The Times and Guardian newspapers, along with the BBC, all last month agreed that the British Prime Minister had provoked ‘fury’ when he had compared the conflict raging in eastern Europe to his own country’s campaign to leave the European Union. In his keynote address to his party’s spring conference, Boris Johnson certainly proved that the weight of those controversies which have lately dogged his administration had not taught him when it might be most sensible to keep his mouth secured very firmly shut.

His supporters may however have been grateful that at least he hadn’t started babbling on about cartoon pigs, launched into passages of schoolboy Latin, told any outrageously obvious lies, or accused the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition of complicity in the failure to bring charges against a notorious pedophile, as these are, after all, the kind of things he tends to say on those occasions when he is given the opportunity to demonstrate his public-speaking prowess.

Speaking at that same conference, his right-hand-man (one might say his quite-far-right-hand man) Jacob Rees-Mogg derided the ongoing police investigation into Mr. Johnson and his senior colleagues’ repeated breaches of their own government’s Covid-19 lockdown rules as ‘fundamentally trivial’ and ‘disproportionate fluff’.  

Mr. Rees-Mogg, a zealous advocate of Brexit, is a major shareholder in a multi-billion-pound investment fund that looks to profit significantly from the UK’s departure from the EU. Indeed, it may also benefit from his own new role as the government minister responsible for ‘Brexit opportunities’ (whatever those may be). This intimate associate of the Prime Minister closely resembles what one might imagine a six-foot-tall praying mantis with the sallow complexion and pinched features of a recently deceased revenant would look like if you decided to dress it in the style of a late Victorian aristocrat on his way to the wedding of a banker friend: which is as much as to say that you might find him a little terrifying if you saw him swaggering towards you in a graveyard on a dark and stormy night.

When, last month, London’s Metropolitan Police announced that they were widening their investigation into those rule-breaking Downing Street gatherings that have provoked the scandal known as ‘Partygate’, extending the net of their questions to a hundred potential witnesses, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith followed Mr. Rees-Mogg in suggesting that this ongoing probe now seemed rather pointless, given that the government had ‘so many other things to deal with’.

Like Rees-Mogg, Mr. Duncan Smith sits on the right-wing of his party, a committed economic libertarian and Brexiteer, with strong views in support of strict controls on immigration. He is a man with the air and charisma of a secretly evil accountant, an urbane serial killer in an unexciting business suit. Last November, it was reported that concerns had been raised over his employment by a company that stood to gain financially from regulatory changes recommended by a government task force he chaired. In this context, it might be observed that the limited extent of the Prime Minister’s reputation for moral probity appears to attract into his orbit, like flies to rotting fruit, a commensurate caliber of allies.

Mr. Johnson has meanwhile been criticized for a recent visit to Saudi Arabia to beg Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to increase oil production, very shortly after that nation had executed 81 prisoners in a single day. He has also been attacked for the Conservatives’ decision not to repay large cash donations from individuals associated with a foreign power he has denounced as inimical to British interests; and a senior member of his own party has said that he ‘cannot believe’ that, against official advice, Johnson himself went so far as to elevate one such individual, whose generous hospitality he has enjoyed, to a seat in the UK parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords.

Last month, a second Foreign Office official came forward to corroborate claims first made in December that Johnson was responsible for the decision in August 2021 to prioritize dogs and cats over people in the British mission to evacuate its former employees from Afghanistan. The Prime Minister has repeatedly denied these allegations, with all the vehemence with which he initially denied charges that he had attended several unlawful drinks parties which he has since admitted to attending.

Early next month, the results of a set of local elections in Scotland, Wales, London, and other parts of England will be viewed by many in his own party as a barometer of Boris Johnson’s ongoing levels of popularity. Also speaking at the Conservative Party’s spring conference last month, the party chairman told the assembled faithful that these polls would represent the start of a two-year election campaign. The latest date for the next full parliamentary election in the UK will be December 2024.

Like his populist soulmate, that fellow rambling narcissist Donald Trump, Johnson has often been considered a so-called ‘Teflon’ politician. However much the ordure of scandal builds up around him, nothing ever seems to stick. He has always seemed to thrive on his notoriety. Reports of marital infidelities and financial irregularities have washed over him like so much water off a particularly disreputable duck’s back. His reputation for personal, professional, and political dishonesty appears only to have enhanced his status in the eyes of his loyal supporters as a loveably charming rogue. Yet his party’s fortunes in next month’s elections may start to change all that.

