There is a distinctively unreal tone playing in the air waves surrounding the melodramatic saga of Boris Johnson’s likely election to the leadership of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If this is what eventually comes to pass, so be it.
Time for a reality check, one hopes. Yet Johnson’s reign – or Jeremy Hunt’s for that matter – may well not see the year out, and then what?
Have a look back at the fate of previous Tory Party leaders whose rocky parliamentary roads came to fairly ignominious ends: William Hague (a four-year term), Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard (two years a piece) and now the remorseless Theresa May (three years).
Tory leaders come and go; only Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron lasted the course as prime ministers before circumstances changed and they were either ousted or stepped down.
It may well be the case that in viewing the jockeying for position in the current race the Brexit debacle will collapse under its own weight, certainly if one considers the leadership qualities of those who see themselves as ‘contenders’. Reading a recent report in The Irish Times, ‘Johnson in pole position as vote far exceeds most optimistic expectation’ (Denis Staunton, World News, June 14th) the accompanying image of Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House until her resignation, displaying a piece of paper with ‘Bollocks to Bercow’ [the Speaker of the House of Commons] is a sad reflection of the quality of intellectual and political engagement of the higher echelons of the Conservative Party.
It makes one wonder how on earth political discourse has slumped to such a low level in barely twenty years, and with so much at stake. Nightly on TV screens pro-Brexit Tories waver between super-confidence and belligerence about their country’s future. It looks fairly certain that under a Johnson administration things are only going to get worse in terms of chutzpah as key ‘Brexiteers’ get their payback.
Just imagine this kind of carry-on in the context of the fraught and epoch-changing discussions which ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement?
The emptying out of intellectual and cultural leadership within the Conservative Party, with its lack of diversity, the apparent ignorance on basic history (Irish) and geography (British and European) of several of its leading spokespersons and the dumbing down of language, does not bode well under (even a short-lived) Johnson premiership, particularly given his own track record.
Perhaps following in the footsteps of president Trump’s Republican party anything goes in the Tory Party, with a responsible civic language and sense of reality reduced to near-view sloganizing as political ideas are reduced to a tweet.
In terms of Ireland, it could well mean a unilateral and slow withdrawal from the complex moral and economic compromises and arrangements that made, with all its blemishes, the Good Friday Agreement produce peace and stability. Might it be left to shrivel on the vine?
No wonder it is hard to take seriously or believe in a single word we are hearing (or seeing) in the partisan and introverted ‘debate’ taking place on the other side of the Irish Sea.
Maybe, indeed, this really is not about Brexit anymore; but about the standard and nature of the parliamentary democracy we thought we had shared since 1998 and what we should expect in the years ahead.
Gerald Dawe is a Belfast-born poet. He was professor of English and fellow of Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 2017. He has published twenty collections of poetry and literary criticism, including most recently, The Last Peacock and The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland.
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