IMAGINE the shame of living your life with the world knowing that the honorific your name bears was awarded by Boris Johnson in his defenestration dishonours list.
Awarding a knighthood to his serially disreputable father turned out to be an embarrassment too far even for the disgraced former premier. And, if it was his doing or not, the failure to decorate the declining years of Boris’s ardent admirer in Mid-Bedfordshire will be seen as a small-minded.
Johnson’s Trumpian resignation letter is a basket of diversionary rhetoric designed to serve his undiminished political ambitions — or perhaps his objective to stay in the public eye, in the media and on the lucrative celebrity speaker list.
As such it is his tribute to the equally disgraced former US president and an attempt to follow Trump’s transparently dishonest playbook.
Be sure that Johnson’s resignation missive is very far from self-deception. It is not that he believes what he wrote but rather that he believes it is necessary to create an alternative reality, a narrative in which he is the victim.
Johnson has run out of parliamentary road with the privileges committee (even with its Tory majority), the Tory Party in Parliament and the Sunak administration keen to see him gone.
If the government think this is the end of the Number 10 lockdown scandal it is wrong. As Johnson helpfully pointed out, Sunak was equally complicit in flaunting the rules the rest of us lived by during the coronavirus pandemic.
When the US judicial authorities dumped 37 counts of mishandling classified documents on Donald Trump it was to add to his woes. He already faces 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Both Trump and Johnson now encounter domestic versions of the lawfare strategy perfected by the empire when it deals with upstart Latin American leaders who think a popular mandate trumps the latter-day Monroe Doctrine, which holds that what happens south of the Rio Grande is up to US big business.
The disgraced duo’s difficulties, in separate ways, express the undiminished will of the Establishment in both countries to be rid of figures, both mendacious and malign, who disrupt the common interests of the most powerful forces of monopoly and big capital.
There is a sense that the present-day Tory Party — with its attenuated mass base and divided and quarrelsome parliamentary cohort — is not a reliable guardian of big capital’s interests.
If this loss is not so feared, it is because the official opposition has to a great extent convinced the powers that be that it is a reliable alternative guardian of the status quo.
And if any doubt remained that danger lurked in the person of Ed Miliband, the unceremonious dumping of Labour's £28 billion green recovery fund in the interests of capitalist stability and fiscal responsibility sealed the deal.
There is a certain symmetry in that the dumping of Boris Johnson — surely the most disreputable, unprincipled, immoral and amoral of parliamentarians — took place on the day Jeremy Corbyn celebrated his 40th year in Parliament as a tribune of the people with an unassailable reputation for probity, principle and personal integrity.
Johnson’s political talent, like Trump’s, was to sense that working-class disillusion with the system — in the absence of a credible appeal from the left — presented an opportunity for the right.
Our collective hopes and desires for jobs, housing, decent education, a free NHS, public ownership of mail rail, energy and utilities lack a political vehicle that can command the loyalty and support of workers. Finding a way for the working class to assert its interests in the life of the peoples of Britain is the task of our times.
