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Boris Johnson’s Bad Example
U.S. presidents get to do one big thing — if they’re lucky.
Some of those one big things are bigger than others: Barack Obama signed a health-insurance bill, but Abraham Lincoln saved the Union. Richard Nixon ended the American involvement in Vietnam. A few really extraordinary presidents get to do two big things: Franklin Roosevelt did the New Deal and rallied the whole of American power to save — the world, really. (So, a mixed record.) Ronald Reagan, in a similar way, got one big win at home by overseeing a major reform of economic policy and one big win abroad by setting up the kill shot on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, though the hammer-and-sickle flag didn’t come down at the Kremlin until Christmas of 1991, when Reagan was enjoying his retirement in Bel-Air. Some presidents make a great noise but don’t actually get much done: Bill Clinton had the great good fortune to be president when the first big technology boom was reaching its height but long before #MeToo. Clinton did not shape events but was carried forward by them: the post–Cold War restructuring of the global economic and diplomatic environment, the Internet, the Bosnian War, the ascendance of a new kind of Republican power in 1994. Clinton was a slacker, but some eminently capable and experienced men end up accomplishing relatively little as president: Ulysses Grant was one such, and George H. W. Bush another. James Garfield, who died from an assassin’s wounds six months into his administration, had too little time in the office to achieve anything, while Andrew Jackson had two full terms to prove that he never should have been elected to the office in the first place.
Prime ministers of the United Kingdom are different from American presidents in that they occupy a relatively large office — wielding both executive and legislative power — in a much-less-consequential country. And so Boris Johnson’s one big thing at home was Brexit, an issue that aside from being an inspiration to right-wing populist movements around the world was of little importance outside of the European Union and the United Kingdom, while his blue-ribbon foreign-policy achievement — getting the Russian war on Ukraine just right — was of limited practical value. Big fish, small pond.
The differences are significant, but the performance of the eccentric gentleman representing Uxbridge and South Ruislip (born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) as prime minister of the United Kingdom does shed some light on a subject of urgent and immediate importance to the very different office of the U.S. presidency: the role of character.
I can hear you rolling your eyes. It’s a kind of squeaky sound.
Conservatives are a little bit embarrassed by the word character just now, for obvious reasons. But the character of both private and public figures, and especially the character of the president, used to be a very big deal to conservatives. There were some good books about the character of presidents (Peggy Noonan wrote one) and whole sprawling business empires built on virtue. In retrospect, it is clear that at least some of us were not all that serious about that.
But the issue of character is worth thinking about — not as an abstract philosophical and ethical concern (though such inquiries are of interest, too) but as a practical issue. As I have been arguing for some years now, character and all those virtues we used to talk about are not mere accoutrements to a political career — nice if you can get them, but not necessary — or issues of concern only to history and the afterlife. Forget, for our purposes here, the confessional: The character of elected leaders has immediate practical importance — which begins with their importance for the workaday concerns of the careers of those leaders.
Boris Johnson was not undone by bad ideas or bad policy, though he had some bad ideas and bad policies. Neither was he undone by some unforeseeable shift in public opinion, nor by factional plotting within the Conservative Party, though that party is famously a nest of vipers. Boris Johnson was undone mainly by the fact that he is a habitual liar, and to a lesser degree by the fact that he is lazy and does not seem to actually believe in much of anything. There is much to like and to admire about Johnson, and it is not difficult to understand why those who supported him did so with enthusiasm right up until the moment they stopped. But admirable men have their defects and deficiencies, too, and sometimes these are more than they can overcome, as in the case of Johnson.
There is a legend about Boris Johnson (generally treated as fact) that as the United Kingdom headed for a referendum on leaving the European Union, he prepared two speeches — one in favor of Brexit and one in favor of remaining — and waited to see which direction the political winds would blow, hoping to use the issue to unseat and replace the sitting prime minister, David Cameron. He managed to get Cameron thrown out but had to sit through Theresa May’s time as PM before finally getting into the office himself.
Once he got there, he did his one big thing — taking Brexit from referendum to reality. And then he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. He had no interest in fiscal discipline or long-term economic thinking, which is not entirely out of character for a national leader who — this is probably the most droll modern English political scandal — skipped out on important Covid-19 planning meetings because he was in a rush to finish writing a biography of William Shakespeare in order to raise money to pay for a divorce then in progress, and who got in trouble for spending £240,000 to renovate his residence (with 32 meters of silk curtains and a £3,675 bar cart) with no authorization and no means to pay for it, handing the bill, illegally, to a sympathetic party donor.
