All this talk about character. We are talking about the prime minister, not the future son in law. A cunning scoundrel who runs the country properly would be preferable to a noble simpleton.
Doesn’t have to be a saint, just someone who understands and does what the people want (less inflation, not more green. Less immigration, not more virtue signalling).
And that is precisely why the Establishment wanted rid of him – he understood the public and did as the majority wanted rather than pandering to the virtue signalling Woke sheep.
If only he had. I suspect he was undone by a combination of a mid-life crisis and his infatuation with a young blonde. Had he run the government as he appeared to have run London we might still have him as PM. I mourn his passing, not least because i see no suitable successor. Badenoch would be good but she appears to be too far behind. And she has character.
He has always seemed to be inclined to take the easy road in his personal life, and it affected his public life somewhat too in the end. Whatever good qualities a person has they can be undone by a failure to persevere or do the hard things or abstain from immediate gratification. I think that’s what did him in at the end, just the cumulative effect of all of it.
Cash boosting online way to work just for 1 or 2 hours per day on your mobile or PC wherever you want and start earning more than 500 per day. receives payments every week directly in your bank. no skills needed.
its an awesome job. go to this page now. ==-==>> https://www.dollars11.com
Good comment but I think the government was in reasonable shape considering what came beforehand.
An altogether harder task than London.
Post Covid was always going to be hard and as you rightly point out no obvious successors. A shame he has gone.
Why Badenoch she has no experience-Ukraine etc, not a good choice. Frankly Boris was the man to lead us out of this.
MSM and the establishment have shot us in the foot, a huge mistake.
There is no doubt in my mind that the MSM used their power to bring Boris down.
For example, it was not Boris who arranged the drinks “dos” in Downing Street but the staff. He was only passing through. And yet the press hounded him
Contrast that with the opposition election night “do” which was organised by the politicians and enjoyed by the politicians. Little publicity was given to this and the threat that Keir Stammer would resign if found guilty, put the police in an impossible position.
We should not be ruled by the MSM. It is time that all media outlets and publications were licensed with a code of conduct imposed and policed. .
While he ‘did’ what the people wanted, sadly (or maybe happily?) he failed in virtually all his endeavours.. Covid, Brexit (NI), Economy, health etc.
Of course if you’re one of the 0.1% super rich he’s been a great success!
I don’t agree with your comment on failures;how was Covid a failure, the U.K. had some of the best support anywhere in the world, look at China and Japan -how do you compare the response and outcome. There were mistakes that revealed themselves in hindsight , the same for the economy but what did anyone really expect after Covid and NI is a failure for who? , it’s an ongoing political problem for NI and a headache for the U.K.
Similarly Brexit it’s not a single event it’s an ongoing adjustment to new political and economic circumstances.
This MSM/ Labour monologue on Boris Johnson’s record is distorted in my view.
This is why Representative Democracy (what you’ve got) is preferred to real democracy – what you seem to want: ie Populism? God forbid the great unwashed determine what decusions are taken!
If voting ever delivered what the people wanted, they’d ban it.
Edward Seymour
1 year ago
“Hovering somewhere between the patronising and the complimentary . . .” Rather like Eagleton himself. Leftists will never understand the connection between a unique leader like Boris and working class people. An enduring image for me from the 2019 election was Boris surrounded by construction workers who were holding up a hand written placard saying We Love Boris. Marxisant post modernists cannot comprehend this.
it is called the social horse shoe… that links the top and bottom of the British socio demograph, like betting, swearing, drinking, whoreing, hunting, long dogs, racing and Toyota Hi Lux… and definitely NOT golf….
This made me laugh. Thank you. I think what you say is humorous and true. Those on either side of the middle class–the really poor, and the really rich–seem to have certain indifference to middle-class notions of respectibility and the sense of shame that goes along with it. I wonder if there’s a sense of inward liberation that comes along with this indifference, too. What’s especially interesting about it, to me, is what it reveals about envy. It’s easy to see how the rich can be envied for their possessions and wealth. But I wonder, too, if being envious of that inward liberation is mixed in there–and also mixed in with the middle-class fear of becoming poor. So either way the middle-class looks, up or down, they have something to be envious of. Anyway, I think what you observed is more than just a British phenomenon.
