Boris Johnson's Fall Tells Us Something About What Voters Care About
Learning from others' mistakes
Until recently, I had been one-quarter-following the Boris Johnson “garden party” scandal, and I didn’t really get it. “So,” I thought, “you’re telling me that people were drinking when they probably should not have been drinking…in Britain. BRITAIN! The country that’s basically a floating pub that was granted nationhood — you’re saying that in that country people were having social gatherings in which they consumed alcohol in a not-very-responsible way. I REFUSE TO BELIEVE IT.”
The scandal makes even less sense when you factor in Boris Johnson. Isn’t his whole schtick that he’s a fuckup and a scamp? He’s been married several times, has a rugby team worth of kids, isn’t religious, and admitted to having used cocaine — aren’t you at least a little bit scandal-proof once you’ve successfully branded yourself as The Prime Minister Who Fucks? Also, considering that Johnson won in a landslide, delivered on his promise to finish Brexit, and has been getting otherwise-passing marks for his handling of Covid, wouldn’t his popularity before the scandal cause the public to give him a pass?
But now that I’ve learned about the specifics of the scandal, I completely get it. This is poison — Johnson might not survive as PM. Viewed one way, it remains a bit odd; nobody was harmed, there were no negative policy consequences, and the scandal didn’t involve any of the sexy/evil Machiavellian stuff that fuels most episodes of House of Cards. But, viewed another way, the scandal so perfectly offends people’s core sensibilities that it’s obviously an enormous liability. I think the incident is worth examining to hopefully teach us something about how people relate to their elected officials.
Briefly, here’s what happened: In November, reports started coming out that staffers at 10 Downing Street had been having parties in the spring of 2020 when the UK was under strict lockdown. Johnson denied any wrongdoing, and at first, the story didn’t get much traction. It’s worth remembering that much of UK media is a hyper-partisan trash pile — next time you encounter an Anglophile with a superiority complex, remind them that the UK’s top circulating “newspaper” is The Sun, which is like a combination of People Magazine and Swank. In this environment, it was easy for people to shrug and think “who knows what’s true?”
The story exploded in December when a video emerged of Downing Street staff — including Johnson’s then-Press Secretary Allegra Stratton — openly joking about the parties. In a mock press conference (with J. Reinhold!) meant to only be seen internally, Stratton admitted that there were parties and that they violated the rules. Give it a watch — the crucial moment comes right after Stratton laughs and says “This is recorded!”
As it turned out, the media training they really needed was this video:
This brings us to the first thing we can learn: Because cable news and social media thrive on visuals, stories that include video are far more likely to catch fire than stories that don’t. A splashy video brings in people who would otherwise be disinterested. Audio is a distant second-best. If you’re asking people to read, then you might as well be asking them to drink less coffee or floss after every meal, because they’re just not going to fucking do it.
Since that video, it’s been all downhill for Boris. He continued to deny that rules were broken, but details of the parties kept trickling out. One gathering occurred during a period of national mourning following Prince Philip’s death. Another time, a staff member tried to use Johnson’s toddler-aged son’s swing set and broke it, which is not something that sober people do. The media covered the ferrying of booze to Downing Street in a suitcase like they had busted up a spy ring. Some of the details actually made the parties sound quite shitty; this article tells of a laptop placed on a photocopier playing music as if it’s evidence of an epic bash, as opposed to evidence of a deeply lame and perfunctory office party. But no minor exculpatory details can disguise the obviously bad look. The public perception became that Johnson’s staff was partying hard and breaking the rules while the rest of the country was stuck in an austere lockdown imposed by that very government.
A photo soon emerged of Johnson, himself, at a party. The party is outdoors, it’s during the day, and it looks extremely dull — the type of mandatory office “fun” where you eat a $10 sheet cake and show each other pictures of your pets — but even I, an American, can tell that they’re not the required two meters apart. Johnson has been reduced to splitting hairs — what is a “party”, after all? — but a report issued three days ago didn’t help his case. The actual police are investigating; Sherlock Holmes is probably examining a dried patch of vomit with a magnifying glass at this very moment while exclaiming “Watson, this kegger was righteous!” Members of Johnson’s party are turning against him, there might be a vote of no confidence, and Johnson’s best-case scenario is that he could maybe muddle through to the next election with seriously diminished prospects. It’s a staggering fall for a man who was quite recently thought to have a chance at becoming Present Day Margaret Thatcher (Who Fucks).
Part of me thinks that the scandal should amount to a big, fat “who cares?” Johnson and his staff broke Covid rules, and that’s bad. But a lot of people broke the rules, so the punishment should fit the crime, and that punishment should be…I dunno, breaking a toddler’s swing set with your fat drunk ass is pretty embarrassing, so that might be enough punishment right there.
But “who cares?” is definitely the wrong reaction. The British public cares, and I’m constantly preaching political pragmatism, so I need to treat whatever the public cares about as part of the political landscape. And, though I’m American, people are people — yes, even British people are people — so it should be possible to draw lessons from this and learn something about political psychology.
It’s striking to me how gettable this scandal is. “They were partying while you were stuck inside” is a situation that everyone instantly understands; it brings out the 17-year-old-who-didn’t-get-invited-to-the-party in all of us. Processing the injustice requires no prior knowledge or commitment to any abstract principal. I spent much of the Trump era wondering if any of his scandals would stick; it was only in year two or three that I realized no, they wouldn’t, mostly because they were too abstract. It’s just very complicated, you see, to explain that the division between the White House and the Justice Department is important, so when Trump tells Don McGahn to fire the Special Counsel…Jesus, I’m already boring myself. The minute you think “I need a white board”, you’re finished. Prior to January 6, Trump’s worst misdeeds were complex, they were described only in print, they contained no splashy details like a SECRET WHITE HOUSE RECORDING SYSTEM (Watergate) or a splooged-upon blue dress (Bill Clinton), and in hindsight it seems silly that I ever thought there might be mass public outrage over any of them. Probably the only thing that would have turned people against Trump is footage of him being urinated on by a Russian prostitute, which I, personally only see as a scandal if he neglected to tip.
