That’s the strange thing about Johnson’s place in history. It is hard to think of a figure at once so ludicrous and so consequential, so abnormal and yet so profoundly influential. His reign was short – his malevolent hangover will last long. He was a politician so incompetent that he could not keep himself in office even with an enormous parliamentary majority, a slanderous press, and a cabinet specially selected for slavish self-abasement. However, it has remade the political architecture of Britain, Ireland and Europe. Johnson’s dark genius was to mold Britain in his own image. Its arrogance has made it a rogue state, openly flouting international law. His frivolity has diminished her in the eyes of the world. His relentless fraud and grossly selfish abuse of power have destroyed its reputation for democratic decency. His bad jokes have made the country he says he loves increasingly indifferent. There is no pleasure in this strange story – not for the majority of Britons, not for Ireland and not for Europe. It was another great English writer, John Donne, who wrote that “If a hill be washed by the sea, Europe is less.” Britain has never been a mere hill, and Europe is indeed less so for its departure. A dense but sensitive network of connections and relationships – with Ireland as well as with the continent – has been severed or badly frayed. As Europe faces two overlapping existential crises (the climate crisis and the invasion of Ukraine), Johnson’s Britain has become a source of further turmoil and uncertainty. The shame is that, for Johnson, all of this is so trivial. His lust for power was real and deep, at least as demanding as his other, more physical appetites. But what exactly did he mean by power? His understanding was always that of juvenile delinquents. On Desert Island Discs in 2005, he spoke of his pleasure in causing trouble, which motivated his falsely anti-European journalism: “What I wrote from Brussels, I found as if I were throwing these rocks over the garden wall and I heard this the amazing crash from the adjacent greenhouse… and it really gave me that, I guess, rather strange sense of power.” It is indeed a strange idea of power. The soundtrack to Johnson’s political career is his crash breaking glass as he throws rocks over the walls of neighbors across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. The manufactured products of Johnson’s imagination – Boris Island, the Garden Bridge in London, the magnificent bridge that was to unite Scotland with Northern Ireland – were fancies whose very grandeur made them infantile. But at least they never happened. It was the destructive side, that pleasure in political vandalism, that became reality – a reality in which Britain looks likely to be trapped for a long time after he leaves. The worst aspect of this is the reckless sabotage of the Good Friday agreement. It is possible to imagine that Johnson was smug enough to believe that both British and EU political institutions were strong enough to withstand his own cynical abuse. But surely even he must have had a basic understanding that peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is a delicate and fundamentally unfinished business. He must have had some idea that this is a place where the ramifications of stirring racial identity politics were all too apparent. But he did it anyway. He deliberately downplayed the problems of the Irish border, comparing it to the line between two traffic zones in London. He dismissed Northern Ireland as the tail wagging the Brexit dog – a pesky appendage, in other words. He played on the delusions of his fans in the Democratic Unionist Party, lashing out at them or abandoning them as the mood took him. He repeatedly lied about the meaning of the protocol he negotiated. He introduced legislation deliberately designed to make Northern Ireland a source of unmitigated conflict with the EU. This accomplished two things. It brought relations between Britain and Ireland to their lowest point for decades. And it delighted authoritarians everywhere. Johnson turned the rule of law and adherence to treaties into another of his bad jokes. On July 1 this year, Johnson tweeted that “25 years ago, we made a promise to the people of Hong Kong. We intend to keep it.” The Chinese embassy in Dublin retweeted a response: “2 years ago, we made a promise in the Northern Ireland Protocol (sic). We are determined to break it.” The terrible thing is that the Chinese were, in this respect, right: Johnson’s behavior gave them license to ignore the obligations they undertook 25 years ago. This is the level to which Johnson has relegated Britain on the world stage, making it fair game for tyrants to taunt. Even while Johnson was doing good by supporting Ukraine, he was also giving Vladimir Putin reason to believe that the West is pretending to believe only in the rule of law. This descent is not only bad for the UK. It is bad for the entire democratic world. Johnson turned one of history’s great democracies into a state in which his own cynicism, recklessness and lack of honor became official policy. In doing so, it has allowed every enemy of democracy to say that it is a hollow system whose rules and values are a fraud. It is not – and there are those who will continue to fight to defend and deepen it. The big question facing Britain is whether it can rejoin this side of the struggle as an honorable, law-abiding and serious presence in international affairs. It is very hard to see a response coming from within the ranks of those who allowed Johnson to make a mockery of their country. The damage done by Johnson will not be quickly reversed – or by those who found it intolerable only when it threatened their own immediate interests.