(The Shakespeare biography remains unfinished.)
Johnson’s leadership and his government were disorganized, chaotic, mercurial, and — in all but that one big thing — generally ineffective.
As Guardian columnist Martin Kettle puts it, “Johnson’s Conservatism is highly unusual, a rag-bag of high spending, government intervention and English nationalism. It has little connection with the low-tax, small-state, globally liberal Toryism that preceded it and which the party cast aside when it rushed to embrace Johnson as the answer to its problems.” Republican heads in the United States should be nodding along with that.
But it was, finally, the lies that undid Johnson. He lied about big things and about little things, and he even lied about things that he didn’t need to lie about, as though he were only keeping in practice, Clinton-style. The U.K. parliament is unlike our Congress in that it actually makes some effort to participate in the governance of the country, and, for that reason, it continues to have a few shreds of institutional self-respect, which Congress happily gave up long ago. Johnson got away with lying to his constituents from time to time, just as he had once got away with periodically lying to his readers in the Telegraph, but Parliament took being lied to seriously. Johnson was subjected to a humiliating no-confidence vote that left him wounded and weak enough to be knocked off by the exposure of yet another lie, in this case about his appointing a political ally accused of sexual misconduct, Chris Pincher, to a party leadership position with foreknowledge of the allegations. Johnson probably didn’t really need to lie about that affair: Pincher already had resigned from Johnson’s government, and Johnson might as easily have told the truth — that he knew about Pincher’s behavior, was confident that he would not do it again, and wanted to give him a second chance. (Assuming that is more or less the truth.) But instead of sharing a little in the pain and taking responsibility for his own decision, he tried to insulate himself entirely from the situation.
That was dishonesty, true, but it was also cowardice.
The practical problem with habitual liars such as Boris Johnson is not that we are offended by their dishonesty (although we should be) but that they end up being impossible to work with. There aren’t a lot of contracts and ironclad deals in real-life politics, which is a game of negotiation and understanding that ultimately is based on trust. That is true for relations between rival politicians and rival parties, but it also is true for people who are on the same side and trying to cooperate.
The institutions of the free world run on trust, and Boris Johnson, in spite of his many excellent qualities, is a man not to be trusted.
That is a lesson that we Americans would benefit from learning.
And Furthermore . . .
I do not agree with the maxim attributed to Heraclitus — often quoted by John McCain — that “character is destiny.” People do not often change, but they can change, and they sometimes change for the better. But, even so, it is impossible to miss the ways in which aspects of character — both virtues and vices — shape and limit the careers of men in high office, especially presidents. Bill Clinton’s presidency was undone by his infidelity and his cowardly refusal to take responsibility for his actions; Barack Obama’s great flaws were shallowness and self-centeredness, which left his hallmark health-insurance program half-made and his party more than decimated at the state and local level after his time in office; George W. Bush was an occasional sentimentalist who sometimes made a vice out of the virtue of loyalty, sticking by advisers and executives from whom he should have liberated his administration; Richard Nixon’s political story was one of personal greatness poisoned by insecurity and resentment; Ronald Reagan was a man almost without friends, whose aloofness (and its flipside: his uxoriousness) sometimes deprived him of the best counsel; Jimmy Carter tried to govern the country with sanctimony and failed; Donald Trump’s vanity made him vulnerable to self-interested flatterers and sycophants who brought out the worst in a man who was wildly ill suited to the job to begin with.
Character is not destiny — but it is almost that.
Words about Words
Michael la Corte writes about cooking for Salon, but he has found something fun in the lexical cupboard: “What the heck,” he asks, “is a ‘napron’?”
As la Corte relays, the modern English word apron is the result of a “false separation,” hearing a break in a word or words in the wrong place. This has happened occasionally in English with the indefinite article “a” and nouns beginning with n — people hear “a napron” as “an apron,” and, over time, napron becomes apron. That is how a narenge got on the path to becoming an orange, and it is how the adder, formerly the nadder, lost his n, and how the nauger suffered the same amputation, becoming an auger.
The phenomenon also is known as rebracketing.
