Prime Minister Johnson

Sadly, not a book but in fact real. (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, July 2019)

This is usually a book blog. However, I thought, given the gravity of Britain’s current political situation, both nationally and internationally, it might be worth using whatever platform I have to say something. Which turns out to be a sort of calm fury.

I do, of course, think he’s terrible. I was working a job that involved data entry the day he was elected Mayor of London, and we all kept checking to see the results, which were incredibly slow. And an awful lot of quiet, polite Londoners really didn’t want him to be Mayor of London. For really, really good reasons. Basically the same ones as now. He’s deeply untrustworthy, entirely fake, tries things to make his name or prospects even if they plunge other people into disaster, even if they plunge hundreds or thousands of other people into disaster. He is utterly reckless and utterly vain.

He managed to skip the election this time. I am slightly worried that he might make a habit of that. Which has historically gone rather badly.

I’m not trying to do a He Who Must Not Be Named Thing up there, by the way. It’s just that so much of him is ersatz branding, and I don’t think it’s a good thing to buy into that. I think we should call him Prime Minister Johnson, because that sounds dull, and functional, and has the pleasant benefit of being entirely civil and accurate. It doesn’t sound posh or man of the people-ish. Or indeed funny. It just sounds dull. He wouldn’t like that.

It is obviously really, really bad that an unelected utter fraud with a history of dishonesty has been made Prime Minister without an election. Pretty dire, in fact.

(I’m trying not to joke or swear here, in this post, because I feel more in control with a steady tone and not losing my temper. Lots of people get a high and feeling of power from performative anger, and that is not innately a bad thing, but I am not one or them. Anger, for me, is loss of control and with Prime Minister Johnson in charge I really don’t want to cede any more of that than I can spare).

We all know he doesn’t mind ridicule. Plays on it, in fact, because it’s a cover for being unpleasant and it means that he is the rare person for whom we should assume malice instead of incompetence. Well, actually, we should assume both. It probably is both most of the time.

And we all know that his base doesn’t mind the fact that he’s a liar. It plays into the idea that he’s a bit of a rogue, rather than a deeply unpleasant man who has become Prime Minister and is now our second unelected Prime Minister in a row.

I do think he, and his base, might mind if he’s thought of as boring. Evil, or at the very least intensely malicious, but also boringly so. The banality of evil is not just a phrase, it’s a very apt description of how shocked Hannah Arendt was when she realised that most of the people who had caused the deaths of six million Jews were both evil and fundamentally dull. That they weren’t charismatic, hypnotic villains everyone was helpless to avoid. They were human, and evil and dull.

I’m not saying it’s a direct comparison. I do think it’s worth considering, just as a phrase. And in terms of how we conceive of evil, and in terms of how we counter it. If we just acknowledge it’s there and evil and dull and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need stopping. It’s just tackling dry rot rather than zombie hordes. (And, sadly, exactly as unglamorous as that sounds)

And I think, given the severity of everything concerned, that the stopping and thinking about what we do, as people trying to hold onto a functioning society, might be quite important. Really important.

I do think it’s worth noting that there are two things that are true, in part, and people will say and it’s worth thinking about when you say them and how helpful they are.

The first is “people have survived bad things before”. This is true. By nature of the continued existence of the human race, some people have at some time survived everything adverse that has happened. Survive exists as a verb and survivor as a noun. Survivor is a pretty common noun, actually, and it has very rarely been attached to the notion of things that do not happen. It doesn’t tend to get attached to remotely pleasant things, except in jest, and apart from when it is literally the only or principle action of which you are capable of performing (at which point it is vital to survive, and to focus on that ) survival as an aim is a pretty low bar.

The second is the flip side, the focus on all the people who won’t survive and the sheer dreadfulness of this all. It’s cathartic, but it’s often a deeply callous act to get catharsis from saying this if, among your audience, are the most vulnerable. Which there often are because being vulnerable to ill fortune or malice does not actually stop people from being intelligent, or politically aware, or good citizens, or afraid. It’s not very helpful to make those people more afraid. They’re dealing with enough. With the business of survival.

I don’t really have a solution. I don’t think any of us do, really, which is another scary thing about this. I mean, we have had a dreadful prime minister for three years who is rubbish at solutions, and now we have a worse one and we can’t think of one either. Or we can but we can’t make it solid.

Which is important, figuring out the last stage. Not daydreaming about a clever logic puzzle of an ideal Brexit, or hoping the grown ups will step in. Thinking before the action, and then the action being considered.

Which I know does sound dull. But at least isn’t evil.