Fintan O’Toole: Boris Johnson has stopped being funny

As Winston Churchill did not say, never in the field of human conflict has so much harm been done to so many by a mere chancer. Never has a great democracy's fate hung on so fatuous a figure.

Boris Johnson is not fundamentally malign. And he is certainly no mastermind, evil or otherwise. He is just deeply unserious, a manchild whose public life has been no more continent than his private life. He acts on impulse, pursuing his own pleasures and ambitions. He understands the world as a kid understands a sweetshop – a store of possibilities for immediate self-gratification.

And yet, future historians may have to deal with this man of no consequence as the most consequential figure in early 21st-century British politics.

The next few weeks, leading up to the Tory party conference at the end of September, may well decide Johnson's place in history. If Theresa May does find the courage to denounce him for what he is – a narcissist loyal only to his own immediate desires – he could destroy not only her premiership but the British state as we know it.

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To understand the surreal nature of Boris Johnson’s part in Britain’s existential dilemma, it is necessary to go back to February 2016 and the phone call that may have shaped the country’s future for decades to come.

Johnson phoned David Cameron to tell him of the decision he was about to announce: that he was backing the Leave side in the referendum campaign then getting under way. Johnson's move was the single most decisive factor in the outcome of the vote in the referendum four months later.

He was at the time the most popular politician in England. Detailed studies have shown that there was an almost direct correlation between liking Boris and voting Leave; for those at top end of the Boris likability scale, people who gave him a ranking of “10 out of 10” in polls, the probability of a Leave vote was fully 93 per cent.

Almost certainly if Johnson had opted for Remain (and he had drafted a Daily Telegraph column arguing passionately for the wisdom of staying in the EU), Britain would not now be in such a profound crisis. So that call to Cameron has to be seen as a moment of national destiny. Which makes its sheer idiocy all the more remarkable – moments of national destiny shouldn't look like a mistaken identity scene from a Whitehall farce.

In the call, Johnson told Cameron two things that are crucial to understanding why, with fewer than 200 days now left before Brexit happens, it is at best an exercise in damage limitation and at worst a predictable catastrophe that nobody has the will or the authority to prevent.

Fundamental truth

First, Johnson assured the then prime minister that “he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be ‘crushed’ ”. This is a fundamental truth about Brexit but one that is so absurd that the brain refuses to hold on to it as fact and lets it seep down into the cognitive sludge of half-remembered dreams and half-forgotten fantasies; for a critical section of its supporters, and in particular for the effective leader of the Leave campaign, Brexit was always meant to be a Lost Cause.

For Johnson, the whole thing was supposed to be a heroic failure, a grand gesture. The ideal outcome would have been 55 per cent Remain, 45 per cent Leave – with a majority of Tory voters backing Brexit.

It would have been a fine showing, a splendid performance against insuperable odds. It would have the romance of, say, the Confederacy in the southern states of the US; a thoroughly bad cause given a veneer of nobility by honourable defeat. It was not meant to be a victory.

Johnson’s face on the morning after the referendum told a remarkable story – written on those oversized features were shock, bewilderment and the panic induced by the realisation that consequence-free rhetoric had to be somehow transformed into a viable reality.

Of course Johnson couldn’t do that. The logic of Brexit was undoubtedly that he, as the leader of the revolution, should take power. But he wasn’t up to it. And when Theresa May made him Foreign Secretary, he wasn’t up to that either. To exercise power, you have to be able to take some responsibility. That is precisely what Johnson is incapable of doing.

When the imperative is to actually devise workable plans and make difficult decisions, he is gone like a shot off a shovel – “shot” arguably containing the wrong vowel.

And so what we are now seeing is Johnson desperately trying to turn Brexit back into what into what it was supposed to be. He is trying to snatch glorious defeat from the jaws of his accidental victory, to recreate Brexit as a Lost Cause – lost, of course, not by the fecklessness and incompetence of Johnson and his fellow Brexiteers but by the treachery of Remoaners, judges, citizens of nowhere and the bloody Irish.

The second thing that Johnson told Cameron in that phone call was that even if by some fluke the Leave side won the vote, it wouldn’t make all that much difference.

As Cameron reported the call to his communications director Craig Oliver: “He actually said he thought we could leave [the EU] and still have a seat on the European Council – still making decisions.”

I know this sounds too stupid to be true. I know it would be simply unbelievable in any other context. But Johnson, after all, is the author of a book about Winston Churchill which mentioned in passing that the Germans took Stalingrad during the second World War. The vastness of his ignorance is matched only by the sweeping self-assurance of his assertions.

The point about these two things Johnson told Cameron is that, either way, there would be no serious real-life consequences. Brexit would not happen but even if it did, the UK would still have a seat at the European table, still be in there “making decisions” for the EU.

Moral imperative

To put it mildly, both of these assumptions were wrong. The voters did back Brexit and the EU, for some strange reason, does not see the virtue of giving a non-member state a place in its decision-making processes. And there are real-life consequences. The farce on stage may well become a tragedy on the streets and in the factories.

What would any patriot – any decent human being – do when he’s made such terrible mistakes? Own up and try to limit the damage. This is not just a political obligation – it’s a moral imperative.

But Johnson is doubly evasive. He leaves other people (principally the hapless May) to mop up his mess and then takes a vast amount of money for criticising them in his newspaper column for not doing it properly.

This is the ultimate in what one of Johnson’s favourite authors, Rudyard Kipling, called the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages: power without responsibility.

Theresa May could do a great deal to rescue her lost credibility if she were to say this in public and at great length. Her biggest mistake has been to indulge the most self-indulgent creature in contemporary British politics, to give him the free pass of “Boris being Boris”.

Boris being Boris is Britain being destroyed. His bad jokes are all on the country he purports to love. May needs to explain, with cold fury, why they are not funny anymore.