Oborne makes an important point which illustrates what really drives Johnson and his co-Brexiteers: While there is no doubt that Johnson is both deceitful and amoral, the Prime Minister’s war on the truth is part of a wider attack on the pillars of British democracy: parliament, the rule of law and the civil service. There is a reason for this. Truth and liberal democracy are intertwined.
If a nation wishes to call its government to account, it needs access to objective truth, to verifiable facts. When that access is destroyed by an unassailable executive, there is the danger of an authoritarian government in the guise of democracy. Poland and Hungary have shown the way. Oborne believes that the UK government has already crossed that line, and he is not alone in thinking this. The Johnson government has long wished to weaken the British justice system’s ability to monitor the executive.
The crucial question now is who should publicly address these attacks and repel them. But British democracy is poorly equipped against attacks of this kind. Unlike in the US, where the Trump era has (for the time being) ended, there is no formal system of checks and balances in the UK, no coherently written, codified constitution that can be applied in times of crisis. Instead, the British constitution is a fragile fabric of conventions, age-old rules and precedents, with no clear framework to determine what applies when, and by whom it is decided. So far, it has worked according to the “good chaps principle”, that is, the assumption that politicians with moral integrity would interpret the essence of this muddle correctly. The British are ultimately dependent on the goodwill of the government they have elected. A prime minister who deliberately chooses not to adhere to the rules and spirit of this unwritten constitution, or who even seeks to actively undermine its principles, is an unforeseen circumstance with no effective remedy.
Annette DittertA more sober analysis of Boris Johnson’s term in office as British Prime Minister – though written around a year ago, it hasn’t lost its significance. Behind the appearance of a fool, Johnson has consistently undermined the rule of law in Britain to maintain and amass more power for himself. Even as he was losing party support, with his ministers resigning en masse and among revelations of private meetings with an ex-KGB agent, he was clinging to his position, and now is apparently telling aides that he’ll return as PM within a year – classic signs of an aspiring autocrat with no respect for democracy or the rule of law.
Not to overly concern my friends in the States, but Boris Johnson was born in New York so don’t be surprised if he runs to be US President one day…
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 7, 2022
Between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, these past years have been a constant lesson on how fragile democracies can be if concentrated forces conspire to delude the electorate and to dismantle democratic norms – all the more vulnerable when you have a constitution designed two and a half centuries ago, like the United States, or simply a set of unwritten rules, like the UK.
Brexit is going to screw the UK for years in a way I never imagined: it's created a culture in which the country's current leaders and their party cannot actually tell the truth about quite a lot of things that matter, and therefore cannot truly fix them
— jon henley (@jonhenley) July 26, 2022
And so it is not unthinkable that Johnson will end up being the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and will instead go down in history as the uncrowned king of a democratically dubious Little England. In retrospect, British democracy would then have been nothing more than what it already is for many of its critics, due to its vulnerable, unwritten constitution: a beautiful illusion that worked brilliantly as long as everyone wanted to hold on to it.
The final paragraph of the article is an apt observation, which could be applied to any system of governance to some extent, and it reminded me of one of the memorable quotes from the Dune series:
Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
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