Sometimes rebracketing leads to misspellings, and sometimes it leads to funny understandings of words. Another is an other, but we sometimes hear a nother, leading to expressions such as “a whole nother issue.” The Middle English mine uncle produces the colloquial nuncle. In Middle English, they had a noumpere, but we have an umpire.
A famous example of the false break, also mentioned by la Corte, is the career of the word hamburger. The meaningful break in hamburger is between hamburg and er, Hamburger meaning someone or something from Hamburg. But we have the word ham in English, and so we hear ham-burger. There is no ham in a hamburger, but that’s how we hear the word, which led us to cheeseburger, veggie burger, burger joint, etc.
I do hope that somewhere near the northernmost tip of France is a restaurant called Burgers of Calais.
Rampant Prescriptivism
The Guardian column referenced above was written by Martin Kettle, whose name is so ridiculously English that it might as well come from Charles Dickens. In fact, the recent news out of the United Kingdom has been full of wonderfully evocative names: Mr. Pincher (“by name and by nature,” as Boris Johnson reportedly described him), MP Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat. Ridiculous, all of them. Only the unassimilated Boris stands out. (His ancestry is, as you might expect, colorful — his great-grandfather was the Turkish journalist-politician Ali Kemal.) But the United Kingdom is a different kind of country than it once was, and the plausible candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party include Nadhim Zahawi, Sajid Javid, former chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak, and possibly Priti Patel.
What I liked best about Mr. Kettle’s column was the correction at the end of it: “This article was amended on 7 July 2022 because an earlier version described Sajid Javid’s resignation speech as coruscating, when it meant excoriating.” Perhaps someone was reaching for the thesaurus for a gold-plated adjective and landed on the wrong page.
To coruscate is to sparkle. As Merriam-Webster puts it, it is “to be brilliant or showy in technique or style,” a sense derived from its literal meaning, “to give off or reflect light in bright beams or flashes.” The guitar playing of Steve Vai is coruscating, as is the prose of Tom Wolfe and the gymnastics of Simone Biles. Paganini is coruscating.
But the word sounds like it should have something to do with blistering criticism, perhaps because of the aural harmony of coruscate and excoriate. In fact, it is one of those words that have been used the wrong way for so long that some dictionaries list that sense.
They shouldn’t!
Different words for different things — it is what makes vocabularies work.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com.
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In Other News . . .
False wittiness is indeed hard to bear.
The above is part of an exchange about my friend and former National Review colleague David French. David really brings it out in people, for whatever reason. It is a cliché to assert that critics of a man are simply envious of him, but I think that’s approximately it in his case: He makes a certain kind of man feel small — father of natural and adopted children, Ivy League pedigree, Bronze Star, a leader in his community, considerable professional accomplishments, etc. I should write something long about him one of these days. In the meantime, I am very entertained by the notion that David French, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law, writes critical columns about Evangelical Christians and political conservatives because he thinks that’s the best way for him to make money. I don’t agree with everything David writes or thinks, but the man deserves better critics. The ones he has are too dumb and too rage-besotted even to hate him adequately.
Recommended
I believe I have mentioned Noah Rothman’s newest book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun. I think you should read pretty much everything Noah Rothman writes, but this especially.
In Closing
Every time I write about that C.E./B.C.E. silliness (those being secularized substitutes for B.C. and A.D.), I get a lot of hurt feedback. Yes, I know that there are lots of people in the world who are not Christians, and who do not believe that there was anything special about that Jesus guy, if he even existed. Mahatma is a word with Hindu religious connotations, but we don’t feel self-conscious talking about Gandhi, and we all know who the Prophet Mohammed is, even if we do not think he was really a prophet. Walter Annenberg’s background was Jewish, but he was happy to be the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, irrespective of whether he had any thoughts about the holiness of James. (Court of St. James’s, not Court of St. James or Court of St. James’.) Grow up. There are lots and lots of calendars in the world, and you can use any one you please. You could start your own calendar and number the years from the birth of Charles Darwin or Elvis Presley or the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But you don’t get to steal the Christian calendar and make it into something it isn’t. It’s not yours to do with as you please. You live where you live, and the history of this civilization is what it is. Trying to secularize the calendar isn’t doing a courtesy to non-Christians — it is an act of vandalism to the culture we all share, irrespective of our own particular religious belief. Knock it off, you ridiculous little Jacobins.
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