There was nothing Marxist about this essay, if anything it evoked traditional standards of virtue which Johnson for all his classical education clearly disdains. Eagleton is also avowedly anti-PoMo.
What was that about “false consciousness” then? Or have I misunderstood and/or mistaken its meaning? In my interpretation seems both Johnson and construction are suffers of Sid complaint.
Character seems to get confused with personality. Many modern politicians are incredibly grey because they don’t want to offend anyone. So whilst they don’t generate any obvious offence nor do they inspire interest. Boris did inspire interest because he was interesting, but flawed.
In 2019, people voted for him because he wasn’t Corbyn, because we were all fed up with Brexit and because we though that if he surrounded himself with competent people then his obvious flaws would be masked by them. Sadly he went for the non competent sycophants in the main and, coupled with enough scandal for a Jackie Collins thriller, his government failed to deliver.
Thatcher – character
Major – grey
Blair – character
Brown – grey
Cameron – grey
May – grey
Johnson – character
I offer no stunning insight, and you may disagree with my assessment of each PM, but I think it shows that we get whatever PM the machine spits out, not necessarily who we would want.
I care to the extent that I pay money to hopefully read trenchant articles, not a slurry of sub-Freudian guff and teasingly ‘humorous’cliches and half-truths.
Margaret TC
1 year ago
Eagleton’s loathing of Boris may have something to do with a family likeness (or likeness of ‘character’): show and little substance is what Eagleton does, throwing out crass generalisations that he knows aren’t true, like the French have style – some of them do but an awful lot don’t – and clever sound bites. Like other contributors to Unherd he likes to show off more than anything else.
Idiosyncratic or idiot ? The two words are related one gathers .
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
So these inadequates have ‘stolen’ Boris’s 80 seat majority and now revoltingly hope to profit by it themselves.What an utter disgrace!
‘Rogue’ Boris may have been a ‘rogue’ but his appeal to the Red Wall, North & South was undeniable. No Tory leader has had such plebeian appeal since Baldwin or Peel.
The crucial question is whether Boris could change tack at a moments notice, and his recent handling of the Brexit saga certainly proves that he can. However he performance over Corona was lamentable. As a quick thinker and a KS*he will have now learnt the lesson of never to trust ‘experts’.
As for your final remark Mr Eagleton that “It was because he is likely to quote Horace when asked about the rate of inflation that a public bored with plastic politicians elected him. But it was for just the same reasons that he couldn’t govern”, what nonsense! Show me a contemporary politician who would have done any better in the Corona Crisis. If Boris had followed his instincts it would have been ‘nihil facere’,** and jolly good too. Let’s hope he gets a second chance, as we haven’t much time left.
I think to have integrity is to possess a set of moral principles and to act according to these principles even when to do so is detrimental to oneself. Many nowadays seem to act out of a single principle, the principle of self interest.
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden all had great integrity, in the sense that their actions were guided by their inner convictions, ultimately at great personal cost.
As always, be careful what you wish for. On the whole, I’d rather have politicians who reliably act according to self-interest and are well practised in the art of U-turns.
“You’ll love Joe Bloggs! He’s a real character.”
You won’t.
Michelle Johnston
1 year ago
What absolutely fascinates me about all the post-Boris debate, and it was glaringly obvious last night in the way the debate was framed, is the West (well nearly all of it) has just put itself through the most self-destructive set of policy decisions since the Great War over a virus that was only ever a threat to the non-productive part of the economy and now the narrative is to completely ignore the consequences of those policies rather than frame every leader’s performance and outcomes in the context of this gigantic stupidity. I have to say that not only goes for the media but for far too many of us.
