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| A recent Private Eye cover sums it up |
One of the creepiest things I have seen recently was our new Prime Minister Boris Johnson sitting with his new cabinet leading them in a chorus of what they were going to do – build so many hospitals, recruit so many nurses, exclude so many immigrants. They all seemed well rehearsed and knew the numbers which they dutifully chanted in reply to Boris’s promptings. All that was missing was a chorus of “for he’s a jolly good fellow…” Yuck. Pass the sickbag.
There are two types of people who are loyal to you – the unquestioning loyalist and the questioning loyalist. The first tells you how great you are, while the second is not afraid to suggest how you might do better. One praises your decisions. The other suggests you change them.
One thing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have in common is that they prefer the unquestioning loyalist. The list of those whom Trump has appointed and then fired is long. Even his Attorney General William Barr, who seemed only too willing to do his bidding on all matters legal, has now said that Trump constantly tweeting about injustices meted out to his supporters and preferential treatment towards his enemies by the legal system is making his job ‘impossible’. Just when you thought he was a total flunkey he seems to have shown that he can think for himself. The future does not look bright for Barr and his newly acquired backbone.
To give them their due, both Trump and Johnson know how to work a room. This is a skill all successful politicians have to master, particularly in the USA where public appearance counts more than private competence. Clinton (Bill, not Hillary) and Reagan both had it; the younger Bush somewhat surprisingly had it in a folksy kind of way whereas the older Bush did not; JFK and Obama had it in a lofty kind of way, appealing to people’s higher instincts. LBJ had it but, I think, lost it as people kept asking him how many babies he had killed that day. You need a sympathetic audience to make an effective speech and Johnson lost his as a result of Vietnam. This is surely why he decided not to run for president a second time and retreated into himself in later years.
Trump is not the retreating type. He has the skill of whipping up people who troop out to listen to him, knowing which buttons to press to galvanise them: “Build that wall! Keep those guns! Dig that coal!” It may not be subtle it sure brings people out to vote for him. You can have the best policies – and all the money – in the world but you need to sell yourself to potential voters if you are going to succeed in politics, which is increasingly a branch of show business. Trump knows this and passes himself off as a shrewd businessman, even if he went bankrupt several times and has a record of not paying his bills. However, he was successful on reality television which is where he learned his trade.
It seemed for a while that Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York who had built up a genuinely successful business and made far more money than Trump ever did, would be best placed to defeat him. If I was American I would probably vote for him simply as a way of getting rid of Trump but he does not have Trump’s ability to whip up a crowd so it is unlikely he will succeed against him. Bernie Sanders does but, being an elderly left-winger who has suffered a heart attack is probably too vulnerable a candidate to take on Trump’s propaganda machine. Just think how they will portray his honeymoon in Moscow in the mid-west. Truth matters very little in propaganda wars.
Americans tend to re-elect their presidents, unless those same presidents face significant opposition from within their own parties as Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior both did. Trump has made sure that no-one survives on his watch without showing unquestioning obedience to him and his whims so there is zero chance of any significant Republican standing up to him. Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to vote to impeach him for a crime he had obviously committed in Ukraine and immediately the attack dogs moved to undermine him. Romney is (I almost wrote ‘was’) one of those decent but dull politicians who failed to win the presidency until the right in America decided that they would back a winner in Trump. At least he could win contests by bringing people out to vote.
In the same way Boris Johnson now is ruler over all he surveys, the British Conservatives realising that he is someone people will vote for. We do not seem to mind a posh public school type like Boris as our leader. The very use of his first name, which is not what his friends and family know him by, gives that away. He may be a rogue but he has convinced people he is a lovable one, so people turn out to vote for him, even though his sexual history would until quite recently have disqualified him from office in the party of the family.
Boris laps up the adulation but he does not deal well with dissent, so Jeremy Hunt, Angela Leadsom, Rory Stewart and now Sajid Javid have all been shown the door, some encouraged to jump, others pushed out. There is nobody near Johnson now who looks like he can either stand up to or succeed him. This cannot be good either for the government or the country. We need questioning loyalists near our leaders, not just yes men - or women.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
