The Tribune

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Character is fate, and the Prime Minister [Boris Johnson] was undone by his lifelong pathological inability to tell the truth.” – Marina Hyde

AS Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson finally succumbed to reality, emerging from the reality show cum bunker of 10 Downing Street to announce his resignation, “Yakety Sax”, the theme song for the Benny Hill Show blared, while a jubilantly clapping audience cheered his impending departure.

The show, starring Alfred Hawthorne “Benny” Hill, was a British comedy setup cum television show airing from 1955 to 1989, with large audiences in the UK and abroad, featuring filmed segments and live comedy.

The show’s ensemble delighted audiences with sketches of burlesque, gags, mime, parody, slapstick – and double entendre. Hill jibed: “That’s what show business is, sincere insincerity.” Replace “show business” with “politics” and one might define Boris Johnson’s journalistic and political career.

Johnson is in some ways a Benny Hill-like character. Both men shared a mastery of entertainment and the performative arts. Both reveled in puns, deploying them like sophisticated heat-seeking missiles intended to destroy targets ranging from opponents to pretentiousness.

The double entendre, or double meaning, mischievously exploiting nuance and ambiguity, was a shared forte of the two comic figures.

The show – Hill’s, not Johnson’s – was rife with sexual innuendo and what some critics described as the sexist objectification of women. Hill was often portrayed as a lecher constantly chasing pretty women. The inside joke, which audiences were in on, was that Hill was gay.

The British public was in on the lechery of Johnson, who was renowned for his sexual exploits. In 2004, then-Conservative leader, John Howard, removed him from the opposition front bench for lying about an affair with a journalist, after vigorously assuring Howard the allegations were untrue.

Johnson, who was married with four children at the time, categorically stated the allegations of the affair were an “inverted pyramid of piffle”. He was, of course, not telling the truth.

LIAR

The lying about the affair was an example of a pathological and entrenched character flaw in Johnson, who was described by observers over the years as a “prodigious”, “habitual”, “pathological”, “congenital”, “unrepentant”, “inveterate” “liar”. He was the master of deploying untruths, small, medium, large and supersized.

Rory Stewart, a former competitor for the Tory leadership suggested Johnson may be “the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as Prime Minister”.

Stewart declared that Johnson “has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy.

“He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true.”

Anyone who has had any experience with such an individual is often bewildered by the boldness and confidence of the liar, especially given that the falsehoods are easily discoverable.

One must check every claim they make, effortlessly lying about others, including supposed friends and colleagues. They are given to gross exaggeration and a life built on a foundation and scaffold of lies.

Yet, despite the falsehoods and dissembling over a lifetime, Johnson often succeeded because of his opponents and the willingness of his allies and voters to look the other way because it was in their interest to do so.

Citizens and voters crave entertainment, bread and circus and often “superficial appeasement” from politicians, ranging from certain antics to handouts to slug matches between opponents and internal tribal battles in a political party.

NARCISSISM

Johnson offered such rollicking political theatre accompanied by memorable quips, bon mots and PR stunts. His theatrics fed his unquenchable narcissism and the hunger by many to be entertained by politician-celebrity types.

During the 2012 Olympics in London, Johnson rode a zip line in Victoria Park. The UK Guardian reported at the time: “It was the sort of stunt from which any sensible politician would have sprinted. Instead, Johnson climbed a tower, allowed himself to be strapped into an undignified harness and, with a small plastic union flag in each hand, he set off.”

Though he got stuck, pranks such as these and his willingness to brazenly do and to get away with things which would have sunk other politicians, bolstered his appeal and celebrity, with some voters vicariously delighting in his outlandish and often rakish conduct.

He often poked fun at and derided many establishment norms and individuals, which would eventually help derail his premiership.

Voters often enjoy such high wire distractions, treating politicians as celebrities whom they enjoy alternatively celebrating and tearing down, sometimes with vicious abandonment and enjoyment.

Voters delight in the thrill and rush of electing a new head of government, crowning them with tremendous power as the leader headily basks in glorious victory, often believing that the throne on which they sit is made of platinum, rather than straw or some other easily dismantled material.

