The most insightful contribution to the Conservative leadership contest was made this week by a smoked fish. That does not reflect well on the human candidates, one of whom brandished a kipper as a prop to facilitate a rhetorical point. Boris Johnson told a hustings audience that “Brussels bureaucrats” had caused distress to a businessman by requiring that shipment of his product be accompanied with an “ice pillow”.
But the kipper told a different story. Its refrigeration was a matter of domestic rules. “The case described by Mr Johnson falls outside the scope of EU legislation,” a European commission official clarified. The prop was only there to set up a pun about “kippers” as former Ukip voters, whose repatriation to the Conservative fold is a promised electoral benefit of Mr Johnson’s candidacy. It was a theatrical flourish to tickle a receptive audience. To that end, facts were immaterial.
Unfashionable though it may be in the Tory party, telling the truth still matters. Especially so when the UK’s EU membership expires in little over three months and Mr Johnson claims, in that time, to be able to enact a deal in Brussels different from the one negotiated by Theresa May. He cannot. A new settlement is not on offer and, even if it were, an extension to the article 50 period would be required to complete it in orderly fashion. As with the smoked fish, Mr Johnson is either lying intentionally or avoiding engagement with facts. Both explanations would be consistent with his character – that word applying in the sense of his temperament but also his stage persona.
“Boris” is a performance designed to advance the man’s ambition while concealing the uglier side of his nature. This is a man whose personal and professional back catalogue, exposed this week in the Guardian, is an archive of deception, cowardice, ethical tawdriness and casual bigotries draped in pseudo-intellectual waffle. The stage performer is a different Johnson from the one who agreed in 1990 to help a crooked friend plan an assault on a journalist. The friendly buffoon is different to the literary charlatan who wrote an essay in 2006 depicting Islam as obstructive to progress and freedom – a historically vacuous assertion that has been succeeded by the author’s more recent excursion into vicious anti-Muslim caricature, comparing veiled women to bank robbers and letterboxes.
The “Boris” persona boasts of imaginary achievements in office as London mayor but does not mention money that the actual Mr Johnson squandered on failed vanity projects.
There is no doubt that he has talents. But the capabilities involved in rising to the top of the Tory party bear no relationship to the task ahead. Being “Boris” is a qualification for winning applause at Conservative hustings, not for negotiating Britain’s safe withdrawal from the EU. Mr Johnson says he will not actively pursue a no-deal outcome, yet choices he has made to secure the job of prime minister make that scenario more likely. Last week, for example, he ruled out any deal involving a variant of the Northern Irish backstop – a device seen as essential in Brussels for management of post-Brexit trade.
The backstop exists to overcome the problem that regulatory divergence from the EU would require borders between the UK and the single market – one boundary being with Ireland. Mr Johnson rejects that mechanism not to spite Mrs May but because she was relaxed about regulatory alignment and he is not.
That is the real meaning of the whole kipper routine, which hinged on Eurosceptic obsession with petty European rules as impediments to free enterprise. Mr Johnson built a career in journalism banging that drum, long before he made it his creed for government. It was a view that lacked foundation in fact then and is now grotesquely irrelevant to the structural and technological challenges facing Britain’s economy. The idea that a country should undergo the trauma of a chaotic Brexit in order to be relieved of footling regulatory obstacles that exist mostly in the imagination would be laughable were it not so frighteningly close to happening. The same might well be said of Mr Johnson entering Downing Street.
