Boris Johnson is certainly a phenomenon. He is Trump-like in getting away unscathed every time, a greased piglet in Cameron's words. Jonathan Lis in Prospect magazine asks a question I think we must all ask ourselves from time to time: How does Johnson get away with it? The answer, as Lis rightly identifies, is us, the people. We have become inured to the misinformation, the falsehoods and the lies to such an extent that we don't even care that we are being lied to.
Lis writes: "Part of this is because of Johnson’s opposition. He either escapes scrutiny altogether, or his opponents are not interested in pressing the point. Labour and the Liberal Democrats will not go hard on the issue of the broken [Halloween] pledge because neither of them wanted to leave the EU on 31st October and actively attempted to stop it. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, seems more interested in protesting about the bad deal rather than the broken deadline—and even then seems either unwilling or unable to land a blow.
"Part of it is Johnson himself. His carefully cultivated bonhomie has been disarming opponents since his days at the Oxford Union. No other PM could stake both their credibility and premiership on one single promise and emerge unscathed when it publicly fell apart."
The notion that there is or ever was a rational basis for Brexit has long gone. We are urged now to 'get it done' not that we are on our way to a longed for Utopian dream. I can't even remember the last time it was suggested Brexit was the glorious path to national renewal calling to us from a brighter future. It used to be said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. With Brexit it's not even prose. Rather than building a New Jerusalem we are sorting the rubble of the old regime into hardcore with no idea what we knocked it all down for.
On street stalls you often hear leavers say they 'just want to leave'. The idea there might be a crock of gold at the end of the dusty and uncertain road is not even mentioned any more. It's become a project without a purpose but the average leaver is still wholeheartedly behind it.
So it is with Boris Johnson. Voters have priced in his congenital mendacity, his duplicity and deception. He could promise white and deliver black and still have plenty of support.
I also think that people do not want to publicly admit they made the wrong decision or that they were duped. It makes them look stupid so they stick to the narrative. Once your mind is made up on something it takes some shifting unless it becomes so patently obvious that you begin to look even more stupid by clinging to the original plan long after everyone else can see it isn't working.
Since I have an absolutely unshakable belief that Brexit will be bad for this country in every way, economically, socially, environmentally and diplomatically, the question for me is when will people see the light?
I suspect that if we do leave (and I'll be doing everything I can to make sure we don't) it will be some time before the light is seen. The impacts, assuming we do not crash out without a deal, will be gradual over many years. Sluggish growth, the diminishing of our influence, the following of EU regulations that we have had no part in setting simply because it's in our best interests to do so. The realisation that there was little if any benefit to signing trade deals with distant partners while trashing the best and the biggest we had with our close neighbours.
Lis is right, the answer must come from the people.
We must somehow stop forgiving those who lie to us. I read the other day that if you put it to people that a politician like Johnson has lied, the response often is that "they are all liars". And it's hard to argue that they aren't. I have been reading Led by Donkeys: How four friends with a ladder took on Brexit and it's a wonderfully inspiring story, but putting up billboards with all the stupid utterances, lies and hypocrisy of the leave campaign, seen by millions on social media, has hardly dented public opinion. We have become apathetic in the face of so many untruths.
In the USA Trump tweets his own easily disproved lies daily. I daresay well over half of Americans know he's telling porkies but don't care, at least not enough to do anything about it. He might even win in 2020.
Part of it is the fake news agenda. Nobody even knows what the truth is any more and I suspect this was always going to happen when broadcasting something that is patently wrong but seems plausible to millions can be done in a trice from your mobile phone while travelling on a bus. We all know that once out a lie cannot be recaptured and erased. It takes root and becomes accepted. Remainers have to counter this stuff daily on matter of the EU, so we know how it works.
How did we get here? I don't believe there was ever a plan to reduce truth to mere perception or lies to common currency, as I say once everybody can publish whatever they like to Facebook or Twitter we were always going to be in trouble. But I wonder if a foreign power didn't recognise the scope to influence events, to sow division and corrode democracy to the extent we have seen in the past few years. We know Russia has an operation in St Petersburg for running social media bots and planting and spreading fake news so it's very worrying that publication of a report into Russian interference by our Intelligence and Security Committee is being held up and by No 10 no less.
What have they got to hide?
