Americans remind themselves that however bad their situation, they are free from the tyranny of a ruling class that looks in the mirror and sees Boris Johnson
America’s annual celebration of the day it broke up with Britain takes on a different flavour each year, depending on circumstance. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the joke for many Americans, on 4 July, was won’t you please take us back? On Monday, as Britain begins its week-long slide into leaderless chaos, the Americans remind themselves that however bad their own situation, they are at least free from the tyranny of a ruling class that looks in the mirror and sees Boris Johnson.
It’s a crisis, but it’s also Britain, which means that for many Americans it’s automatically funny. What is happening over there in that silly little country with its words and traditions – the 1922 Committee, the Lascelles Principles, turnips, spotted dick – that from a branding perspective, you couldn’t get away with in the United States?
Aspects of the events of this week will amuse British people too, albeit with a grimness that recognises the cost of the joke. As clips from The Day Today start to circulate (“Peter! You’ve lost the news!”) and reality promptly overtakes them, we are reminded, half vainly, that while Americans lead the world in everything else, no one can ever match us for farce.
When Trump says he won’t stand down as president, fascists storm the Capitol, American democracy teeters, people are killed. When Johnson says he won’t stand down as prime minister, the wife of the former chancellor brings out tea to waiting reporters; Keir Starmer breaks out the big puns; and the Benny Hill theme tune echoes around College Green. With the gravity of someone explaining an impenetrable satire, an American called Aaron Fritschner unpacks the entire episode to other Americans on Twitter: “Hugh Grant tweeted a request at activists protesting outside Westminster to play the Benny Hill theme on their loudspeakers; when they did, it became the soundtrack for street interviews with leading Tories trying explain the situation to the British people.” A rare moment of national pride.
Petronella Wyatt, the former deputy editor of the Spectator, once memorably described, by John Walsh I believe, as the “forces’ sweetheart of rightwing journalism”, and a former girlfriend of Boris Johnson. Speaking to reporters, Wyatt buries the knife right up to the handle as only a woman who has dated the man can.
“Boris has undoubted talent and charisma but is sadly bereft of humility or a sagacious apprehension of the realities of a modern democracy,” says Wyatt on Tuesday, with real cometh-the-hour energy. The 54-year-old continues: “Boris’s obsession with his own divine right will tear apart his party and cause collateral damage to the country.” She goes on: “He once told me that he idolised medieval kings because they didn’t ‘have to bother with voters’ and had ‘a free pass to do as they pleased’. In the universe of Boris he is king, not prime minister.” We can only hope that others occupying the large pool of the soon-to-be-former prime minister’s exes follow suit to post similar tributes.
Our politics might be making us an international laughing stock, but we still have Wimbledon, where Cameron Norrie becomes the first British man to reach the semi-final since Andy Murray in 2016, and there’s a kerfuffle in the press room.
In a post-match press conference on Wednesday, a reporter asks Ajla Tomljanović, the Australian player knocked out after an epic quarter-final loss against Elena Rybakina, not about the tennis but about her ex-boyfriend – the current bad boy of tennis, Nick Krygios. “Quite disappointing that after almost 2 hours of playing my quarter-finals that that was the first question the journalist chose to ask me,” she complained on Twitter; “and never proceeded to ask anything match related. Glad to see headlines mostly about that now. Do better.”
I have some sympathy for the reporter, who will have been under pressure from his news organisation – he works for one of News Corp’s Australian titles – to land on that particularly rancid line of questioning. But, of course, Tomljanovic is right; the former partners of such men should only have to comment on their hideousness precisely as and when they elect to.
The worst thing about the political meltdown this week is that, because of peculiarities in Johnson’s character, we are denied the full force of the schadenfreude. Thatcher: now that was a downfall. The twitching curtain, the tears, the deranged swivel-eye look as she left Downing Street for the last time. Thatcher went the full Bertha Mason and for those who’d spent 18 years hating her, it offered a closure of sorts.
You don’t get that with Johnson. He cannot be shaken. Outside No 10 on Thursday, we see a man still behaving as if his humiliation is a joke he has himself engineered; his default tone, in other words. At this stage, it can be said with some confidence that there is no outrage capable of breaking Johnson’s smirking demeanour. He is a man so incapable of seriousness he should be submitted for study.
Contrition will never happen, but even so, his exit speech is extraordinary. He leads with his achievements, the “millions of people who voted for us in 2019.” He ropes in the people of Ukraine. He calls the desire to unseat him “eccentric” and accuses his critics of following a “herd instinct”. The closest we get to any sign of a troubled mind is his failure to evoke Greek mythology. No “tube of fennel” here, no bloated metaphors nor list of synonyms to drag up the word count on a speech that, like everything else in his record from Brexit to Covid response, Johnson will have spent all of two minutes on. It’s not much, but as a departure from business as usual, I guess in the circumstances we’ll take it.
My children are in the kind of performing arts boot camp that New York takes so seriously the city gives it away for free. It’s an eight week long programme with eight hours of rehearsals each day. Anyone caught glancing at their device is yelled at. Late arrival isn’t tolerated. The children have been prepared in advance for “hard days, and hard insights.” It’s a combination of Fame, A Chorus Line, and Private Benjamin. I’m simultaneously horrified by the rigour and jealous I don’t get to go, too.
At pickup, one of the instructors asks how they are enjoying it so far and I reply I’d never seen them so wiped out. He regards me sympathetically, as if I have dodged a tough truth about existence: that it can only decently be met with self-examination and star jumps. “It’s the life of the artist,” he says. “Better they learn now.”
