The Tears of a Clown
We were in the white room in 10 Downing Street, and Boris Johnson was joking around with the photographer who was taking his portrait. “You’re like the kind-of taxidermist in The Godfather,” Johnson said, laughing. “Do you remember? The funeral—the undertaker?” He then launched into his Don Corleone impression. “‘Buona sera, buona sera, see what a massacre they’ve made of my son.’ Do you remember? ‘Use all your arts, use all your arts.’”
The scene was almost perfectly Johnsonian, capturing the British prime minister’s instinct to amuse and distract, to pull a veil of humor over anything remotely serious. Watching him can be like watching a child, in this instance a child shuffling uncomfortably having his picture taken, desperate to grin and ruffle his hair, to mock and undermine, to play up to the inherent absurdity of the situation.
Fast-forward barely six months from that moment of levity and Johnson is going to need quite some skills to cover up his massacre of his own premiership, which now lies riddled with the bullets of his own failings.
As I write this, Johnson has survived to fight another week of turmoil—barely. All last week disaffected Conservative members of Parliament plotted to oust him, without quite making their move. One backbench lawmaker was so appalled at Johnson’s behavior that he switched sides in the House of Commons to join the Labour Party; another stood up in the chamber to tell him, “In the name of God, go.” And yet Johnson hung on, waiting for a report to be published this week that will formally lay out exactly what went on inside 10 Downing Street while the rest of the United Kingdom was in various states of lockdown.
