Johnson’s believers ignore UK’s problems

One day in Korea in 1951, a puzzled American soldier peered at a sign above the entrance to a British base, which proclaimed “Britannia Camp.” He quizzed an officer, pointing upwards: “Whaddoes that mean?” Major Gerald Rickord said: “Haven’t you ever heard of Britannia Rules the Waves?” The American said: “That’s a bit out of date, isn’t it?”
This encounter was described to me long afterwards by Rickord, who added how shocked he had been, in the midst of a war in which his country and the US were fighting as allies, to hear such words: “I was saddened by how far we had come down in the world.”
The US, China, Russia, Switzerland and a very few other countries can, in different ways, parade exceptionalism. The rest of all, however, must recognise a need to live and work with others; to bow to rules of strategy and economics. Today, it is fascinating to behold the spectacle of Johnson dominating the country’s politics in a fashion unmatched by any national leader certainly since Tony Blair, perhaps since Margaret Thatcher. His mastery is unshaken by a post-Brexit, post-Covid labour famine that has left the hospitality industry starved of staff, and animals facing slaughter and incineration on farms for lack of butchers to prepare them for market. Many restaurants are obliged to close two days a week, and there’s some of the worst supply-chain problems in the world.
Fuel stations, especially in southeast England, have been enduring shortages provoked by lack of delivery drivers, sometimes causing queues a quarter-mile long. Britain is only one among many countries, including the US, in which gas and electricity prices are set to soar. Uniquely here, however, the government is allowing suppliers to go bust by sustaining a regulatory retail price cap, almost heedless of the ascent of wholesale rates.
Johnson has indulged the xenophobia of his political base by picking a war of words with France. The Germans, when they take a break from their own domestic problems, despair of conducting a working relationship with the British, because they say that they find it hard to trust anything our prime minister says. Last month the British government crowed at French discomfiture about the Australia-UK-US nuclear submarine deal. Yet there is no evidence that Johnson and his advisers have considered what this agreement may commit us to. Would we go to war alongside the US if — for instance — China invaded Taiwan? The almost certain answer is that Britain would not join such a fight. But somebody needs to think about it.
We may add to the charge sheet rising inflation; increased taxation; a new bullying threat to put peace in Northern Ireland at risk by tearing up the Irish protocol in the Brexit treaty; an absence of credible policies to make good on 2050 carbon-neutrality promises; noisy denunciations of Russia, although the Tories have allowed Britain to become dangerously dependent on Putin’s gas.
Yet the joke against such longtime critics as myself is that Johnson’s personal popularity seems impervious to any of the above. British voters sometimes voice anger against subordinate ministers, selected for their personal loyalty to Johnson rather than for evidence of competence. He repeatedly makes appointments that flaunt defiance of the expert advice, most recently Britain’s new chief of defense staff, Admiral Tony Radakin. Yet Johnson’s followers refuse to extend their wrath to the man in charge of this most presidential British government since 1945.
In all this, of course, there are obvious matches with the attitude of former President Donald Trump’s supporters towards their hero. Johnson is a more intelligent and cultured man than Trump, yet he displays a similar contempt for rules, precedents, decency, truth. One of Britain’s most distinguished historians emailed me during the summer to observe that he thinks our current prime minister “the most morally debased leader Britain has had since the 18th century.” Johnson remains the most brilliant crowd-pleaser in Britain, maybe the world. This skill suffices to keep him surfing a wave of popularity, especially with his working-class supporters, unbroken by the country’s increasingly rocky economic prospects — and, indeed, their own.

—Bloomberg