So Boris is going. The yellow mop is leaving the building, leaving a steaming trail of unmopped shit behind him. This is the man who has broken national services, begun shipping people fleeing conflict to processing centres in Rwanda, he has resided over sex scandal over sex scandal: proved that politics is not safe for women and more recently, not safe for men.
More personally, he has ruled a government whose policies on releases into care homes allowed my grandmother to die. So why don’t I feel happy?
I thought when he went I might feel elated, somehow vindicated that one who has destroyed so much was finally being destroyed. Yet, I feel the opposite. Not even really deflated; I just feel nothing. This doesn’t feel like a win. My outrage and pain have affected nothing; he has been able to walk away from each ‘scandal’ unscathed. The gravity of the things he has done have even been belittled by the very label we give them. We call them scandals as if they are something to be gossiped about, something juicy to get your teeth into. Each one is a personal tragedy for someone. Each one has left someone chewed up and spat carelessly out by a government who work only for themselves.
The issue is, it’s not just him. We have an obsession in the UK with our Prime Ministers: a country unable to elect a Labour government because the labour leader talked about his allotment jam too much because he seemed too ‘soft’. All the resignations, all the sudden distance, not because of true outrage, but because they do not want to be dragged down. They do not want to lose their place on the ladder. A game. A game woven out of people’s lives. The winnings for them: social standing and career. The loss falling solely on other people, on us, who unwillingly have gambled it all: lives, livelihoods and social structure and support.
So yes, Boris is gone, but he leaves behind a legacy that the tories will be able to package up as just his own. Wrapped in a ribbon of the pandemic and filed carefully away as a ‘big patch of a difficult time’. Those doing the packaging will be the same people who sat in the working committees, stood on the floor in support of each decision. The very same who sat in the cabinet, who pushed for each change they now say is a disgrace.
Who will we get next? Someone more slouching and grotesque like Jacob Rees Mogg, or even worse, it could be someone more palatable than Johnson. They’ll be able to take the helm of the tory ship, set so confidently for self-destruction, and shift gear. If they can get clear distance from Johnson, they’ll be back on the old ‘safe hands’ straight and narrow. The battered ship will be repainted as the ‘safe option’, and people will eat it up right before the general election. How quickly will people revert back to the ‘did the best he could’ narrative? How quickly will they say, well how bad could it really be? How quickly will we collectively forget?
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