Boris Johnson:A deeply flawed character caught up in his own Greek tragedy
A man without a plan or a future
We love a hero. As parents we go along with the cult of the superhero, larger-than-life beings with superhuman powers. Characters like Batman and Captain Marvel star in modern morality plays in which good ultimately triumphs over evil.
In a week when the Fates, the weaving goddesses who assign individual destinies to mortals, have returned to haunt our classicist Prime Minister it’s worth reflecting on the nature of heroism, those who seek it, those to whom it falls naturally and those who perish in the quest.
The word hero comes from the Greek ἥρως or heros – literally protector or defender. In classical mythology heroes are semi-divine creatures who live and die in the pursuit of honour. But they can also be amoral, blindly ambitious and foolhardy, a mixture of the flawed and the fearless.
What we know of Johnson from his teachers, his family and his biographers is that he craves greatness, glory, above all else. He yearns to be a hero which explains why he is drawn to real-life heroes like Volodymir Zelensky Ukraine’s improbable warrior president.
The rape of Ukraine is a story filled with the elements of a Greek tragedy: a turning point in modern history pitting the forces of free choice against a tyrant who wants to turn the clock back to the dark ages of Russian imperialism.
Johnson’s jaunt to Kyiv for a photo opportunity with Zelensky was in part a ploy to distract his tormentors who wish him gone. But it also speaks to the Prime Minister’s inner hero. His support for Ukraine is part conviction and part reverie.
Rubbing shoulders with Zelensky, recipient of the John F Kennedy award for courage for marshalling “the spirit, patriotism and sacrifice of his people in a life-or-death fight” inevitably conjures up Churchill. It proved irresistible.
Beleaguered at home, vilified for his self-evident guilt in breaking the very Covid rules he enacted, faced with an investigation into whether he lied to Parliament, Johnson, as Simon Jenkins says, must dearly love to swap places with the hero of Ukraine.
Johnson is no Pericles
Johnson’s all-time hero is Pericles, the soldier statesman of fifth century BC Athens. Johnson has carefully cultivated his classical aesthetic since university carrying we are told a bust of Pericles from office to office. One now sits in Number 10.
Like Johnson, Pericles loved big ideas (he built the Acropolis). He transformed Athens into a leading maritime power. He was a populist. He was an accomplished orator. He came from a celebrity family. He was a patriot and he had unbounded belief in himself.
Pericles might not have been out of place at Eton. Johnson no doubt imagines he would have been at home ruling Athens in its glory days.
But Johnson is no Pericles. He would like us to believe that, for all his self-avowed blemishes, he possesses noble traits. His diehard supporters argue that he must be forgiven his flaws because he is a great man doing great things.
Johnson yearns to be seen as a transformative figure, which in a way he is, having delivered Brexit, a decisive fork in road that leads Britain to glory or more probably into a slow decline into second-rank status.
Brexit is done and (almost) dusted. It is not, as his handlers hope, the gift that will keep on giving. To stay in power, let alone win it again, the Tory leader must do what he says he wants to do (if only party poopers would just let Partygate drop) which is to deliver.
He seems incapable of doing this not least because he has ensnared himself in a crisis of his own making. Had he fessed up at the start and sought forgiveness for the illegal Downing Street gatherings instead of deflecting blame onto others, denying and forcing his party to defend the indefensible he might have got away with it.
Previously loyal backbenchers are now turning against him. Others wait to see which way the wind blows. It must be exhausting. It’s certainly a monumental waste of the government’s time.
Grandstanding on the world stage will not address the problems Britain faces: a cost of living storm that will inevitably hit those who can least afford it hardest, many of whom are in those famous Red Wall constituencies.
Levelling up, the great hope of Johnson’s second term, the main course to the Brexit entrée, remains little more than an underfunded slogan. Sending refugees to Rwanda may satisfy some xenophobic voters but it’s unworkable as well as unethical.
There is something almost pitiful about Johnson.
Threatening once again to tear up the Northern Ireland protocol just as the pound slides to its weakest level since 2020, retail sales and trade slump, and inflation surges driven by exploding energy prices, is a mistake.
Number 10 seems to think that doubling down on the Brexit agenda will shore up Tory support in key marginals. But without an economic recovery that will not work. Voters will see it for what is it is – a distraction.
There is no obvious strategy for growth. Social care and energy security remain ships stranded at low tide. Partygate, for all the sophistry deployed by Number 10, has done real, perhaps irreparable damage. Voters just don’t believe him.
The Tory party is tired and fractious. Two years on from a resounding election victory and two years out from the next it can’t decide whether to ditch a leader whose fortunes are sinking in the polls or plough on in the hope that something turns up.
The hope that Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, might emerge as a post-Johnson lifesaver is gone. He turns out to be a clever man with feet of clay.
There is something almost pitiful about Johnson. On the day he jetted off to India he suffered two further, humiliating blows. MPs (including his own) backed a motion to investigate whether he lied to parliament over Partygate while senior Tory backbenchers with clout declared, in the words of arch-Brexiter Steve Baker, that he” now should be long gone”.
Johnson resembles not so much Pericles as Icarus, the tragic hero in Greek mythology who failed to make the transition from boyhood to manhood. Warned by his father, who had built wings from feathers and wax, not to fly too close to the sun Icarus over-reached with fatal consequences.