The long goodbye

The last days of Boris Johnson’s brief but riotous premiership take me back to a steamy February day 35 years ago in Manila. The passing of power is invariably a gripping spectacle. Will it be clean? Or will it be bloody? A country’s future may depend on the answer.

President Ferdinand Marcos was barricaded in the Malacanang palace with his wife Imelda and her exotic shoe collection. Outside thousands of ordinary Filipinos were preparing to storm the gates.

Marcos, in power for 25 years, a corrupt and ultimately deluded autocrat, was finished. His country was in a deep economic crisis. His allies were deserting him. Yet he clung desperately to the hope that the United States, a close ally with a big military presence in the country, would come to his rescue.

When the call came, it was Senator Paul Laxalt, one of President Ronald Reagan’s closest friends. “Should I step down?” Marcos asked him. “The time has come,” Laxalt replied. “I think you should cut and cut cleanly”.

Marcos was devastated. He felt betrayed. But he was on a US transport to Guam within 24 hours with his shell-shocked family. The Philippines, a quasi-democracy but a democracy nevertheless, was spared a bloody civil war.

The choreography of political change is crucial to a country’s internal stability and how it is seen by its allies and trading partners.

Democracy is upheld by the ingrained belief that, when the electorate or its representatives say “time’s up”, the condemned walks. This convention is the cornerstone of democracy. When that fundamental principle is threatened, so is democracy.

Witness the United States. The fear that Donald Trump, who still claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen, might unleash some horror while America waited for Joe Biden to assume the presidency was widely shared.

The assault on the Capitol on January 6 2021 by his baying supporters reminded the world that even the most constitutionally buttoned-down democracy is vulnerable to outsize personalities who believe the rules don’t apply to them.

Britain has old and practiced conventions for the smooth transfer of power. No serving Prime Minister has had to be dragged kicking and screaming from Number 10 Downing Street. That’s not how we do things. The Queen, for one, wouldn’t like it.

But Number 10 has never had a maverick occupant like Johnson. Having finally summoned up the courage to oust him, his party remains fearful of what he might do between now and the appointment of a new Tory leader. Assurances from his acolytes that he will behave cut little ice. Most want him gone now.

His remarks confirming that he would step down as party leader, but not yet as Prime Minister, did nothing to reassure. Angry, wounded, belittled, the man who would be king lashed out as his supporters deserted him in an rising wave of resignations finally grasping that the very soul of the Conservative party was in peril.

Unsurprisingly he blamed others for his fall. “When the herd moves, it moves,” he said with barely disguised contempt. It must have felt like a hard slap in the face to colleagues who, until the very last hour, had backed him.

Entitlement courses through this man’s veins. Humility is totally alien to his nature. The exercise of power is not an acquired habit. It’s in his DNA.

Firing Michael Gove, the one steady presence in his close circle, in a fit of rage, was a pointless act of animal instinct. Johnson doesn’t do flight. Just fight.

Were it not for the immense damage he has done to our already fragile trust in our institutions you might almost feel sorry for him.

There was no friend, no family member, no mentor with sufficient influence over this supremely self-centred man-child to say “the time has come Boris” and for him to listen.

His childhood dream shattered, Johnson blames everyone else for the mess he leaves behind. He then goes back to the office, without a hint of contrition, appoints a new cabinet and carries on as if to say: “Is that all you’ve got?”

What happens next, who the Tory party chooses to replace Johnson and how the transfer of power takes place will tell us just how robust our unwritten constitution- the conventions, nods and winks, that govern our country is.

The economic outlook is bleak. The war in Ukraine drags on. Inflation threatens a wage price spiral. Brexit is proving seriously problematic. Our public services need urgent care.

But these are not particularly unusual times. You shouldn’t need a crisis to pick a leader whose personality does not overwhelm his or her good sense.

Johnson, like Trump, was picked because of his charisma, his disposition. Both men parlayed their magnetism into a powerful populist movement. Razzmatazz can get you so far. But without substance no leader can last the distance.

Britain needs fixing. We all know that. Its rickety state is part of our daily lived experience: trains, planes, hospitals, the passport office, the NHS, social care all need sound, sober, competence.

The question for the Tory party now is this: will it succumb again to the culture warriors who see every policy challenge as an opportunity to drive the wedge deeper, every disagreement with allies as a pretext for another bar room brawl?

Or will it pick a grown-up who can govern and heal at the same time?

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