Boris Johnson and the enemy within

Boris Johnson has published his personal manifesto for Brexit; and, by a curious coincidence, this has happened just days before his boss is due to outline the Government's official manifesto for Brexit.  As his colleagues immediately realised, this is a thinly veiled application for the job of Prime Minister.

Most of the article is dismal guff written on auto-Boris which leaves the reader feeling more stupid at the end for having read it.  It is long on rhetoric about a "glorious future", with more or less vague references to the possibilities of new technology and the like.  It is very short on detail about the issues that actually matter in the current crucial negotiations.  Perhaps Johnson is positioning himself as a visionary statesman; or perhaps he just thinks that his readers are thick (and, given that he writes for the Daily Telegraph, he may not be wrong).  At any rate, it is an unfortunate fact that there is a constituency in this country of people who think that good old Boris with his breezy, feelgood rhetoric is just what we need at the present historical moment.  They are no doubt the same people who think that Britain's place as a mid-ranking power in a dangerous and unstable world can be maintained by nostalgia and force of willpower.

Picking through the unctuous verbiage, there are a few matters of substance to object to in Johnson's job application.  First, there are the outright lies.  The worst of these is this:

Before the referendum we all agreed on what leaving the EU logically must entail: leaving the customs union and the single market, leaving the penumbra of the ECJ; taking back control of borders, cash, laws.

This is patently untrue.  Notoriously, even the Leave side - let alone "we all" - did not have an agreed plan for "what leaving the EU logically must entail".  The Remain campaign pointed this out at the time; and the prospect of a hard Brexit did not solidify in Government circles until last autumn.  In any event, the idea that the 52% were consciously voting for a hard rather than a soft Brexit - or even that most of them understood the distinction - is utterly dishonest.  It is not just wrong; it is not even arguable.  People were not saying to Remain canvassers on the doorstep, "Sorry, mate, we want to leave the penumbra of the ECJ".

Second, Johnson is carving out a position for himself as the candidate of the Right in the coming Tory leadership election.  As has been observed, it is likely that one candidate from the Right will make it through to the final two names on the ballot paper; and it is likely that this person, whoever it is, will go on to be elected by the party members at large (who now, by the way, have an average age of 72).  Accordingly, Johnson makes sure that he works in the usual dismal Thatcherite clichés about "free markets", "a culture that is pro-business and pro-enterprise", and "simplifying regulation, and cutting taxes wherever we can".  Yet this is not just boilerplate Tory neoliberalism.  Theresa May's policy is precisely to emphasise that Brexit will not be used to deregulate the economy - this came through very clearly from the Tory speeches in the recent Commons debates on the Brexit Bill.  May does not want the idea getting about that this will be a Thatcherite Brexit, in part because she happens to come from the paternalistic wing of Toryism, but more importantly because that kind of talk offers the Labour Party an open goal.  Johnson nods to the idea that we are not going to water down European environmental and social protections, but his emphasis is quite different from his boss's.

Finally, there is the genuinely disturbing part.  Johnson is attempting to ride the unruly tiger of British nationalism.

There are countries in the world in which opposition to Government policy is characterised as disloyalty to the nation.  Britain is, by and large, not one of them.  Not since Margaret Thatcher called striking workers "the enemy within" has this tactic been used in the political mainstream.  Yet there is a perceptible and disturbing trend towards labelling people who support the EU - or even just people who point out real problems in our approach to the current negotiations - as a treacherous fifth column.  Andrea Leadsom infamously called on the media to be "a bit patriotic" in their Brexit coverage (although Leadsom is probably mad enough to have genuinely misunderstood the role of the media in a free society).  The leading Tory activitst Tim Montgomerie has accused the BBC of broadcasting "propaganda for France" for no other reason than it has reported on the phenomenon - which is all too real - of the Macron government attempting to poach City businesses and jobs.

Jolly old Bozza has evidently decided to join this unlovely tendency.  He explicitly frames Remainers in general and Labour in particular as being not merely wrong but anti-British.  The piece begins: "My friends, I must report that there are at least some people who are woefully underestimating this country."  He goes on to accuse Labour of courting "national humiliation" and showing "a dismal lack of confidence in this country".  He ends with a peroration directed at "all those who write off this country, who think we don’t have it in us, who think that we lack the nerve and the confidence to tackle the task ahead".  He doesn't quite call them cucks, but the rhetoric has a worryingly Bannonite feel to it.

He also worries about young people developing an emotional loyalty to Europe.  This inverts the usual nationalist argument against the EU (which, rather inconsistently, Johnson uses elsewhere in his piece): that it represents an artificial attempt to impose a European identity which does not truly exist.  Johnson's fear is that it is starting to exist - and he wants to use Government policy to stamp it out:

I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked to their faces, and I am troubled with the thought that people are beginning to have genuinely split allegiances.
And when people say that they feel they have more in common with others in Europe than with people who voted Leave I want to say, but that is part of the reason why people voted Leave.
You don’t have to be some tub-thumping nationalist to worry that a transnational sense of allegiance can weaken the ties between us; and you don’t have to be an out and out nationalist to feel an immense pride in this country, and what it can do.

The idea seems to be that each individual has a fixed and finite quantity of loyalty, and that loyalty to a European identity can only come at the expense of allegiance to Britain.  This is such a transparently wrong idea that it needs no refutation.  I really doubt that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson - a man with Turkish, French and German blood, who was a US citizen until earlier this year - really believes such McCarthyite bilge.  But he clearly does know what excites the right wing of the Conservative Party.  All politics involves a certain amount of opportunism, but in this case Johnson has gone too far; disgust is really the only appropriate emotion.  The man is cynically trying to use, to further his own career, the fears and prejudices of people who are stupider and more bigoted than him.

There is still a potential good scenario for a Johnson premiership.  The sinister tub-thumping is plainly an attempt at political posturing, and Johnson is arguably the only Tory PM who is maintaining enough Leave credit at this point to deliver a soft Brexit (which is plausibly what he has really wanted all along).  But this isn't the only possibility.  It is equally possible that he will end up realising that it isn't he who is using the nationalist Right for his own ends, but rather the other way around.