The U.K. is now about halfway through the difficult negotiations to extricate itself from the European Union, and, since the turn of the year, Theresa May’s Conservative government has been increasingly beset by uncertainty and discord about how best to proceed. The euphemisms employed to describe the points of disagreement shift constantly, but the latest schism is between those who want Britain to remain “closely aligned” with the E.U. after its departure, in 2019, and to follow many of its rules, and those who wish for “divergence”—clear blue water. This division runs through both the Conservative and Labour parties, and extends to Downing Street, where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, wants to protect the economy by maintaining many of the E.U.’s regulations, whereas the Cabinet’s Brexiteers crave something more heroic. The Prime Minister, as is her style, says little. The result is that, at any given moment, the government’s Brexit’s strategy can appear rather fantastical, containing elements that make everyone happy but that also cannot actually exist.
On February 5th, for example, Downing Street confirmed that the country would be leaving not only the E.U.’s Single Market but its Customs Union as well. Logically, this would require a physical frontier between the U.K. and the E.U., on the island of Ireland. But, given the bloody history of Ulster, this would be a disaster for both countries, so members of the House of Commons have recently been hearing from experts about the viability of having an “invisible border.” The mind-bending goes on: in order to compensate for the U.K.’s departure from the Single Market, which accounts for forty-three per cent of British exports, the nation will also pin its hopes on a “post-geography trading world,” according to the minister for international trade, a Brexiteer named Liam Fox. This is in defiance of an economic reality that trade in all its forms decreases with distance, a phenomenon known helpfully as “the gravity effect.” And finally, when confronted, last month, with evidence compiled by its own civil servants that Britain will be worse off in every plausible scenario upon leaving the E.U.—to the tune of five per cent of G.D.P., or a hundred and thirty billion dollars per year, in a moderate case—the government rejected the analysis because it had not considered the “bespoke” Brexit that only it is seeking and only it understands.
It is easy to get confused and despondent in such an atmosphere, and so this week Boris Johnson, who is probably Britain’s most recognizable politician, and easily its most ambitious, was assigned the first of six “Road to Brexit” televised speeches to be given by Cabinet ministers in order to reassure the nation. Johnson, who is fifty-three, was a journalist before entering politics, in the late nineties, and the mayor of London for eight years before becoming the disheveled, chummy face of the official “Vote Leave” campaign, in 2016. He models himself self-consciously on Winston Churchill and Britain’s other great hacks-turned-politicians, and, in the immediate shock of the referendum result, when David Cameron, a contemporary of Johnson’s at Eton and his eighth cousin, resigned, it briefly looked like he would become Prime Minister. But Johnson fell out with Michael Gove, another leading Brexiteer, leaving the way open for May to enter Downing Street.
May made Johnson her Foreign Secretary, partly to keep him out of the country much of the time, but his influence on her government and its magical thinking about Brexit remains strong. In a column for the Daily Telegraph written three days after the vote, Johnson sketched a gleaming future for Britain outside the E.U., in which the U.K. would maintain all the best parts of being in the bloc (the freedoms and economic integration) while shedding the worst (the onerous rules and regulations). “This will bring not threats, but golden opportunities for this country,” he wrote. This was later condensed into a Johnsonian quip. “Our policy is having our cake and eating it,” he told the Sun, in September of 2016. Everywhere except London, where it is obvious that the rules of the E.U. are precisely what allow for its freedoms—that you can’t, in the German version of the phrase, “dance at two weddings”—this has become a joke. Last fall, as Britain made a series of concessions in the first round of Brexit negotiations, the European Council President, Donald Tusk, said, “This shows that the philosophy of having cake and eating it is finally coming to an end. At least I hope so.”
But Boris is—as the old boys’ phrase goes—good value. He enjoys writing speeches and giving them. He has favorite words, such as “glutinous,” which he uses wherever possible. Ahead of this week’s speech, morsels were carefully shared with the press. We were told that this would be a hopeful, inclusive, liberal vision for Brexit. It would also cheer everybody up. “If pessimism was a disease, Boris Johnson would be immune,” Conor Burns, the Foreign Secretary’s parliamentary aide, told the BBC.
On Wednesday morning, Johnson took a car to drive the couple of hundred yards from the Foreign Office, in Westminster, to the Policy Exchange, the right-of-center think tank where he was due to speak. This was to avoid the journalists who were waiting for him on the street and a group of young-looking anti-Brexit protesters, who were waving E.U. flags and shouting down from a balcony next to the building’s entrance. (Two out of three voters under the age of thirty-four wanted to stay in the E.U.) While he was being introduced, Johnson mouthed “Good morning” to people and practiced one of his trademark facial expressions—a kind of crumpled peer into the crowd—and mussed his already mussed hair. His speech, which was about thirty-five minutes long, took the vaguely Socratic form of a response to a woman who had recently come to Johnson’s office in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, the constituency he represents in West London, worried about the future of Britain. “She felt so downcast, she said, that she was thinking of leaving the country, to go to”—he waited a beat—“Canada.”