There are many decent and honorable figures in the upper echelons of his own party whose loathing for their leader has in recent months grown increasingly explicit. They have for more than a decade been infuriated by the growth in Johnson’s grassroots support among that key electoral demographics that are too often dismissed as the ‘blue rinse brigade’ of Tory grandmothers. In recent years, many have also been secretly appalled by how his opportunistic engagements with anti-European sentiment have endeared him to disillusioned white working-class voters in the former ‘red wall’ constituencies of the north of England.

At the start of this year, the British news media had been replete with revelations, escalating on an almost daily basis, as to the government’s propensity to hold booze-fueled parties at the height of national lockdowns, even while their country’s ordinary citizens were unable to visit close family members sick and dying in hospitals and care homes. But events of rather greater global impact have since arisen to distract the UK’s headline-writers from the lawless revelry that engulfed Downing Street during this period of dire national emergency. In fact, if it were not for the crisis in Ukraine, it seems highly unlikely that Boris Johnson’s residency at that celebrated address would persist beyond May; indeed, it might not have even endured this far.

Boris Johnson has been drinking for so long in the last chance saloon of UK politics that he appears to have taken up a permanent residency. In that sense, his continuing incumbency in Number 10 might seem pathetically reminiscent of the persistent presence of that embarrassing drunkard lodged perennially at the far end of one’s local bar, who, from time to time, shouts out incoherently bigoted obscenities, but whom the landlord finds it increasingly difficult to shift. He has become a fixture of British public life, like an unloved but comfortably familiar piece of furniture. He is, in short, the parliamentary equivalent of a scruffy old chair battered and degraded by the unwanted attentions of the big old family dog. And he is also the big old family dog.

But, as he sips his tepid bitter from his half-drained glass (or doggy bowl), stale foam dripping from lips quivering on the verge of blurting out his latest eccentric verbal paroxysm, he must surely realize that all is not entirely as it should be – in truth, that there is something profoundly rotten – in the state of his party, his administration, and his nation. And that this rotten something is him.

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From his failings in leading the COP26 climate conference and his backtracking approach to Brexit negotiations, through to his erratic responses to the critical situations in Afghanistan and Ukraine, this British Prime Minister has hardly distinguished himself in his performance on the international stage.

At the same time, huge hikes in the prices of fuel and food have led Britain into a cost-of-living crisis. Last month, inflation was reported as having reached its highest level in thirty years. Pensions and benefits are set to rise by only half of that inflationary increase; wage growth in many sectors remains even lower than that. The BBC’s Economics Editor has warned that, as the full impacts of ongoing international tensions have not yet hit the consumer price index, ‘the worst is yet to come’. Energy prices are mounting steeply, with the regulator’s price caps having risen this month. The fear of being unable to heat one’s home and feed one’s family is now commonplace and looks set to stay, an endemic feature of the new normal in one of the ostensibly wealthiest countries in the world.

Towards the end of last month, Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered his Spring Statement to a packed House of Commons. Those who had hoped he would reverse plans to increase direct taxation on most working people from the start of this month were sorely disappointed, although his move to raise the income threshold for that tax liability will offer some mild degree of relief when that eventually kicks in, in three months’ time. His reduction in duties on the cost of petrol will provide a quantum of solace to those fortunate enough to be able to afford to drive their own cars, but that level of support has already been overwhelmingly outweighed by continuing surges in global oil prices.

As the BBC pointed out that evening, ‘living standards are set to take the biggest hit since records began’. This gloomy prospect was echoed across the front pages of the following morning’s newspapers. The Times ran with news of ‘biggest fall in living standards since the 1950s’ – and specifically since the age of post-war rationing. The Guardian pointed out that the government’s budget plans would ‘squeeze the poorest’. Even the old Tory faithful, the Daily Express, argued that ‘millions of Britons were left without a helping hand’, while the Daily Mail declared that Conservative MPs feared that these promised tax cuts ‘won’t be enough’.

That day, an influential economic think tank warned that more than a million British people, unable to afford basic necessities, would be pushed into poverty from the start of this month. Later that same week, doctors advised of a resurgence in tuberculosis cases across the UK. The country really was getting back to the austere era in the immediate wake of the Second World War.