Another important thing to note is that the scandal violates people’s innate sense of fairness. Equal treatment is a hard-wired concept, as vividly illustrated by this research:
I think of this whenever I encounter an issue that tweaks people’s sense of injustice. When I see evidence that people support taxing the wealthy, oppose affirmative action, are enraged by police brutality, or believe that people who get welfare should work, I picture that monkey throwing that piece of cucumber back in the researcher’s chest. When something is perceived as unfair, people react in a visceral way. It might not be completely rational — that monkey could have had the cucumber! — but that doesn’t make it less real.
Finally, this episode demonstrates once again that the relationship between voters and a public official is based on trust. People don’t have time to learn about inflation, Ukraine, supply chains, and a million other things, and even if they did, they don’t have access to the experts, data, and classified intelligence that can inform decisions on those topics. They’re not micromanagers; they want to hire a public official they trust to handle those issues.
But, going one layer deeper: What creates trust? One of the most baffling polls in recent memory was the one that found that voters felt that Hillary Clinton was less honest and trustworthy than Donald Trump. How anyone could be seen as less trustworthy than Trump — who is to lying what Nolan Ryan was to strikeouts — is hard to understand. Clearly, there’s more to trustworthiness than quantity of lies.
And, as many have pointed out: This is far from the first time that Boris has been caught lying. But I think that the nature of this lie was very different. When Johnson was a minister, he lied about an affair, but everybody lies about sex; lying about sex is the only thing that enables us to move through society pretending to be respectable people instead of the disgusting monsters that we truly are. Boris twice said he that wasn’t going to run for office and then did, but that’s a lie nobody believes to begin with; every presidential candidate says “I’m not running, I’m focused on representing the good people of [locality they’re desperate to leave in the rear-view mirror]” right up until the moment that they declare. Johnson lied during Brexit, but lying about policy seems to be pretty much always in-bounds. Something was obviously different this time.
I think what was different was that the deceit was calculated, long-term, and the public was the mark. The staffers in the video are giggling over the fact that they’re pulling a fast one. The dynamic is obvious; they’re the clever elites who can skirt the rules, and everyone else is the dumb sucker. Nothing earns someone’s enmity quite like calling them dumb, and this entire scandal is a long-form exercise in calling the public a dumb bunch of rubes. Boris became complicit in the deceit when he lied about his involvement, but when that picture of him at a party surfaced, there was no mistaking him for anybody else, because Boris happens to like a My Buddy doll who tried to eat himself to death.
Trump is a world historic liar, but he’s authentic. That is: He actually is the (terrible, terrible) person he appears to be. A not-too-bright politician might actually have an inside track to being seen as authentic, because people may be less likely to believe that they’re capable of pulling the wool over their eyes. In contrast, a polished, rehearsed politician (like Hillary Clinton) might more easily be seen as manipulative. After all: What is the difference between “shrewd” and “calculating”? A politician who’s too practiced, too polished, and too perfect is probably at a greater risk of losing people’s trust.
For his entire career, Boris has played the part of a bumbling oaf to disguise the fact that he’s an Eton and Oxford blueblood. This scandal put him decidedly on the side of the elites for perhaps the first time. The public could see their elected officials laughing at them and feel the injustice. I could make an esoteric argument about what voters should care about, and that argument might be thoughtful and persuasive but it would definitely be useless. People get to decide what they care about, and we probably just learned a little more about how most peoples’ thought process works.
Brilliant. The lesson Maurer draws here can be filed for the ages.
I would, however, qualify - or at least question - one small thing. The visceral reaction one has to the video is not because it implies that you, oh dreary member of the hoi polloi, are dumb. It certainly does communicate that. You can feel in your gut. I did. The visceral reaction to the laughter comes from the contempt it communicates for its target, accelerated by the pretense of respect.
Here's an illustration: if a bunch of NBA players who made a show of sponsoring the Special Olympics were shown on video to be mocking the skill and coordination levels of the people participating in the Special Olympics, our visceral enmity would derive from their contempt, not the fact that they are calling people klutzy. People call each other klutzy all the time. They call themselves klutzy. But they typically do so affectionately, or at least sympathetically. To pretend respect, when contempt is the actual relationship, is to invite a severe and punishing rupture of trust.
The extension of Maurer's observation to the opinion patterns of people regarding Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is brilliant. Sam Harris has a wonderful podcast where he talks about Trump's shamelessness. After saying how baffled he had been by the affection Trump commands, Harris explains that his "Eureka" moment came when he saw that Trump's shamelessness conveys - authentically! - his solidarity with the broken and ashamed part in each of us. He doesn't pretend to be a more moral person because... he doesn't think he is. Is there an American alive who can't see that Hillary Clinton considers herself more virtuous than the rest of us?
A final thought: people often wonder that nothing Trump did or said ever really laid him low, and that nothing could. They're wrong. Here's what could: video showing that Trump, despite his professed love for his supporters, has in truth neither respect for them nor concern for their welfare, that his displays of working class solidarity are an act, that he is, in short, a phony populist, a closet elitist. This would end Trump's reign, not a violation of the Emoluments Clause. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where one stands politically, it's pretty evident that no such video is coming. Trump is authentic. In an age of collapsing trust that's an asset that genuinely means something to people.
The thought I'm left with is, slap some red overalls on that guy and he has his costume for the next Halloween rager he throws.