Hasta la vista, baby

How very Boris that he should have bowed out as prime minister with a line from that particular Hollywood film.

He may well see himself as a Terminator-type character, someone who can take on all comers and disperse them with a mighty sweep of an over-muscled arm.

That was last year. Now that Johnson has been hounded out of his parliamentary seat, it’s he who has been terminated. Yet I’m sure the same phrase is bouncing around his cranial cavity.

Or perhaps he has reverted to a line more apposite to his Eton-Oxford education: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning”. I don’t think either line would be out of place. Johnson may be neither the Terminator nor King Lear but he is definitely a man more sinned against than sinning. And he’ll be back.

This isn’t to say his detractors don’t have a point. Johnson has indeed sinned both in his private and public life, a lot, often and in various ways. And yes, he has been known to tell the odd lie about such vital matters as consuming a piece of unauthorised cake.  

In this Johnson is presumed to be startlingly different from those who have been spewing venom at him at a vigorous pumping rate. Their own public lives have never been sullied by a single lie or indiscretion. Moreover, they have been spared the onus of any discernible achievement, with its potential for tempting a man into the sin of hubris.

They, Johnson’s detractors, differ from him in their sterling integrity and refusal to seek cheap popularity. They have none, which proves their commitment to high principle at the expense of any electoral gain.

Now that I’ve got sarcasm out of the way, a few mirthless points are in order.

Johnson has never been immune to the core frailties of the modern political class. But the way those jackals have pounced on him in a pack is totally out of proportion to his failings.

Like them, Johnson is open to amply justified criticism. He suffers from the systemic maladies of modern politics and adds to them a few touches of his own. Thus he did nothing to undo the constitutional damage done by his predecessors, nor anything to point the economy in the right direction.

But that’s not what is really held against him, whatever his detractors may be claiming. Johnson is hated not for what he failed to do but for what he did, his very tangible achievements.

I’ve now lived in England for 35 years, having moved here from the US two years before the palace coup against Margaret Thatcher. That’s nine prime ministers ago, including Mr Johnson and Mrs Thatcher, as she then was.

And, those two apart, I can’t think of a single one who can boast of any real achievement. Margaret Thatcher was, to me, more personally attractive than Johnson, and her achievements, though not unequivocal, were greater.

However, unlike his predecessors and successors, Johnson will go down in history not only for his failings but also for his accomplishments.

He campaigned on the promise of getting Brexit done, that is complying with the biggest vote in British history. And he broke ranks with modern politicians by actually doing what he had promised to do, restoring British sovereignty, after a fashion.

Keeping that particular promise was unpardonable. That was tantamount to leapfrogging practically the whole political class and landing smack in the middle of the people with their wishes.

Unlike the usual populist demagoguery all modern politicians try on with variable success, that was genuine populism, being at one with the demos. Treasonous behaviour, as far as Johnson’s colleagues were concerned. That alone would have been sufficient to single him out for buckets of vitriol.

Yet there was also that Ukraine business, with Johnson emerging as the first PM in my lifetime with a genuine claim to being a world leader. His outbursts of crusading zeal did much to rally the West to the defence of the Ukraine, ultimately Europe, from Russian fascism.

Johnson is the Western politician Putin hates the most, which at the moment is the highest accolade I can think of. Britain can’t match America’s physical ability to help the Ukraine, but Johnson injected much moral energy into the resistance effort, and in this he was unmatched by any other Western leader.

No doubt his motives were laced with a shot of self-interest; he is a politician after all. Yet one could detect a genuine passionate commitment to an unequivocally good cause – and I can’t think offhand of a single other post-Thatcher PM about whom one could say the same thing.

All this lies close to the surface. However, if we delve a little deeper, we’ll find another layer of resentment against Johnson. His parliamentary colleagues, including those who owe their seats to him, hate his popularity with hoi polloi.

That Labour should feel that way is perfectly understandable: Johnson beat them in one of the biggest landslides ever. Yet even most Tories share such sentiments, which at first glance seems paradoxical. But only at first glance.

For Johnson has always been ready to go over the heads of the political establishment and appeal directly to the people, among whom he was extraordinarily popular. That violated the implicit compact of modern politics: playing the democracy game is all well and good, provided all the cognoscenti never deviate from the knowledge that it’s just that, a game.

Burke insisted that members of Parliament should be the people’s representatives, not their delegates. Today’s lot solve that dichotomy by being neither – they don’t feel obliged to act either according to the people’s wishes or their interests. The people are merely the building blocks of individual political ambitions.

Appealing to them directly is breaking the rules of the game, and anyone who is good at it emanates the putrid aroma of treason to his corporation. He is branded a populist, a term that has become pejorative whereas in fact it encapsulates the very essence of democracy, to which our political class professes its loyalty.

Thus Johnson, though in many ways the flesh of the political class’s flesh, is seen as a maverick. The apparatchiks can’t forgive him his success achieved outside the inner workings of the apparat.

I despise unrestrained populism for any number of reasons, aesthetic, philosophical, historical – you name it. But then I’ve never pledged loyalty either to liberalism or to democracy or especially to liberal democracy. That’s why I’ve never been a particular fan of Mr Johnson.

Yet I recognise his achievements, including one I haven’t mentioned yet. Thanks to his popular appeal, Johnson is the only Tory who can be expected to keep Labour from power.

This is of paramount importance even though the difference between today’s Tories, including Johnson, and Labour is only marginal. Yet margins are important, especially when they separate failure from catastrophe.

The latter will ensue if Labour win the next general election, as every poll predicts they will. The mere anticipation of their victory is already causing economic damage, and they haven’t even won yet.

A survey of 504 business owners with annual revenue of more than £5 million has shown that 40 per cent of them are planning to sell or shut down their companies within the next year. The principal reason cited is Labour’s plan to double the rate of the capital gains tax as part of a general programme to crush private enterprise under the burden of extortionate taxation.

Rather than reversing the Tories’ ruinous economic policies, Starmer’s lot will add nice calamitous touches to them – as they will to all other perverse policies of the current government in every sphere of life.

Hence stopping Labour in their tracks is worth doing, and Johnson strikes me as the only Tory with a sporting chance of doing that. Yet even those Tory MPs who are slated to lose their seats in the next election pounce on him with lupine ferocity.

They do so not in spite of his achievements, but specifically because of them. Johnson is many awful things, but a faceless apparatchik isn’t one of them. For our army of faceless apparatchiks that sin outweighs even their self-interest.

For the time being. When the electoral bomb explodes, they’ll crawl back to Johnson because there is nobody else to crawl to. So he’ll be back, for better or for worse.