Johnson’s tragic fate: to have taken the throne only to be robbed of all power

The way Britain's constitution is set up, not much can get in the way of a prime minister in full command of parliament. The system was famously described as “elective dictatorship” by Lord Hailsham in the 1960s (although the term was not his original coinage). That power is now in Boris Johnson's hands. What is he doing with it all?

The prime minister's party is subserviently grateful for its 80-seat majority. Tory MPs elected last December in former Labour strongholds attribute their victories to the “Boris effect.” Old-timers in safe seats know they might easily be in opposition if forced to rely exclusively on the stale, unloved Conservative brand. Tories are in a loyal mood and the opposition hasn't got the numbers to cause legislative mischief.

Besides, parliament is currently operating at half-steam, constricted by social distancing. Scrutiny is hard to apply by conference call. Emergency legislation giving the government extraordinary powers over every aspect of the nation's economic and social life has been nodded through. Downing Street reigns supreme.

That institutional vigour has additional cultural momentum. Even before the pandemic struck, there was probably some appetite for national coalescence after years of hyper-partisan aggression around Brexit. When the country was then plunged into an emergency the automatic gravitation of support to incumbency kicked in. Political scientists call it “rallying round the flag.” That effect is not indefinite, but it appears still to be shielding Johnson from serious polling damage that might otherwise have been inflicted by Covid-19.

Even the most generous analysis would find the government's handling of the situation inconsistent. The highest death toll in Europe invites harsher judgment. But Johnson's own tussle with the virus also gives him a certain immunity, as if he briefly became the personal incarnation of a national trauma. He isn't quite the centre of a personality cult, but he enjoys a lofty position over the rest of politics that few of his predecessors have experienced and none have sustained for long.

There is a catch. Johnson's power is vastly inflated by the crisis and strangely circumscribed by it. Debate in recent weeks has been consumed by the question of how and when to ease lockdown restrictions. The prime minister has decided whether people should be allowed to visit garden centres; how long they might be allowed to walk in parks; how many centimetres apart they should stand. Crucially, the basis on which these decisions are made is supposed to be scientific. Ministers insist their actions are guided by experts and, even if No 10 is selective in the expertise it follows, the range of choices is limited to what is known about the behaviour of the virus. For now, no one has enough information to draw any conclusions with confidence.

Johnson is making pseudo-totalitarian adjustments to the everyday lives of British citizens—simultaneously intrusive and unrelated to any ideological project of his own. He can only hope the choices he makes do not generate increased infections, then wait to see what happens next.

Like everyone else in Westminster, the prime minister is used to thinking of politics in terms of human agency. Most news events are defined by conscious actions undertaken by people. Or at least, to move events along, politicians can do things. They act, and then their rivals act differently, and from the iterative process of all that action the national story unfolds.

Johnson is particularly attached to that mode of thinking because he subscribes to the Great Man school of history. He believes not just that individual decisions shape the destiny of nations but also that destiny has cast him as one such individual. But coronavirus doesn't play by those rules. It is not a Hitler to his Churchill or Napoleon to his Wellington, capable of being out-manoeuvred. It has no motives worth anticipating, other than the evolutionary drive to self-replicate. And it certainly will not yield to the conventional weapons of domestic political warfare. It cannot be banned or campaigned against. The only way to get the better of it is scientific research, driven by the collection and analysis of reliable data, which all takes time.

There is plenty for the government to do in the meantime in terms of public health and the economic impact of the pandemic, but it is mostly a reactive and managerial project. It is all technical, uncertain and fraught with risk. Much of what is done today is vulnerable to being proved unwise in hindsight.

None of that suits the swashbuckling, heroic idiom in which Johnson has narrated his own story. By a cruel twist of fate, the man who always fancied himself as a supreme leader is cast in precisely that role by a crisis for which his style of leadership is uniquely unsuited. The stars have aligned to give him every power that British politics could bestow on a prime minister, and then also to take away his control over events.

By the time events have released him from that bind, the political capital he had amassed at the start of the year will have degraded. The financial aftermath of the pandemic might not be characterised by a spirit of forbearance and solidarity. There will eventually be an audit of government mistakes and the human cost incurred, by which point Downing Street's current immunity from blame will be weaker, maybe lost.

Things might still come good for the Tory leader. Betting against the Boris effect has not paid well in recent years. His party and the Brexit cause have benefited from the Midas touch he brings to any political contest. But it is worth remembering that greedy Midas's fate was to starve when his gift turned even food into gold. He got what he had always wanted, but then suffered for it because his special powers could not be adapted to practical circumstance. It is still too early to predict how Johnson's reputation will weather the pandemic, but it is not too soon to observe the extraordinary position in which the virus has put him: a dictator with nothing to dictate, all-powerful and impotent.