Boris Johnson, Christmas Parties, And When Privilege Runs Out

It Ain't Just About Boris

One of the weirder things about this year, on a personal level, is the amount of time I have spent thinking about charity dinners. For a year in which much of the world could not have the usual gala circuit that has often been a staple of wealthy cities and their rich denizens, the idea has been in my mind a lot, both in trying to explain the Global Fucking Realignment, and also in trying to understand the world more broadly better. In some of my writing, both Salvation In The Storm and other work unpublished (for now, at least), the setting has been front of brain for me in a way that I never would have expected it to be. And now, faced with the biggest scandal in British politics since *checks notes* last year, I’m thinking about it again, for one simple reason.

The Tories can’t help themselves, because they have no idea what to do when the clock strikes midnight.

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The Tories chose Boris Johnson to be their next leader in 2019 for one simple reason – he would win the next election, which ended up coming in December 2019. His entire job was to win that election, and he did, delivering an 80 seat majority. He did the job the Tory Party asked him to do. Governing through a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a recovery? That wasn’t supposed to happen, and yet, he was there for it all.

The Tory Party is, more than anything, a creature of the institutions which sustain it, namely Oxford and Cambridge. It’s the party of a very specific kind of wealth, a specific kind of culture, and the culture of the people who are its donors and its benefactors has corrupted the party. In some ways, Johnson embodies both the staid nature of it and the way the party has changed, being the son of a MEP who went to Eton and Oxford before becoming a journalist, MP, Mayor of London, and then an MP again. He has to affect a crazed, insane persona to appeal beyond those roots, but Boris is, at his core, as much a product of his upbringing as David Cameron is of his own – Boris just has no principles, and so he has no problem writing two columns for the Telegraph and deciding the night of whether he wanted Leave or Remain.

Boris is unprincipled in every way, a crook, a liar, a fraud – every adjective you might want to use is true. He’s a charlatan, a disastrous Prime Minister, and leading a political party that deserves to lose the next election. What he also is is beside the point in some ways. This isn’t about Boris, this is about a culture, and a Conservative Party, that has never understood what happens when its privilege runs out.

The act of being wealthy, and of growing up around wealth, is that you’re inured from consequences. When you’ve always known wealth, you always know there’s a way out of whatever problem you have gotten yourself into. If you crash the car as the son of a working class family, you’re in deep shit. If you crash the car as the son of Stanley Johnson, you’re likely to not be in nearly as much shit. It’s the privilege of knowing you’re not living on the edge, and it permeates everything about this week’s scandal.

Am I shocked that No. 10 hosted a number of illegal parties while the rest of England were in lockdown? Of course not. Am I angered by it? Sure, but I ain’t surprised by it. It’s how the world works, rich and powerful people think the rules don’t apply to them, so long as nobody gets caught. You think Super PAC rules in the US, the anti-coordination rules specifically, are ever followed? Of course not, you just need to find some plausible deniability, and the system just moves on. You think these are the only parties or gatherings? Of course not.

The vast majority of Tory staffers, and especially Tory Members of Parliament, have never known consequence in their lives. The Tories thought they could just muddle through the Owen Paterson affair for much the same reason, and while the story of Paterson’s wife is devastating, it is still monumentally insane that the Tories thought they could just jam through a fix for their friend. It is a culture of not understanding that the world does not work the way it has for them, because they do not understand the world, only their bubble.

The problem for the Tory Party is the public have made impossible to contemplate sacrifices in the last two years, and finding out that the Government was fucking around in Downing Street as England was dying of this disease goes down exactly as badly as you’d think it would with the public. Nobody has any patience for this because it is a comically on the nose example of how out of touch the Tories are. And if they think getting rid of Boris Johnson is the answer to their problems, it isn’t.

What about Rishi Sunak, I can hear you ask? Yes, because replacing the Eton-and-Oxford educated Johnson with the Winchester-and-Oxford educated Sunak is really going to improve things for the government, absolutely. Yes, the guy who was gifted William Hague’s old Parliamentary constituency is really the outsider who can break the party. Maybe Priti Patel could, but her star is dimmed right now over her disastrous job dealing with the migrant crisis in the Chanel. This is a problem of a party institutionally broken, because the world they live in is entirely disconnected from the real world.

I started this piece with the concept of the charity dinner circuit, because that is what the Tory Party was built by and for, and now it is a party that is different than that. It is a party that has to appeal to the Red Wall of economic liberals and social conservatives while being a party that is led by a bunch of social liberals who want tax cuts and tax cuts. The large donors to the Tory cause have wanted better access to foreign trade markets, and so the Tory policy on Brexit maximized independent trade policy. It’s not that hard to understand why the Tories are the way they are, but here they are.

They are a party full of people who have never faced a real life or death choice in their lives, and here they are now, unable to even take seriously the biggest crisis since the Second World War. Why they can’t is simple – because they think it’s a crisis hitting other people, and they’d like to continue living their lives. If the Tories dump Johnson, they might rally in the polls a bit, and they might even rally anyways as this story fades. But either way, the fact remains simple – the Tory Party doesn’t know what to do when they can’t just buy their way out of problems, and that might be about to make Keir Starmer Prime Minister.