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Bobby McDonagh: Boris Johnson is like a hamster on a roulette wheel

Making sense of the UK prime minister is an impossible task – but we must try

Two years after Boris Johnson became prime minister of the UK, on July 24th, 2019, many are still trying to work out what makes him tick. The UK’s international partners, including Ireland, have a particular need to understand, insofar as possible, his underlying motivation and objectives.

It is no easy task. Alongside Johnson’s straightforward domestic political manoeuvring, there is a high degree of ambiguity and above all unpredictability on substantive policy issues. It is hard to detect a coherent strategy or set of principles. Frequent U-turns are now unsettling even some Conservative MPs. Dominic Cummings has compared his former boss to a shopping trolley careering from one side of the aisle to the other. While Cummings is arguably about as convincing a witness as Richard Nixon claiming he was not a crook, this particular simile has a certain ring of truth. Johnson reportedly told Cummings, when they were discussing the response to a possible second wave of Covid, that his own heart was “with bonkers”. The challenge is sometimes to make coherent sense of an approach hardwired with unpredictability.

I once rented an apartment in a small hill town in Tuscany. Unfortunately, the planned week of family peace and quiet coincided with the town’s annual medieval festival. Among several fairground stalls in the piazza was one involving a live hamster. The hamster was placed under a cage in the middle of a circular table, the circumference of which was divided into numbered sections. The public would place bets on the various numbers. As the table was then spun around like a roulette wheel, the cage above the hamster was lifted. The bewildered hamster would hesitate for a moment before beetling across to one of the numbered sections, thus determining the winner of the game.

Patrician nostrils

Johnson can perhaps be understood as a hamster on a political roulette wheel, charming but unpredictable. Each time the cage goes up, he is faced with political choices. The patrician nostrils quiver. The options are assessed for a whiff of political advantage. Observers – including the British public, the nations of the UK and Britain’s friends abroad – watch on nervously. Then, relying on instinct rather than objective interests, the hamster scampers in his chosen political direction.

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The solution to the conundrum of what motivates Johnson may lie in understanding what shapes that instinct. National interest is usually the best guide to understanding a government’s actions. However, as the Brexit process has made clear, national interest has at best been secondary in Johnson’s thinking. Likewise, his unnecessarily hard Brexit and his initial “nod and wink” to those booing the English football team suggest that uniting the country does not top his agenda either.

What then, more than two years in Downing Street, have been the factors most significantly influencing Johnson’s instincts? Three spring to mind.

First there is his determination to hold together the coalition of voters, representing less than 44 per cent of the popular vote, that delivered him the 2019 general election. Many of his instincts seem to reflect that fundamental aim, including his vague objective of “levelling up” society; the narrow and eccentric definition of sovereignty; the celebration of Englishness at the expense of Britishness; a Hungarian-style hostility to so-called elites, including the courts and parts of the media; and the premature opening-up from Covid lockdown under the rousing but meaningless “Freedom Day” moniker.

Confronting the EU

Second, with similar electoral calculations in mind, he sees the attraction of being seen to stand up to the EU, and of portraying it as hostile, even if it means distancing the UK from its closest neighbours and from any reasonable interpretation of a Northern Ireland protocol largely shaped by Johnson himself.

Third, he enjoys waving his chosen flag of “Global Britain”, including by seeking to replicate trade deals that the UK already benefited from through its EU membership and presenting those deals as a post-Brexit dividend. The trumpeting of “Global Britain” is, of course, not helped by radical cuts in foreign aid or by an insular approach to the UK’s neighbourhood, but the consequence of impulsiveness is never coherence.

In the international context, however, Johnson does instinctively understand one thing: the importance of his relationship with the Biden administration. Without that, the goose of “Global Britain” is well and truly cooked. Hence the continued importance of Biden’s unprecedentedly strong, and recently repeated, stance on the Northern Ireland protocol, which reflects his administration’s deep understanding of and commitment to the Belfast Agreement and to the rule of law.

Recently released British state papers quote the British ambassador in Dublin in 1997 as reporting, somewhat loftily, that “working with the Irish is never easy”. I imagine many embassies in London are expressing similar sentiments these days as they seek to decode the thought processes in No 10.

Bobby McDonagh is a former ambassador to London, Rome and Brussels