Pinnochio Prime Minister
On 21 November, on Conservative Home, the unofficial digital heart monitor of the Tory party, Andrew Gimson reflected on a segment from the television debate two days earlier between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.
When the moderator, Julie Etchingham, posed the question: “Does the truth matter in this election?” Boris Johnson replied: “I think it does.” According to Gimson: “The studio audience, after a moment’s pause to take this in, burst out laughing, as if the Prime Minister had said something which coming from him, sounded preposterous.” He pondered: “Could this be Johnson’s Achilles’ heel? Downing Street knows he has a trust problem — but draws comfort from the fact that all politicians have a trust problem.” Mr. Gimson went on to analyse the connection between truth and trust in politics.
He acknowledged that great leaders are often admired in part because they are seen to be straight with people, “straight” meaning a mix of truthful, honest, sincere and patriotic. He instanced Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher as examples. Of Mrs. Thatcher, he said: “Her conversation rendered the standard English methods of evasion — jokes, paradoxes, understatement, any number of ironical devices which enable one to avoid commitment — unusable.”
Of Boris Johnson, Mr. Gimson wrote: “Johnson is a master of such methods of evasion. In order to avoid answering a serious inquiry on an inconvenient topic, he will launch into a riff on some extraneous matter which is so entertaining that the questioner may not object to being thrown off the scent.”
The last prompts two observations.
First, it reflects more on those questioners than on Mr. Johnson that the former should be so easily satisfied by having their tummies tickled rather than their bellies filled. I venture to suggest that those questioners are generally already recruits for the Johnson cause, so eliciting truth and substance from their engagements with him matters less than just boosting him.
Second, the issue with Mr. Johnson is less that he is evasive (he is, but all politicians are to some degree) than that he tells lies. He doesn’t just fudge the truth, he contradicts it. Most prominent in the recent campaign were his denials, repeated more often than those of Saint Peter, that there would be no checks on goods being traded between the North and Great Britain arising from his exit deal with the EU when the opposite is clearly the case.
But Mr. Gimson finds it hard to be indignant about Mr. Johnson’s lying for two reasons.
The first is a bit of a straw man. “One cannot have an argument with an opponent one dismisses as a liar…. Dismiss Johnson as a liar if you wish, but very soon you will find yourself uninterested in grasping why his message on Brexit appeals to millions of voters who do not think of themselves as Conservatives. Character assassination displaces comprehension.” But we are not faced with so binary a choice as either dismissing a politician for frequent lying or ignoring that lying altogether. Lies are not the whole story but they are relevant to it.
And that is exactly Mr. Gimson’s second point. Leadership debates cannot be settled by an appeal to the facts alone. “The judgements involved in deciding whether or not to trust someone… are far more complicated, and entail trying to reconcile a swirling mass of often inconsistent, moral, historical, psychological and so forth. …voters can allow — or not — for a candidate’s frailties, and may prefer to be led by a Prime Minister who does not pose as a pillar of rectitude.”
The results of the election look like a ringing endorsement of Mr. Gimson’s view. If Boris Johnson has a political Achilles’ heel, it remains undiscovered. Winning the election so comprehensively appears to cover any multitude of perceived sins.
Nonetheless, while a reputation for serial lying may not prevent a politician from being a winner, it is a headwind rather than a tailwind to the journey. Mr. Johnson acknowledged to Ms. Etchingham that truth matters. He does not promote himself as an unalloyed pillar of rectitude but he doesn’t promote himself as a reprobate either. In fact, his evasions and lies often flow from attempting to portray himself as more upright or less venal than we know he really is. He won the election in spite of untruths and evasions rather than because of them.
Moreover, we do not judge political candidates in isolation but by reference to the quality of their opponents. Jeremy Corbyn was as much a blessing to Boris Johnson as Hillary Clinton was a gift to Donald Trump. The winners might not be so lucky next time.
Voters see political leaders as holding positions of public trust to which especially rigorous standards of integrity should apply. Maybe they don’t have to be paragons of virtue altogether but they are supposed to come close. Associated with that perception is a belief that political leaders should adhere to a code of behaviour with reasonably “bright line” thresholds about what counts as compliance or infringement and that breaches of the rules should be subject to sanctions. There might be room for argument over what infringements disqualify a leader as suitable to hold office at all rather than merely calling for a rap on the knuckles. But I suspect the public would prefer to see sanctions erring towards severity over sympathy.
Those perceptions are not easily compatible with the idea that hitting the electoral numbers is sufficient qualification for attaining office and being upright “enough” or “in the round” sufficient to stay there, despite specific moral failings or lapses,
Moreover, the case for a strong code of conduct would seem especially applicable to political “chief executives” like Presidents and Prime Ministers. While they can normally “sack” subordinates at their discretion and the stroke of their pen, they are not normally so easily sackable themselves.
Sacking procedures at leadership level, where they exist at all, are cumbersome. More important, democratic politics is not just a competitive business but a directly antagonistic one. Only one person, party or coalition is in government at a time and the rest are wandering forlornly in the desert of opposition. Part of how the “out” group seeks to undermine and displace the “in” crowd is by striving to knock its leader off his or her perch.
So the ripples from calls for a leader to resign office because of a matter of personal character or conduct extend beyond the health of standards in public office. These are matters of adversary politics as well as good governance. Even if there is consensus on the “facts” of the case, that is only part of the story. The winning or concession of political “points” is also important. Political “chiefs” are as much totems for as leaders of their tribe.
Donald Trump gives every impression of believing that the will and pleasure of the electorate is the only consideration that should determine whether he remains in office; that standards of behaviour beyond this have minimal if any place in the assessment. That approach fosters a banalisation of delinquency which can only corrode public governance.
Mr. Johnson’s large majority allows him a similar immunity. As Mr. Trump might say, we will see what happens.