Boris was stupid and lied sometimes but the much more interesting point to consider is like some other Prime Ministers he was a consequence of a particular set of circumstances and a much more interesting question is to ask why did we need him at that precise moment in 2019.
As an aside, one interaction made it clear last night that Sunak did what he was told to do. So you had a PM that was dragged into a policy he did not believe in and basically said. If that’s what the experts insist then just print money and Sunak probably did not believe in that either. The unconvinced lead the unconvinced and the poor and the young will suffer for a very long time and woe betide the other lot to say they would have done anything different it would have been worse. Check every other Left Centred Government as well as what Labour said.
That is the stuff that will look important in the coming years not observations about the nature of Boris’s personality. The latter was important in getting the election won in 2019 the rest of his performance is about specific decision-making and personal behaviour during an extended period where he was offered a blizzard of incomplete narrow advice which lacked context or consequences which people are now realising is way more important than a spring and a couple of winters where the death rate to a virus was 3 times that of a typical flu season of a particular age group.
Last edited 1 year ago by Michelle Johnston
Nick Marsh
1 year ago
Being a ‘character’ certainly helped Boris gain power, as it did Donald. Both men stood out from their non-committal, insincere rivals. The public could accept lies emanating from childish self-interest, because it was fed up with the intangible untruths of the politically-acceptable. Unfortunately, as the writer concludes, both men lacked the true character to meet expectations. As far as character went, they were seeds in shallow ground.
But, like a politician, the writer fails to answer the question, preferring (as ever) the easier line of defining terms. History shows that people are always prone to follow characters, no matter how flawed, and our technological age appears to be no different; in fact its return to a form of puritanism has only served to increase the public search for character. Our species, it seems, will not evolve on demand, no matter how much data we feed it.
But Should our leaders have character? Again, history seems to prove its advantage (as well as its risk). As preached in the military, any decision is preferable to no decision, and risk-takers are essential in all walks of leadership. Risk-takers also usually happen to be egotistical – those that aren’t succumb to stress, as does anyone with a conscience. In many jobs, I’ve noticed that the only way to achieve company expectations is to break company rules. The respectful child is father of the failure; certainly in the business world.
Boris bungled many things and had the trustworthiness of a snake, but he presented an identity and was never afraid to confront anyone. These skills are often overlooked; no matter how brilliant the policies, a leader is useless if they fail to garner support. The fact that Boris fell over such trivial matters as eating cake, or overlooking a frisky reputation, is nationally embarrassing. True, these events illustrated his hypocrisy, but he was never one to back down on decisions of national, or international, importance.
Last edited 1 year ago by Nick Marsh
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Well, Boris is almost gone.
The biggest remaining “character” now is Angela Rayner, so I guess this is aimed at her.
RAYMOND Yeow
1 year ago
YES !, ….out with bland milquetoast politicians
polidori redux
1 year ago
“Should politicians have character?”
Better than an excess of virtue. Leave that to bishops (And literary critics!)
Last edited 1 year ago by polidori redux
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
very good!
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
You started losing me when you slagged off politicians with the usual cliches; and then you lost me completely when you described Ant and Dec as having no individual personalities.
What bigoted, snobbery! Does it make you feel good churning out cliches to feed the circus spectators? And dressed up as intellectual fare for us to consider. Just awful.
Jerry Carroll
1 year ago
Be A Clown, Be A Clown, All The World Loves A Clown. Act A Fool, Play The Calf, And You’ll Always Have The Last Laugh
— Cole Porter lyrics for the 1948 movie The Pirate starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly
All this talk about character. We are talking about the prime minister, not the future son in law. A cunning scoundrel who runs the country properly would be preferable to a noble simpleton.
Doesn’t have to be a saint, just someone who understands and does what the people want (less inflation, not more green. Less immigration, not more virtue signalling).
And that is precisely why the Establishment wanted rid of him – he understood the public and did as the majority wanted rather than pandering to the virtue signalling Woke sheep.
