Boris Johnson destroyed the Conservative party - and the Tory leadership election proves it

The Strange Death of Tory England (cont)

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Photo by Jannes Van den wouwer on Unsplash

Boris Johnson wrote a novel in 2004 called Seventy-Two Virgins – I swear I am not making this up. It was awful. The skills you need to knock out a 1000-word column for a right-wing paper are entirely different from the discipline required to pull off an entire book or, indeed, govern an entire country.

Johnson was only ever good for the one liner and the easy laugh. He entertained Conservative readers by deploying a basic literary skill and by playing to their prejudices.

And by lying. Oh God how he lied. He lied as a matter of course. He lied for laughs. He lied when he didn’t have to, which is always the mark of the compulsive liar. He lied because his readers wanted him to.

Nothing could stop him. The Times fired him for lying. No matter. Johnson moved to the Telegraph where he gave the punters what they wanted by lying about the EU

To his shame and subsequent regret Max Hastings, then the Telegraph’s editor, did not discipline him.  Even when Johnson was caught on tape discussing beating up a fellow journalist, Hastings kept him on because he was “a peerless entertainer”.

Why should Hastings have cared? In his mind journalism was just entertainment. It wasn’t like ruling the United Kingdom, for example. It didn’t matter

Twenty years on, after Trump and Brexit, Johnson’s modus operandi of treating politics as a branch of the entertainment industry dominates the right, as the Tory leadership election illustrates.

The women and men campaigning to lead what was once the UK’s “natural party of government” prefer to feed the biases of Telegraph readers than confront the failure of austerity and of Liz Truss and, above all else, the calamity of Johnson’s Brexit.

Like Johnson himself, they would rather lie and burble than see the world in front of their eyes. And this triumph of Johnsonian deceit is so complete it may well spell the end of the Tory party as a viable governing force.

If that seems a bold claim, consider that if you had told Hastings or me or anyone else in journalism in 2004 about Johnson’s subsequent career, we would not have believed you.

In Bloody Panico! Whatever Happened to The Tory Party, his erudite and blistering account of the collapse of the Conservatives into a rabble of half-mad fantasists, the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft makes a wonderful comparison to illustrate the depth of the hole the party is in.