OPINION: Last month, as Britain went through its preparations for the lavish jamboree celebrating the coronation of King Charles, Huw Pill, the chief economist of the Bank of England, suggested that Britons “need to accept they’re worse off”.
Instead of trying to get wage rises that will maintain high inflation, he explained, we should all just come to terms with the fact that we are poorer. In other words, shut up and enjoy the ceremony.
No politician would ever have said such a thing, because in politics, the promise is always of better times ahead. But the truth is that hasn’t been the case for 15 years, since the banks went bust and Britain went into hock bailing them out. Brexit and then Covid only made a bad situation worse.
Whatever the chief economist says, even Brexiteers now accept that as a country, the UK is going backwards. The British have also lost their biggest booster, or fantasist, depending on your opinion. It’s been nine months since Boris Johnson was forced out of office by his own MPs but his legacy continues to haunt the country and its creaking institutions.
A recent example is the resignation of Richard Sharp, a former Goldman Sachs banker and friend of Johnson, who was appointed chair of the BBC. Sharp was forced to quit the Beeb following an inquiry into a loan that was arranged for Johnson when he was prime minister. The murky details change but the story remains the same. Everything Johnson touches is destroyed or devalued. That is his political legacy.
Of course, errors of judgment are made and rules transgressed in all walks of life, but it’s striking how often they occur around Johnson. It’s as if his most significant contribution to British national life, after removing the UK from the European Union, has been to normalise self-interest and slack practice.
In the same week that Sharp resigned, a book called Johnson at 10 was published by Anthony Seldon, a scholar who has written accounts of British prime ministers’ terms of office for the past 40 years. The books are always well-researched and soberly written, but by common critical consent, none has ever depicted such a dysfunctional premiership as Johnson’s three years in Downing Street.
His estrangement from the truth has been well documented, but what Seldon and co-author Raymond Newell really show is that Johnson also possessed no guiding beliefs. His single, consistent motivating principle was personal ambition. But ambition to do what? To be loved, to be leader. There was nothing else.
He didn’t even really believe in Brexit, and on the morning of the referendum result, he was to be seen murmuring that his side had no plan. In the absence of one, when he became prime minister he appointed Dominic Cummings, a man who held politicians and civil servants in roughly the same regard as Basil Fawlty had for Manuel.
Johnson then set his wife against Cummings and Cummings against his wife. The results were predictably chaotic and self-defeating. In the end, like almost everyone who gets close to Johnson, Cummings had to resign.
The only positive thing that could be said about Johnson’s time at Number 10, aside from his stalwart support of Ukraine, is that his successor, Liz Truss, was even worse. What turns this pantomime into a tragedy is that it has taken place against a backdrop of economic woe and social polarisation.
Now, as the coronation silver is polished and formal suits are pressed, Johnson has gone off to earn millions on the speaking circuit and the nation he governed so ineptly is locked in downward mobility. That is the bitter pill that Mr Pill asks us to swallow.