If only he had. I suspect he was undone by a combination of a mid-life crisis and his infatuation with a young blonde. Had he run the government as he appeared to have run London we might still have him as PM. I mourn his passing, not least because i see no suitable successor. Badenoch would be good but she appears to be too far behind. And she has character.
He has always seemed to be inclined to take the easy road in his personal life, and it affected his public life somewhat too in the end. Whatever good qualities a person has they can be undone by a failure to persevere or do the hard things or abstain from immediate gratification. I think that’s what did him in at the end, just the cumulative effect of all of it.
Cash boosting online way to work just for 1 or 2 hours per day on your mobile or PC wherever you want and start earning more than 500 per day. receives payments every week directly in your bank. no skills needed.
its an awesome job. go to this page now. ==-==>> https://www.dollars11.com
Good comment but I think the government was in reasonable shape considering what came beforehand.
An altogether harder task than London.
Post Covid was always going to be hard and as you rightly point out no obvious successors. A shame he has gone.
Why Badenoch she has no experience-Ukraine etc, not a good choice. Frankly Boris was the man to lead us out of this.
MSM and the establishment have shot us in the foot, a huge mistake.
There is no doubt in my mind that the MSM used their power to bring Boris down.
For example, it was not Boris who arranged the drinks “dos” in Downing Street but the staff. He was only passing through. And yet the press hounded him
Contrast that with the opposition election night “do” which was organised by the politicians and enjoyed by the politicians. Little publicity was given to this and the threat that Keir Stammer would resign if found guilty, put the police in an impossible position.
We should not be ruled by the MSM. It is time that all media outlets and publications were licensed with a code of conduct imposed and policed. .
While he ‘did’ what the people wanted, sadly (or maybe happily?) he failed in virtually all his endeavours.. Covid, Brexit (NI), Economy, health etc.
Of course if you’re one of the 0.1% super rich he’s been a great success!
I don’t agree with your comment on failures;how was Covid a failure, the U.K. had some of the best support anywhere in the world, look at China and Japan -how do you compare the response and outcome. There were mistakes that revealed themselves in hindsight , the same for the economy but what did anyone really expect after Covid and NI is a failure for who? , it’s an ongoing political problem for NI and a headache for the U.K.
Similarly Brexit it’s not a single event it’s an ongoing adjustment to new political and economic circumstances.
This MSM/ Labour monologue on Boris Johnson’s record is distorted in my view.
Kim Jong Johnson imposed three lockdowns for show and only a rebellion prevented him imposing a fourth lockdown.
Thoroughly agree.
He is a great fat Communist fraud, he is as establishment as it is possible to be.
Kim Jong Johnson is thoroughly woke and disgracefully condemned the Industrial Revolution.
This is why Representative Democracy (what you’ve got) is preferred to real democracy – what you seem to want: ie Populism? God forbid the great unwashed determine what decusions are taken!
If voting ever delivered what the people wanted, they’d ban it.
“Hovering somewhere between the patronising and the complimentary . . .” Rather like Eagleton himself. Leftists will never understand the connection between a unique leader like Boris and working class people. An enduring image for me from the 2019 election was Boris surrounded by construction workers who were holding up a hand written placard saying We Love Boris. Marxisant post modernists cannot comprehend this.
Contrast with the 2017 image of the, er, somewhat less working-class, Glastonbury crowd chanting for Jeremy Corbyn!
it is called the social horse shoe… that links the top and bottom of the British socio demograph, like betting, swearing, drinking, whoreing, hunting, long dogs, racing and Toyota Hi Lux… and definitely NOT golf….
