Photo: Amer Ghazzal/Shutterstock Teflon Johnson.” “Houdini.” “The greased albino piglet.” The unique ability of Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson to survive career-ending controversies with his reputation intact has earned him a variety of nicknames, not all flattering. But since the resignation of his bullish strategic adviser, Dominic Cummings, in November 2020, the prime minister has obtained a new moniker with a different meaning: “the shopping trolley.
He got his wish. Today, over two years after Johnson’s election, disillusionment with the prime minister is everywhere. The exposure of Johnson and his team’s parties during lockdown, flouting the very rules they imposed, has angered his party, the public, and the loyalist press like never before. The bundle of revelations now known as “Partygate” could be terminal for Johnson.
One doomed proposal proved particularly consequential, and it is possible to capture Johnson’s downfall through it: a plan for daily televised press briefings. In the early months of the pandemic, the public had become accustomed to live news conferences led by Johnson. Despite the government’s woeful mishandling of the virus itself, Johnson’s team deemed the briefings a success. They decided, in the summer of 2020, to make them a permanent feature.
The abandoned idea for televised briefings proved uniquely revealing and costly to Johnson. For one thing, it captured the fundamental tension — and fragility — at his heart: He is, it seems, caught between a desire for more attention and an aversion to more scrutiny. And it inadvertently sparked a sequence of events that inflamed rivalries within Johnson’s team and blew the Partygate scandal wide open.
The leaked recording proved a tipping point in Partygate. Johnson, his colleagues, and their friends in the press could no longer refute the allegations — which began in the Daily Mirror, Britain’s only left-wing tabloid, on November 30 — as politically motivated. Stratton took the hit and delivered a tearful resignation speech outside her home in London. “I will regret those remarks for the rest of my days,” she said.
But even when faced with a difficult scandal to spin, the dynamics of press scrutiny have demonstrated at least one source of Johnson’s staying power: his entanglement with the media. The combination of Johnson’s past career in journalism, spanning the Times, the Spectator, and the Daily Telegraph, and his passionate conversion to the Brexit cause, cherished by the right-wing press, mean an unusual depth of devotion.
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