Is Boris Johnson really Britain's Trump?
Cas Mudde
Both are loudmouthed man-children, whose professional
success is a combination of immense privilege, unscrupulous opportunism, and
relentless self-promotion
@casmudde
Wed 24 Jul 2019 07.00 BST Last modified on Wed 24 Jul 2019
07.02 BST
The United Kingdom has a new prime minister, again, roughly three
years after Theresa May took over to clean up David Cameron’s Brexit mess. The
new PM is Boris Johnson, one of the many European politicians to be portrayed
as a local equivalent of the US president Donald Trump in the US media. This
time, however, the similarities are indeed striking.
Both are loudmouthed man-children, with a history of
adultery and other scandals, whose professional success is a combination of
immense privilege, unscrupulous opportunism, and relentless self-promotion, all
happily promoted by a complicit media environment. They share an “unorthodox”
approach to politics as well as a “tell it like it is” communication style –
media euphemisms for reckless opportunism and a combination of homophobia,
racism and sexism.
While Trump mainly lies about himself, from his richness to
the size of his inauguration crowd, Johnson mostly lies about the European
Union. After first being fired by the Times (of London), for making up a quote
from his godfather (historian Colin Lucas), he was quickly picked up by the
Daily Telegraph as its EU reporter. From Brussels, where his father had served
as a Member of the European Parliament and a top Eurocrat at the European
Commission, Johnson filed report after belligerent report bursting with lies
and myths about alleged EU regulations and scandals, eagerly repeated by the
Eurosceptic elites and masses.
Like Trump, Johnson’s
'gaffes' … include a litany of racist, homophobic, and sexist statement
Writing for the paper-of-record for the Conservative party,
it set him up perfectly for a political career in a party that was increasingly
moving away from Brussels. For years the MP for Henley in Oxfordshire used his
Daily Telegraph column to advance his political career, something he continued
to do as he was launching his campaign as the next leader of the Conservative
party – and, by extension, the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Like Trump, Johnson’s “gaffes,” another media euphemism
almost exclusively reserved for upper-class white men, include a litany of
racist, homophobic, and sexist statement, from referring to Africans as
“piccaninies” with “watermelon smiles”, to Muslim women wearing burqas as “bank
robbers” and “letter boxes”, to gay men as “tank-topped bumboys” and to female Labor
MPs as “hot totties”.
However, there are also important differences between the
American president and the British premier. Trump was actually elected by a
much larger percentage of the population than Johnson. While Trump lost the
popular vote decisively against Hillary Clinton, he was at least elected by
46.1 % of the voting population. In sharp contrast, Johnson was chosen by the
membership of the Conservative party, which accounts for roughly 0.02% of the
British population. This makes Johnson’s electorate not just smaller than
Trump’s, but also even older and whiter.
And while the two share a remarkable flexibility in terms of
policy positions, Johnson is much more solidly Conservative than Trump is
Republican. Both politically and socially he is the product of an elitist
upbringing that is uniquely British and Conservative. As Simon Kuper has so
brilliantly described, Johnson is a perfect example of the public schoolboys
that brought us Brexit (confusingly, private schools are called public schools
in the UK).
This is not to say that Johnson is any less a loose cannon
than Trump, but he is much more a professional politician. He is also,
professionally and socially, fully connected to the British political and
social elites – consequently, unlike Trump, Johnson does not really have a chip
on his shoulder about being scolded by “the elite”. His support is therefore
much more partisan and much less charismatic – in Trump’s terms, Johnson could
not kill someone at Oxford Circus and get away with it.
In short, Boris Johnson is probably as close to a European
Trump as you can find – just as Britain is the most American country in Europe.
But Johnson is ultimately British, just as Trump is essentially American. He is
a product of a specific elitist class culture, steeped in privilege and
tradition, to which he has both an allegiance and responsibility.
It is this rootedness in Britain’s elite culture and society
that propelled him to power but that will also lead to his downfall. Unlike
Trump, who is largely a one-man movement that captured an establishment party
with an increasingly anti-establishment electorate, Johnson is the voice of
both the establishment and the anti-establishment. And it is this dependence on
both elements of the Conservative party, which he perfectly embodies in his own
schizophrenic political career, that will make it more likely he goes down into
the history books as the shortest term prime minister rather than the prime
minister who delivered Brexit.
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