This made me laugh. Thank you. I think what you say is humorous and true. Those on either side of the middle class–the really poor, and the really rich–seem to have certain indifference to middle-class notions of respectibility and the sense of shame that goes along with it. I wonder if there’s a sense of inward liberation that comes along with this indifference, too. What’s especially interesting about it, to me, is what it reveals about envy. It’s easy to see how the rich can be envied for their possessions and wealth. But I wonder, too, if being envious of that inward liberation is mixed in there–and also mixed in with the middle-class fear of becoming poor. So either way the middle-class looks, up or down, they have something to be envious of. Anyway, I think what you observed is more than just a British phenomenon.
touche!!!
Rich is not a class definition… by any stretch of the imagination… or perception
There was nothing Marxist about this essay, if anything it evoked traditional standards of virtue which Johnson for all his classical education clearly disdains. Eagleton is also avowedly anti-PoMo.
The lower orders know their betters and wring their caps in yrue subservient style!
Those placards were for Brexit not Boris
What was that about “false consciousness” then? Or have I misunderstood and/or mistaken its meaning? In my interpretation seems both Johnson and construction are suffers of Sid complaint.
are sufferers of said complaint.
Character seems to get confused with personality. Many modern politicians are incredibly grey because they don’t want to offend anyone. So whilst they don’t generate any obvious offence nor do they inspire interest. Boris did inspire interest because he was interesting, but flawed.
In 2019, people voted for him because he wasn’t Corbyn, because we were all fed up with Brexit and because we though that if he surrounded himself with competent people then his obvious flaws would be masked by them. Sadly he went for the non competent sycophants in the main and, coupled with enough scandal for a Jackie Collins thriller, his government failed to deliver.
Thatcher – character
Major – grey
Blair – character
Brown – grey
Cameron – grey
May – grey
Johnson – character
I offer no stunning insight, and you may disagree with my assessment of each PM, but I think it shows that we get whatever PM the machine spits out, not necessarily who we would want.
Cameron wasn’t an endearing character, but he was a character nonetheless.
The upshot of this article is that Terry doesn’t like Boris. Who effing cares?
You for one it seems!
I care to the extent that I pay money to hopefully read trenchant articles, not a slurry of sub-Freudian guff and teasingly ‘humorous’cliches and half-truths.
Eagleton’s loathing of Boris may have something to do with a family likeness (or likeness of ‘character’): show and little substance is what Eagleton does, throwing out crass generalisations that he knows aren’t true, like the French have style – some of them do but an awful lot don’t – and clever sound bites. Like other contributors to Unherd he likes to show off more than anything else.
Naw: nice try but he got it mostly right..
Idiosyncratic or idiot ? The two words are related one gathers .
So these inadequates have ‘stolen’ Boris’s 80 seat majority and now revoltingly hope to profit by it themselves.What an utter disgrace!
‘Rogue’ Boris may have been a ‘rogue’ but his appeal to the Red Wall, North & South was undeniable. No Tory leader has had such plebeian appeal since Baldwin or Peel.
The crucial question is whether Boris could change tack at a moments notice, and his recent handling of the Brexit saga certainly proves that he can. However he performance over Corona was lamentable. As a quick thinker and a KS*he will have now learnt the lesson of never to trust ‘experts’.
As for your final remark Mr Eagleton that “It was because he is likely to quote Horace when asked about the rate of inflation that a public bored with plastic politicians elected him. But it was for just the same reasons that he couldn’t govern”, what nonsense! Show me a contemporary politician who would have done any better in the Corona Crisis. If Boris had followed his instincts it would have been ‘nihil facere’,** and jolly good too. Let’s hope he gets a second chance, as we haven’t much time left.
*(King’s Scholar)
**( Do nothing!)
It’s not really his majority though, he is still the MP for the people who voted for him.
love the KS jipe!
I think to have integrity is to possess a set of moral principles and to act according to these principles even when to do so is detrimental to oneself. Many nowadays seem to act out of a single principle, the principle of self interest.
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden all had great integrity, in the sense that their actions were guided by their inner convictions, ultimately at great personal cost.
As always, be careful what you wish for. On the whole, I’d rather have politicians who reliably act according to self-interest and are well practised in the art of U-turns.
