Politics: The First Page of The Boris Obituary

Boris Johnson has suffered a devastating blow to his credibility which may come to be seen as the moment his demotion from Foreign Secretary became inevitable.

This deeply wounding setback was not another international faux pas by the country’s top diplomat, nor another poll showing that Conservative Party activists have fallen out of love with the entertaining figure who was once their darling.

It was a calmly expressed, carefully thought-through but savagely scathing column by Times journalist Rachel Sylvester, who basically said the man is a joke as Foreign Secretary and it is time for the Prime Minister to remove this national embarrassment.

The Times is no longer the voice of the British establishment but it is not exactly a Left-wing or fringe publication, and unlike many other Fleet Street columnists Rachel Sylvester is a very serious journalist who does not write such things lightly.

Deadly Turning Point

Sylvester was named Political Journalist of the Year at the 2015 British Press Awards and the 2016 Journalist of the Year by the Political Studies Association.

It was Sylvester who ended the prime ministerial hopes of Johnson’s fellow Brexiteer Andrea Leadsom with a single interview, crushing her leadership campaign by revealing that Leadsom was either spiteful enough, or dopy enough, to try to score points against Theresa May from the fact that she has children and May does not.

That was curtains for Leadsom and therefore Downing Street for May, her sole remaining leadership rival at the time, who stunned everybody including Johnson by appointing him to the Foreign Office.

Reviving Johnson’s career after his own leadership campaign had imploded may have been part of a devious attempt to give the most prominent Brexiteers the responsibility for delivering on their wildly optimistic promises about the sunny uplands that would follow Brexit but it handed the Foreign Office to a man who has been sacked by both The Times and Tory Leader Michael Howard for dishonesty.

Sylvester’s most withering point was that Johnson is seen as a frivolous and unreliable lightweight by his own civil servants and almost everyone he deals with on the international stage. On the major diplomatic issues of the day he is either irrelevant, incoherent, ineffective or “all but invisible”, she says, adding that “occasionally he surfaces briefly, like a hostage paraded before the television cameras to prove he is still alive.”

British diplomats and security advisers struggle with Johnson’s limited concentration span and have trouble trusting him with sensitive information, according to Sylvester (below), whose columns are based on heavy reporting rather than glib opinion.

“They think he’s a joke”

Johnson has treated Brexit, she says, like “some kind of public school game rather than a negotiation on which the future of the nation depends.”

“Having fooled the UK into voting to leave the EU, by promising that it would mean an additional £350m a week for the NHS, he has no realistic idea of what Brexit should entail.”

“I’ve just spent a fortnight in America and was shocked by the number of tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers and political strategists I met who asked: ‘Why has your PM appointed a fool as foreign secretary?’ According to diplomatic sources, even officials at the Trump White House ‘don’t want to go anywhere near Boris because they think he’s a joke’. If that seems ironic, one minister says: ‘It’s worse in Europe. There is not a single foreign minister there who takes him seriously. They think he’s a clown who can never resist a gag.’

“Last month he infuriated the French by revealing Emmanuel Macron’s plans for Libyan peace talks, having been briefed about the initiative on condition that he told no one about it. Senior Conservatives blame ‘vanity’ for his inability to remain on message or keep a secret. ‘The French think Boris is totally unreliable, the Germans think he’s a liar and the Italians think he’s dangerous,’ says one well-travelled Tory MP.

“The civil servants in the Foreign Office are horrified by their boss’s lack of discipline and have taken to slipping in to see his deputy Sir Alan Duncan, the Europe minister, when they need a decision. At the intelligence agencies, there is a nervousness about giving sensitive material to a politician who treats every public outing like an after-dinner speech.”

Political historians will almost certainly look back on the Rachel Sylvester column as a very significant moment in Johnson’s career. Downing Street was forced to respond to the column by insisting that Johnson was “doing a good job” and has the “full confidence” of the Prime Minister.

So that seals it – it is just a matter of time before Johnson goes.

 

by Peter Wilson

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