What a difference a day makes. On Tuesday, Boris Johnson had been in his comfort zone. The Mr Bright Side telling the Commons more or less what it wanted to hear and getting little pushback even from opposition MPs. The saviour releasing the country from months of hibernation. Trusting everyone to still observe the essentials of social distancing even while they were getting pissed in newly-opened pubs and bars.
Prime minister’s questions, though, exposes Boris’s fallibilities. Not because he is too lazy to properly prepare and isn’t nearly as clever as he imagines himself to be – though both of those things are true – but because the very idea causes his psyche to go into meltdown. Johnson is the narcissists’ narcissist. He believes in his inalienable right to do whatever he pleases. Even the merest hint of a challenge is an insult to his fragile ego.
Someone more self-aware might realise that the coronavirus is nowhere near half-done. That mistakes have been made and others may well be in the future. That the pandemic can make fools of anyone and a degree of humility might be in order if he is to keep the country onside in the weeks and months ahead. People can forgive a lot if they feel they aren’t being taken for mugs. But for Boris any admission of failure or liability is a psychological impossibility.
Asking Boris to take responsibility for his own actions is pointless. He just can’t do it, because he is the centre of his own universe, locked into his own closed system of thought. What he wants he must have. So it follows that whatever he does must automatically be right. People who disagree with him or are no longer useful to him are easily discarded as inconveniences.
The trouble is that Boris can dump wives, mistresses, ministers and friends but he just can’t get rid of Keir Starmer. For the first time in his life, Johnson has come up against an immovable object. And rather than accept the inevitable, Boris has merely allowed himself to regress.
Initially he saw the Labour leader as a mild inconvenience – an unwelcome intrusion into his alternative reality – but, after discovering that he couldn’t make him go away with mockery, a few cheap gags and by trying to turn the session into an interrogation of Starmer, his feelings have turned to hatred. Keir has got under his opponent’s skin. Somewhere in Boris’s subconscious he knows that Starmer is both better briefed and a great deal sharper and he can’t bear it. So all he can do is lash out, flailing wildly, tilting at windmills.
Part of Starmer’s skill is to keep things simple. His questions have a logic that even a 10-year old can follow. It’s just a shame that Boris is still stuck in the toddler age of development. The Labour leader began by pointing out that easing restrictions was all very well providing that the track-and-trace system was functioning properly. Which at present it wasn’t as it was missing two-thirds of cases. So how did the government propose to get it working properly by 4 July? Boris was outraged. How could the person who had offered him cautious support the day before dare to now challenge him on the detail? That was the kind of disloyalty only he was allowed.
The Labour leader just kept plugging away. This wasn’t obstruction, it was constructive criticism, he observed, as he reiterated the point that he was quoting from the government’s own data and wasn’t interested in the one-third of the system that was working. He then moved on to the app that had been downgraded in the past few weeks from critical and world-beating to “additional support” before observing that the prime minister had misled the house on the child poverty figures last week and would he mind correcting himself. Just for the record.
All that Boris had to offer was histrionics and lies. Gestures of feigned “What me Guv?” innocence, combined with blatant untruths. Boris still labours under the impression that if you tell a lie often enough then it somehow becomes true. But what might work on the campaign trail on the side of buses just doesn’t cut it when you’re supposed to be the prime minister during the greatest health crisis for a century.
We reached full-on meltdown shortly after Johnson claimed he had never said the app would be anything other than “icing on the cake” – since Boris begins each day as a tabula rasa, he must think the rest of us are equally amnesiac – when he went back to the tactic of asking Starmer about schools that had been moderately successful the week before. Only this time it failed dismally as Starmer had long since answered it.
The few dozen Tory backbenchers in the chamber kept their heads down. They were as embarrassed as Boris would have been had he the capacity for that level of empathy. It’s slowly dawning on most Tories that Boris just isn’t up to the job as they witness their leader unravel at PMQs week after week. Nor do many have much faith in his ability to make the right calls at the right time with the pandemic. And having used up what little goodwill he might have had – Boris has never bothered to conceal his contempt for most, make that all, of his colleagues – his support is dwindling.
Too many more PMQs like this and something will start to give. And as Boris is incapable of change, then it can’t be long before his suitability for the job comes under scrutiny from his own party. It was probably always inevitable that the person who would ultimately destroy Boris was Boris himself. But Starmer is doing a great job of exposing his faults. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/24/boris-the-narcissists-narcissist-flails-wildly-as-pmqs-exposes-cracks