The extremes, the mystic and the mass murderer.
“You’ll love Joe Bloggs! He’s a real character.”
You won’t.
What absolutely fascinates me about all the post-Boris debate, and it was glaringly obvious last night in the way the debate was framed, is the West (well nearly all of it) has just put itself through the most self-destructive set of policy decisions since the Great War over a virus that was only ever a threat to the non-productive part of the economy and now the narrative is to completely ignore the consequences of those policies rather than frame every leader’s performance and outcomes in the context of this gigantic stupidity. I have to say that not only goes for the media but for far too many of us.
Boris was stupid and lied sometimes but the much more interesting point to consider is like some other Prime Ministers he was a consequence of a particular set of circumstances and a much more interesting question is to ask why did we need him at that precise moment in 2019.
As an aside, one interaction made it clear last night that Sunak did what he was told to do. So you had a PM that was dragged into a policy he did not believe in and basically said. If that’s what the experts insist then just print money and Sunak probably did not believe in that either. The unconvinced lead the unconvinced and the poor and the young will suffer for a very long time and woe betide the other lot to say they would have done anything different it would have been worse. Check every other Left Centred Government as well as what Labour said.
That is the stuff that will look important in the coming years not observations about the nature of Boris’s personality. The latter was important in getting the election won in 2019 the rest of his performance is about specific decision-making and personal behaviour during an extended period where he was offered a blizzard of incomplete narrow advice which lacked context or consequences which people are now realising is way more important than a spring and a couple of winters where the death rate to a virus was 3 times that of a typical flu season of a particular age group.
Being a ‘character’ certainly helped Boris gain power, as it did Donald. Both men stood out from their non-committal, insincere rivals. The public could accept lies emanating from childish self-interest, because it was fed up with the intangible untruths of the politically-acceptable. Unfortunately, as the writer concludes, both men lacked the true character to meet expectations. As far as character went, they were seeds in shallow ground.
But, like a politician, the writer fails to answer the question, preferring (as ever) the easier line of defining terms. History shows that people are always prone to follow characters, no matter how flawed, and our technological age appears to be no different; in fact its return to a form of puritanism has only served to increase the public search for character. Our species, it seems, will not evolve on demand, no matter how much data we feed it.
But Should our leaders have character? Again, history seems to prove its advantage (as well as its risk). As preached in the military, any decision is preferable to no decision, and risk-takers are essential in all walks of leadership. Risk-takers also usually happen to be egotistical – those that aren’t succumb to stress, as does anyone with a conscience. In many jobs, I’ve noticed that the only way to achieve company expectations is to break company rules. The respectful child is father of the failure; certainly in the business world.
Boris bungled many things and had the trustworthiness of a snake, but he presented an identity and was never afraid to confront anyone. These skills are often overlooked; no matter how brilliant the policies, a leader is useless if they fail to garner support. The fact that Boris fell over such trivial matters as eating cake, or overlooking a frisky reputation, is nationally embarrassing. True, these events illustrated his hypocrisy, but he was never one to back down on decisions of national, or international, importance.
Well, Boris is almost gone.
The biggest remaining “character” now is Angela Rayner, so I guess this is aimed at her.
YES !, ….out with bland milquetoast politicians
“Should politicians have character?”
Better than an excess of virtue. Leave that to bishops (And literary critics!)
very good!
You started losing me when you slagged off politicians with the usual cliches; and then you lost me completely when you described Ant and Dec as having no individual personalities.
What bigoted, snobbery! Does it make you feel good churning out cliches to feed the circus spectators? And dressed up as intellectual fare for us to consider. Just awful.
Be A Clown, Be A Clown,
All The World Loves A Clown.
Act A Fool, Play The Calf,
And You’ll Always Have The Last Laugh
— Cole Porter lyrics for the 1948 movie The Pirate starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly
surely you mean ” Dickhedian”?
Well, that was a waste of my time.