It’s hard at first glance to grasp what Johnsonism is. Boris Johnson has never been big on ideology. Famously, he wrote two opposing newspaper columns on Brexit before deciding to support it. To make sense of his beliefs, you have to read his life experience.
Buried in there is a unifying ideology that ties together Brexit, his deadly tardiness in locking down Britain and his caste’s contempt for rules, as exemplified by last year’s illegal Christmas party (or parties) at Downing Street. The common thread: life has taught Johnson to expect maximum personal freedom. He embodies, in exaggerated form, the worldview of today’s Conservative ruling class: rules don’t apply to us.
Johnson represents a distinct Conservative generation. Though the Tory elite always consisted largely of public schoolboys, two factors used to connect them to Britain’s other ranks. One was that almost all Conservative leaders from 1940 through 1975 had fought in world wars. For Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, this was their only experience of shared national sacrifice. These men couldn’t entirely feel above the rules that bound the lower orders.
The other factor that long mitigated Tory entitlement was that, even though public schoolboys continued to populate the upper ranks, all party leaders from 1965 to 2005 had attended state school. Margaret Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter, Ted Heath’s parents a carpenter and a maid, while John Major’s father performed in vaudeville.
From 2005, Etonians reclaimed the leadership. Etonians are raised to make rules, which is why Eton is relatively lenient about rule-breaking. For instance, whereas 1980s public schools often expelled pupils for smoking pot, Eton merely “gated” 15-year-old David Cameron for two weeks. Johnson, as the school’s most charismatic boy, felt particularly unbound. In 1982, the Eton master Martin Hammond wrote to Johnson’s father: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”
Life has taught Johnson to expect maximum personal freedom. He embodies, in exaggerated form, the worldview of today’s Conservative ruling class
At Oxford, Johnson, Cameron, and the future Chancellor George Osborne all joined the Bullingdon Club. For an outfit with about a dozen members a year, that represents a remarkable grip on modern Toryism. The Bullingdon was defiantly anti-meritocratic, selecting its all-male members for their social origins. It specialised in public statements of entitlement. Club members went around sacking restaurants or new members’ rooms, “debagging” (removing the trousers of) lower-caste outsiders, and some humiliated hired sex-workers. They would then compensate “pleb” victims with money. The message: rules don’t apply to us.
Johnson’s life path has validated the Bullingdon ethos. Even when sacked from his first journalistic job for inventing a quote and then from the shadow cabinet for dissimulating about an affair, his career scarcely suffered. In fact, his scandals built his brand. He spun rule-breaking as an upper-class prank, akin to stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race night.
When the issue of Brexit came along, Johnson’s instincts rebelled against Brussels. While a correspondent there, he had invented a genre of often-bogus articles about “Brussels bureaucrats” who bossed Britons around, regulating banana shapes and condom sizes. His mocking expressed the Tory ruling class’s core belief: nobody tells us what to do. In their private lives, in their financial dealings and at Westminster, posh Conservatives expected maximum freedom. Their caste had ruled Britain for centuries, and to some degree they came to see the country as themselves writ large. Nobody told Britain what to do.
When Johnson belatedly began paying attention to the coronavirus, he instinctively pursued maximum personal freedom, which meant avoiding lockdown. The World Health Organization declared a global pandemic on March 11 2020. Johnson kept the UK open until March 23. The epidemiologist Neil Ferguson estimated that locking down a week earlier could have reduced Britain’s death toll — at that point about 50,000 — by “at least half”. That would make Johnson’s delay possibly the deadliest decision in postwar British history.
Johnson later tempered his expectation of freedom from the virus, partly because he had the personal experience of nearly dying from it. However, the expectation survives on the Tory right, which is rebelling against his latest curbs.
Their caste scorns restrictions. Various senior government officials have shown contempt for lockdown rules: Dominic Cummings took a family trip to Barnard Castle, the then health secretary Matt Hancock forgot social distancing in a clinch with a colleague and Johnson’s aides Ed Oldfield and Allegra Stratton joked about an illegal Downing Street party. Not by chance, all these people were privately educated, as were the politician-lobbyists Cameron and Owen Paterson, whose scandals have hurt the Tories. Among developed countries, possibly only the 21st-century US has an elite raised in such isolation from everyone else. But Johnson’s caste makes rules for other people.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021
