous will set the standard for everyone else.
Who could be more offensive to this way of thinking than Johnson? He is a living affront to virtue, a known breaker of rules who has again and again got away with it, indeed has prospered by flouting convention.
The man has had the effrontery to win the votes of people who admired his audacity, loved the way he teased the prigs, and felt an affinity with him because he did not pretend to be a saint.
During lockdown he went too far, broke the rules he himself had set, and made a complete hash of explaining himself. Just under a year ago, his colleagues lost confidence in him, and refused to serve under him, so out he went.
But one of the problems with the Puritans is that they too do not know when to stop. They were unsatisfied with seeing Johnson drummed out of office, and wanted him drummed out of Parliament too.
For had he not broken the rules? Yes, one replies, he had broken the rules, and had paid a swift and heavy penalty for doing so, which will act for generations to come as a warning to Prime Ministers not to behave as he did when he wrongly assured the House that all rules had been followed in No 10 during the pandemic.
To his critics, the idea that he had now suffered enough was mere weakness. If such an indulgent view were to be taken, the country would be run by reprobates. Puritan after Puritan declared that the country must be governed by serious people like themselves, who never smile and never tell jokes.
The Puritans loathe the theatre of politics, and yearn to shut it down. For them, life is real and life is earnest, and theirs is the only acceptable morality. They are the just, the elect, and no one who does not come up to their irreproachable standards should be allowed to play any part in public life.
This notion of respect for the rules naturally appeals to public-spirited civil servants who are not, for the most part, Puritans, but have devoted their professional lives to upholding the laws, rules and conventions which constrain what ministers and officials can do.
While I was writing this piece, my eye was caught by an admirably clear piece by Sir Jonathan Jones, former Head of the Government Legal Service, published yesterday by Prospect, in which he explains why the Privileges Committee report into Johnson’s behaviour was so damning.
There is a class of senior officials who were outraged by the behaviour of the Johnson Government, some of whom, like Sir Jonathan, actually resigned in protest. They bring backbone and erudition to the fulminations of the Puritans.
But the cure for political ills is more often to be found in politics than in regulation. The Commons, and within the Commons the Conservative Party, are extraordinarily sensitive to changes in public opinion.
Hence the defenestration of Johnson by Tory MPs. Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer now compete to see which of them can prove himself the more virtuous, in the sense of more completely compliant with the rules.
The pious belief that political behaviour can be reduced to a set of written codes, administered by the impartial guardians of those codes, is hardly challenged.
But in politics, the great and difficult questions are generally matters of endless debate, dispute and sometimes brutal judgement. Do we uphold the United Kingdom, or should we break it up? What relations should we have with our European neighbours? How do we reconcile order and freedom? What measure of equality do we wish to attain? How many refugees should we welcome? How do we prosper?
And what sort of people do we want to go into politics? In 2004, when I announced to an at first enthusiastic but then alarmed Johnson that I was writing his life, he burst out into a chunk of Milton:
Alas! what boots it with incessant careTo tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade,And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?Were it not better done, as others use,To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,Or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair?Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise(That last infirmity of noble mind)To scorn delights and live laborious days;But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,And think to burst out into sudden blaze,Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,And slits the thin-spun life.
Fame is the spur that drives gifted people into politics, most of whom, after scorning delights and living laborious days, find their political life slit by “the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears”.
This row is not just about one recently deposed Prime Minister. It is about how wide or narrow we wish our political class to be.
Could someone as audacious, cavalier and irreverent as Johnson still enter politics, or have we decided we wish it to become the exclusive preserve of the dull, the prudent and the reputable?