Boris Johnson didn’t stay in power for long and he hasn’t left it yet, but he is already guaranteed to go down in history. Above all, he will forever be the man of Brexit, the one thanks to which, or because of which, the United Kingdom divorced its main partner and neighbor, the European Union. He thus reinstated customs barriers with the largest market in the world, for which his country had itself helped to set the rules, and with which it carried out 47% of its trade. This is the first time that a State has signed a treaty intended to limit free trade instead of facilitating it. To have managed to lead a country as mercantilist as the United Kingdom to such an act of economic self-harm is a feat that only a genius for the conquest of power could accomplish. The man who told me in 2013, in his office at the London town hall, how absurd it was to leave the European Union and that there would not be a “crazy nest” in the capital to commit such a stupidity, changed his mind soon after, to distance himself from his rival Prime Minister David Cameron, and seize a political opportunity. During the campaign for the 2016 referendum, it was Johnson who swung to victory a “Leave” camp that lacked a strong voice from the Conservative party.
Marion Van Renterghem, winner of the Albert-Londres Prize, author of a biography of Angela Merkel and an autobiographical essay on Europe entitled “Mon Europe, je t’aime moi non plus” (Stock, 2019). Photo @Philippe Matsas
Philippe Matsas
Infantile taste for lies
Brexit wouldn’t exist without it, it wouldn’t exist without Brexit. He owes him to have conquered 10 Downing Street. From his patter, his clowning, his cultured mind, his unfailing optimism, his skilfully worked I don’t care, he has made a tool of seduction. From his childhood taste for lies, he made a system and a political strategy. Brexit is the child and the metaphor of this strategy.
Boris Johnson has sold a chimera to citizens who have the desire and the reason to believe in it: nostalgic for their defunct empire, harmed by globalization, frightened by the migration crisis, flattered to belong to “British exceptionalism”, relieved to find a scapegoat for all their problems – the European Union, its regulations, its freedom of movement -, watered by decades of Europhobic tabloids, seduced by the idea of a “rediscovered sovereignty” which the formula brilliantly summarizes ” Take back control”. Johnson haggled over Brexit like a huckster doing a miracle product: both out of the single market and in the single market, wealth-producing and free from regulation, dynamic and free from migrants, medium-sized and global-sized – “Global Britain”, advocating British unity and defending the interests of English nationalism. A compendium of populist bullshit, made up of insoluble contradictions and resulting from a megalomaniac illusion, in a world where only the great powers exist. Result: among the G7 countries, the United Kingdom has the highest inflation, the weakest growth forecast in the G7, a loss of influence in the world, penalizing administrative red tape, trade treaties with third countries only replicating those that existed in the EU – but without the only one that matters, the one with the United States.
He invented elitist populism
Pure product of this British conservative class passed by the discriminatory school of Eton, convinced to be superior and “born to govern”, Johnson succeeded in the supreme illusion to make believe that he embodied “the will of the people”. Cousin of Trump and Berlusconi, he invented elitist populism.
Said people ended up realizing that their leaders dispensed with the rules they imposed on them. What merry parties were held in Downing Street when he was not even allowed to bury a relative. That the most fervent Brexiters invested their fortune in the euro zone or granted themselves a European passport to escape their new prison. That the Prime Minister’s attempts to prorogue Parliament, to redo laws and international treaties at his convenience, to promise butter and butter’s money have dramatically weakened their purchasing power. That the magic potion of Brexit, supposed to make other European countries jealous, on the contrary plays the role of scarecrow, to the point that even Marine Le Pen no longer dares to mention leaving the EU. Coming to power on a lie, Boris Johnson installed lies, amorality and vulgarity at the heart of the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world. Now either she wakes up or he’s normalized the worst.