Yet, voters delight even more in the ignominious downfall and humiliation of the very hero in whom they reposed their temporary trust and adulation.

Johnson, adept at quoting Grecian and Roman ancients, should have known his character traits and unwieldy hubris would eventually lead to his downfall. Hill and Johnson appreciated how humour is an antidote to pomposity and arrogance.

Referring to himself in a fit of self-mockery, Johnson self-ribbed: “You can’t rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot, there lurks a blithering idiot.”

Despite various political gifts, Johnson’s hubris and various pathologies were always likely going to doom him, just like ancient figures and modern politicians, the seeds of whose destruction are evident at the height of their greatest triumphs and victories.

After a British Prime Minister is forced from office, party members and leaders typically opt for the near-opposite of the outgoing leader.

PERSONALITY

The phlegmatic Theresa May, who preceded Johnson, was dull in comparison with her successor, resembling high-fibre multigrain unbuttered toast. Johnson is a high caloric, high fat, high cholesterol English breakfast-like (or “fry-up”) personality.

The typical English breakfast comprises: bacon, sausages, fried eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread, white or black pudding and buttered toast, accompanied by tea or coffee. It is a hearty, savory meal, satisfying for a time. But too much of such a breakfast is not good for one’s waistline.

We can extend the metaphor with a story. A friend visiting London recalls eating two helpings of a free English breakfast at his hotel during a two-week vacation. By the end of his stay, he was stalled and gaining weight.

Though enjoyable at the time, it became all too much. Eating such a breakfast every day could lead to long-term health problems.

The entertaining and at times satisfying Johnson shtick gave voters what they sometimes hungrily craved, whether it was healthy for them or not, whether it was based in reality or not, whether what he was saying met certain truth tests or not.

Ever the conjurer and illusionist, he mastered the delivery of dog whistles and a wink and a nod, which many voters either enjoyed or constantly let slip. The impractical and unethical decision to send certain migrants seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda was a prime example of this well-practised art.

In the obverse of the car mirror warning, “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”, Johnson breezily told voters he would “get Brexit done” quickly. Brexit was always further away than Johnson suggested and it is far from done.

The UK is going to continue to experience long-term economic and trade dislocation because of the vote. Britain applied to join the EU in 1961. Because of two French vetoes it did not join until 1973, 12 years late.

The fuller exit and disentanglement from the EU is going to take many years, something Johnson and many of the full-throated Brexiters often elided.

During the Brexit campaign in 2016, Johnson insisted that leaving the European Union would save taxpayers £350m a week in funds being sent to Brussels.

He boasted that the savings could be invested in the National Health Service. The claim was bogus.

HYPOCRISY

There is a classic political equation and equilibrium: Voters are willing to put up with certain levels of hypocrisy, untruth and corruption by politicians, sometimes even closing eyes and ears to poor conduct and cant, especially if the politician is satisfying them emotionally, economically or politically.

But eventually, especially in times of crisis, citizens grow angry, wary of gross excess and the lies covering up such excess and arrogance. COVID-19 and the global economic crisis were just those crises, ingredients in the cauldron of events in which Partygate exploded unrelentingly.

Late last year, a friend argued that most UK voters were unconcerned about Partygate, the various parties held at No. 10 during COVID lockdowns, a number of which were attended by Johnson, who aggressively misled the public and his colleagues on the matter, and perhaps misled Parliament.

The friend and others did not appreciate that the degree of hypocrisy and the cavalier attitude toward both truth-telling and the sacrifices and suffering of others, were now too much for voters, including most of the Tory base.

Power and crises reveal a leader’s strengths and weaknesses, good character and flaws. Johnson was not undone because of policy matters. His outsized character flaws, especially his pathological lies, finally ended his brief and shambolic premiership.

It was near fateful that the flaws that ejected him from office were inevitably bound to end his political career.

Lesson for leaders and voters: The flaws and Achilles heels of those elected are the very instruments of their political demise if they are not tamed by one’s inner voice and the voices and corrective advice of colleagues and observers issuing warnings that one’s wings are melting in a fireball freefall as one hurtles to the dusty ground of political demise.