'I shudder about Johnson as PM - a low point that could have been even worse'

20 August 2023 , 20:54

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Johnson was a shamelessly populist politician who abused the laws and ignored the rules (Image: AP)

Sometimes I think about Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street and shudder.

I shudder because what was a low point in British politics could have been so much worse. Johnson was a shamelessly populist politician who abused the laws and ignored the rules but he was not a fanatically right-wing politician. He was not like Hungary’s Viktor Orban who has rigged the courts and closed down critical media outlets.

He never embraced the xenophobic language of France’s Marine Le Pen or denied the existence of the climate crisis like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. The hard right are on the march across Europe. The anti-immigration, climate change-denying Alternative for Germany party is topping the polls in Germany.

Italy is led by Giorgia Meloni, who started her career in the youth wing of a neo-fascist party and who likes Benito Mussolini so much she has even adopted his slogans. Far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland, Slovakia and Bulgaria and are knocking at the door in Austria and Poland.

There is a terrifying prospect that Le Pen could win the next French Presidential election. It would be dangerously complacent to think the hard right couldn’t make advances here. The discontentment on which the far-right feeds – concerns about immigration, anger at the decline of local communities, disillusion with identikit politicians – exists just as much in Britain as it does in other European countries.

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You can easily see how that despair could be milked by a cynical politician who combined, say, Johnson’s popular appeal with the knee-jerk prejudices of Nigel Farage. What has saved the UK from joining the goose-step towards the hard right is a bit of luck and our voting system.

The lucky bit is that, so far, no far-right politician has emerged who has the skill and charisma to exploit the groundswell of discontent. The first-past-the-post system has many flaws but it has tended to prevent factions from the far-right and far-left from getting a toehold in Parliament. But these safeguards are not foolproof.

Which is why I shudder. Imagine if Johnson had dabbled with hard-right rhetoric. Imagine if he had gone even further in seeking to muzzle any opposition, silence the courts and neuter Parliament. Johnson may not have taken this path but he did signpost the way an even more unscrupulous politician could travel.

Jason Beattie