Johnson’s rhetorical answer to the “Remainer” (or “Remoaner,” as the forty-eight per cent of voters who rejected Brexit are sometimes called in the right-wing press) came in three parts. First, he dismissed the idea that leaving the E.U., with its coördinated arrest warrants and judicial systems, would make Britain or the continent any less secure. “Our commitment to the defense of Europe is unconditional and immovable,” Johnson said. Next, he addressed the fear that, by removing itself from the bloc’s open borders, universities, and research programs, Britain will become more insular and culturally isolated. “We will continue to go on cheapo flights to stag parties in ancient cities,” Johnson promised, in a passage that also contained a joke about Thai sex tourism. Finally, Johnson challenged the central preoccupation around Brexit, which is that it will make the country poorer and less pleasant to live in. The E.U.’s economy is currently growing at its fastest rate in a decade, while Britain’s slows, but that did not stop Johnson from describing it as “a regional trade bloc comprising only six per cent of humanity.” Only by escaping the “stockade” of the Single Market, he argued, will Britain truly be free to flourish in the global economy. “We are a nation of inventors, designers, scientists, architects, lawyers, insurers, water-slide testers,” Johnson said, meandering slightly. “I met one in my constituency. Toblerone-cabinet makers! All the Toblerone cabinets in Saudi airports are made in Uxbridge, I am delighted to tell you.” The most important thing was to be positive. “So much of this is about confidence and national self-belief.”
Confidence and reality are two different things, and Johnson has never been that interested in the latter. He was fired from his first job, at the Times of London, in 1988, for making up quotes from his godfather, an Oxford don. A year later, he was sent to Brussels by the Daily Telegraph to write about the European Union, where his father had been a senior bureaucrat in the seventies. At the time, the E.U was covered seriously and reverentially by most British newspapers, but, with the dawning of Euroskepticism in the Conservative Party, Johnson spotted an opportunity to write about it differently. Johnson’s stories soon became full of the bloc’s supposed absurdities—rules about straight bananas, fishermen wearing hairnets, an E.U. skyscraper two miles high—often confected or based on deliberate misunderstandings. Such stories have become a staple of right-wing British journalism ever since. “He made it seem like a game,” Sonia Purnell, who was Johnson’s deputy in the Telegraph’s bureau at the time, told me. “A pretty scary game, where he always pushed everything to the absolute outer limits of truth.” In 2012, Purnell wrote a biography of Johnson, in which she described his daily ritual, as a young journalist, of yelling obscenities at a yucca plant on his desk, in order to raise his adrenaline to write his next assault on the bloc. “This bizarre ritual, to those who witnessed it, was an insight into the torrent of focus and drive that lies beneath Boris’s affable exterior,” she wrote.
“I think you can draw a straight line between that time I was with him in Brussels to the referendum,” Purnell said, when we spoke. “He is still not using facts now.” We were talking shortly after Johnson’s speech, which excluded all mention of the intractable technical problems of the Brexit talks. One of Johnson’s traits, both as a journalist and as a politician, has been to use exciting decoys to avoid addressing actual, pressing concerns. As the mayor of London, rather than tackling the problem of expanding the city’s existing airports, Johnson came up with “Boris Island,” a brand new, floating airport in the Thames estuary, which would cost an estimated hundred and fifty billion dollars to build and which everyone knew would never happen. Since the Brexit vote, Johnson has taken to talking about building a bridge to France, which he brought up again in the speech. “For those who really want to make Britain less insular, the answer is not to submit forever to the E.U. legal order but to think about how we can undo the physical separation that took place at the end of the Ice Age,” he said.
The Foreign Secretary’s speech was carried on most of the U.K.’s news channels, and, while I watched, I remembered a quote from Benjamin Disraeli, another of Johnson’s heroes, which Purnell included in her biography: “I love fame; I love public reputation; I love to live in the eyes of the country.” At one point in the speech, Johnson contrasted his own celebrity with the remoteness of the E.U.’s democratic institutions. Of those who now swear at him in the street, Johnson said, “At least they know roughly who I am, at least they know, roughly speaking, what I do . . . generally speaking.” The room laughed. Sky News had a currency ticker in the top-left corner of the screen. It was glowing red. The pound has fallen fifteen per cent against the euro since the summer of 2016, and on Wednesday, while Johnson spoke, it continued to fall.
