How Hypocrisy Undid Boris Johnson

The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Conservative who won a huge election victory in 2019 and who delivered on his promise to “get Brexit done,” has seen his share of scandals, but none has caused him as much damage as evidence that he and his staff repeatedly violated their own COVID restrictions. On Monday, a British civil servant released a long-awaited report about the behavior of Johnson and the 10 Downing Street staff, which found that they had hosted numerous parties that violated government policies. At least one took place at Johnson’s apartment. Polls now show that as much as seventy per cent of the electorate is dissatisfied with Johnson. Officials across the political spectrum, including nine members of his own party, have called for his resignation. After the report’s release, Johnson was attacked in Parliament by his Conservative predecessor, Theresa May, who said that he and his staff had not observed “the regulations they had imposed on members of the public.”

To help understand the scandal, and why it may lead to Johnson’s downfall, I spoke by phone with David Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University who contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and hosts the podcast “Talking Politics.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why hypocrisy is often more dangerous than lying in politics, why many Conservatives have turned on Johnson, and what Johnson’s premiership might reveal about the politics of COVID.

How do you understand the precipitousness of Boris Johnson’s fall?

Of course, he hasn’t gone yet, and he may yet survive it, but he is only about two years out from a general election that he won resoundingly. And, when he won that election, for the first time in a long time in British politics, it looked like we had a Prime Minister who was secure in Parliament because he had such a big majority.

So it is a consequence of the pandemic. A politician like Johnson was going against his nature in issuing these rules and governing the country, in the way he was persuaded he had to. And the thing that has got him, I think—and, if he does go, the thing that will bring him down—isn’t the lying. It’s the hypocrisy. So he’s under a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, his political enemies in Parliament are trying to prove that he lied to Parliament. On the other hand, the more serious charge, the one that Theresa May levelled against him in the House of Commons yesterday, is that he thought the rules didn’t apply to him. And that’s what’s killing him.

I know you have written a lot about lying in politics, so tell me: Why is hypocrisy often a bigger threat to a politician than lying?

There is something about lying that appears to be able to go with a kind of sincerity. You can be a sort of sincere liar in that you don’t tell the truth as a politician, but you seem to be who you claim to be—and you don’t pretend that you’re not a liar. The thing that’s so hard for politicians to survive is the sense that they have one moral stance for the public—one way of talking to us, the voters—and then behind closed doors there’s something different. It makes us feel like fools, and the most damaging charge against Johnson in the House of Commons on Monday was a Conservative M.P. who talked of going to his grandmother’s funeral and not being able to embrace others, and not being able to do any of the things he might want to do at a funeral. And he said to Johnson, “Do you think I’m a fool?” Not “Did you lie to me?” but “Do you think that you are allowed to break the rules, and I was a fool for obeying them?” To me, the most toxic and resonant charge against Johnson—and this has been all over the British press—is that he treated the public as though, in a sense, they were stupid enough to follow the rules. And that seems to be the aspect of hypocrisy that is just so damaging for politicians and hard to recover from, because we’re all used to being lied to, but everybody hates being treated as a fool.

If I were to describe the appeal of Johnson around the 2019 election and in his political career more broadly, I would have said that he often behaved as if the rules didn’t apply to him. So I’m a little surprised at how much it’s hurt him. Or do you think that’s the wrong account of Johnson?

No, I think it’s right, but I think it shows that he was a perfect politician for Brexit—which was itself a great act of rule-breaking—but he’s been totally caught out by the pandemic. And this is one of the ways in which he’s very different from Trump. Over the past eighteen months—I suppose for reasons of political calculations, but maybe just straightforwardly because he thought he had no choice—he has been extraordinarily insistent on the rules in a way that has no parallel in his earlier career. He was a cavalier politician, and he’s been on TV, he’s been in Parliament, being serious, being quite pompous, being quite censorious. He’s not been doing it with a nod and a wink and saying, “Well, here are these rules. The doctors say you have to do them, but you know me. I’m not going to mind what you do.” He’s been, for whatever reason, boxed in, including in Parliament. There was a tape that came where his then press secretary joked about the possibility of there having been wine-and-cheese parties. She was doing it in the spirit of Boris Johnson. And he got up in the House of Commons and talked about it as though it was this great moral outrage, and he’d never been so shocked and appalled in his life to see this. I’m sure he wasn’t shocked and appalled. He felt obliged to do it, and now he’s caught. Eighteen months of probably pretending to believe in the rules has left him exposed, now, as a rule-breaker.

I was reading an old essay of yours about political lying, and you say of a certain kind of smooth politician, “But he has all the advantages of someone comfortable in his own skin in a political world where a sense of comfort is what counts.” And I would say that Johnson was always comfortable in his own skin, but the pandemic has forced him to be different in a way that makes him not comfortable. Is that right?

I think that’s right. I was watching him in the House of Commons on Monday, and, my God, he looked uncomfortable—physically uncomfortable. There was a recent interview where he almost broke down in tears when he apologized about having allowed parties to happen the day before the Queen’s husband’s funeral. And it just didn’t look like him.

In my mind, I contrasted it with a debate that happened in the House of Commons in the fall of 2019, after he had prorogued Parliament and then the U.K. Supreme Court had declared that illegitimate. He had to recall Parliament, and he had to stand in Parliament as waves and waves of outrage rolled over him, with Labour politicians saying this was the most disgraceful thing that ever happened, and he’d been caught breaking the law. This was far more serious than these parties, but he was almost comfortable with the outrage. He sensed that it would be good for him in the long run. It showed that he was standing up for Brexit. In contrast with that, on Monday he just had nowhere to turn, because he was caught on this question. There was no plausible defense. There was no public-interest defense. He wasn’t standing up for the British people. He wasn’t defending anything except himself, and suddenly he looked like a different politician. And, whether he can recover from it, I don’t know. He looked a little broken in a way that I’ve never, for instance, seen Trump look.

Can you talk about Johnson’s place within the Conservative Party right now? There seems to be a wing that thinks he has gone too far with lockdowns and might use this scandal to get rid of him.