Johnson’s traditional repertoire of glibness and bluster... the Conservative leader could not even wriggle with eloquence, let alone defend himself with facts....He flaunted his unreadiness to own the result, withdrawing from the subsequent Conservative leadership race on the day of his campaign launch. He served in Theresa May’s cabinet only for as long as he could be idle in a grand office...Here is a British prime minister building on a formidable reputation for dishonesty, welching on debts, revelling in contempt for legal norms and trashing protocols that underpin democracy....Johnson’s actions are best explained by his congenital aversion to things that are hard..His talent is as a narrator of political myths, casting himself as the hero. His greatest creation is the character called “Boris” who has recruited a devoted following in the Conservative party, much of Britain’s print media and a sizeable chunk of the electorate [hence the Graun worry about a geeralelection?]...Like all theatrical performances, it works by suspension of disbelief.
Then, more broadly:
In part, Johnson is captive to the public school cult of effortless dilettantism that despises diligence as vulgar and swotty.
The problem for us left Leavers is that much of this is completely right. But the soggy liberal Remainer conservative alternative is also dreadful, and the prospect of them winning is awful. They will be convinced they are the masters now,and Guradina values will triumph throughout the land. Talk about politically homeless!
A Chakrabortty seems much closer to the issues:
the public protests across the country against all this are not especially large; away from the keyboard warriors of social media, the mood is not particularly restive...two fellow passengers, “ladies in their late 60s or early 70s”, looked out at a march against Johnson’s coup and loudly advised the driver to run them over. Yesterday, while the world’s media camped out on College Green for wall-to-wall chaos coverage, another friend posted on Twitter from a dentist’s waiting room in Newcastle. “Three Tory MPs debating Brexit on BBC News channel. Nobody watching.”
Chakrabortty delivers his insights via a poem by WH Auden!
Some of this indifference is both eternal and welcome... If today’s residents of Downing Street can so easily gut our democratic institutions, it is largely because many of those institutions long ago lost their importance to the public. In his own pseudo-bumbling fashion, Johnson is taking a leaf out of the book of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro: he is deliberately outraging the norms that have governed politics and society, safe in the knowledge that for much of his electorate those conventions have already rotted away to useless totems.
Democracy, argued Crouch, “thrives when there are major opportunities for the mass of ordinary people to participate”....Crouch warned of a public habituated to a “negative activism of blame and complaint”, no longer interested in formulating constructive demands – but merely demanding some MP’s head on a pikestaff.
But the post-democratic order he saw taking shape was “a tightly controlled spectacle managed by rival teams of professional experts in the techniques of persuasion”, in which the interests of multinationals and big businesses would always trump “the political importance of ordinary working people”, especially with the withering away of unions.... “retail politics“, parties touting their “offer“ and the apparatus of marketing.
The public will not be moved by finagling in parliament or cases put forward by well-intentioned lawyers – important as both are. ...Real democratic renewal will not come through Westminster manoeuvring, or new pieces of legal text, but through building serious and sturdy new institutions.
Chakrabortty argues that the Labour Party should lead this renewal:
providing advice to voters, not just members, on welfare, housing and employers. It means acting to collectively procure cheap utility deals. It means laying on classes in how politics and economics work and why they matter.
Still no plan to revive unions -- but a nice if limited return to the dear dead days. Meanwhile, his own newspaper offers this as a contribution to democratic renewal:
Lizzo is '100% that bitch' … but can she trademark it?
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