During the Chancellor’s address to Parliament, the Prime Minister – sitting on the bench immediately behind him – had been seen to snigger and gurn like a six-year-old, while his finance minister had spoken of the human suffering in the conflict raging in Eastern Europe. Needless to say, this did little to endear him to the cognoscenti of social media.

That same day in parliament, Boris Johnson claimed that the mass-sacking – through Zoom – that week of 800 British workers by a Dubai-based logistical corporation (as part of a strategy to hire staff at significantly below the national minimum wage) had been made possible by a European Union directive. Legal experts have since noted that it was in fact not the directive itself but the manner in which a 2018 Conservative amendment to the legislation had chosen to interpret that particular directive that made this callous and cavalier management tactic possible. Johnson had then added, rather paradoxically, that he nevertheless believed that this maneuver had broken the law. The Leader of the Opposition expressed the views of many British people when he suggested that the Prime Minister might wish to desist from his ‘half-arsed waffle’.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 infection rates have risen significantly since Mr. Johnson declared that the need for coronavirus restrictions was over (at least for England), at the end of February. It was estimated that one in thirteen people were infected at the end of March. His government is now rolling out the fourth round of vaccinations for the elderly and vulnerable; and it is only to be hoped that his almost superhuman levels of optimism do not eventually prove to be as hopelessly unfounded as many members of the country’s scientific and medical communities have said they fear them to be. It is unclear how long his administration’s early successes in its vaccine roll-out will continue to compensate, in the minds of the UK electorate, for his series of delayed decisions and severe misjudgments – both in terms of policy and personal choices – throughout the past two years of the pandemic.

Last week, it was announced that the government would no longer be providing people in England with free Covid tests. It appears the cost is too high. That day, it was also revealed that more than half of the so-called ‘VIP’ suppliers of personal protective equipment stockpiled by that administration during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis (through fast-tracked referrals from ministers, MPs, and their associates) had provided products that turned out to be unusable. Billions of pounds of public money had been wasted. Some businesspeople had been made very rich.

At the same time, the publication of the long-awaited complete version of the official report into Boris Johnson’s rule-breaching party culture is expected to follow swiftly upon the heels of the full outcomes of the related police investigation. It is anticipated that the details redacted from the summary already released (and already highly damning) may prove even more damaging to his prospects of remaining very much longer in his exalted office.

A week ago, the British police announced that an initial cohort of twenty individuals would receive fixed-penalty fines for their involvement in those unlawful gatherings, a clear demonstration that real wrongdoings had, despite all the denials, definitely been done. On 30 March, Boris Johnson still refused to admit that any criminal activities had taken place – even though his Justice Secretary (and Deputy Prime Minister) had confirmed that they had.

The man’s chutzpah does not simply beggar belief. That’s too small a phrase for his brazen gall. Belief is not just beggared: it is now utterly destitute and living, alongside trust and integrity, out on the wretched streets.

We should not however underestimate the British Conservative Party’s capacity for pragmatism. Depending on how disastrous the next few months might prove to be, Tory grandees may choose to wait a little longer to line up his successor, and to install their new figurehead closer to the next general election, in a bid to exploit the narrow window of public goodwill they may hope should result from the appointment to the nation’s highest office of anyone – absolutely anyone – other than Boris Johnson. (We may note that in his Spring Statement the Chancellor announced his plans to cut income tax shortly before the next general election and that this might be interpreted as his first pitch to the party of his prospective candidacy to succeed his boss.)

Nor should we fail to appreciate Mr. Johnson’s own notoriously pig-headed ability to refuse to see the writing on the wall. Of the three monkeys made famous by that old Japanese proverb, he most closely embodies the qualities of Mizaru and Kikazaru: he covers his eyes and his ears to avoid seeing and hearing the truths he seeks to deny. Unfortunately, however, he fails to reflect the wisdom of the third of those mystical monkeys, the silent Iwazaru, who keeps his mouth covered in order to prevent the flow of the awful nonsense it might otherwise inevitably emit.

He is, after all, only a semi-evolved simian, a premier among primates but still a grunting ape. Boris Johnson may choose to bury his head in the sand like an ostrich, but he still manages to strut and squawk his capricious course through British politics like the cockiest cock on the farm, a rooster ripe for the roasting. The time may however come soon enough for the head honchos of his own party to silence him once and for all – to belatedly throttle the bombastic bluster out of his crowing cries.