Leadership in a time of pandemonium Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump face similar challenges to their political survival Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/leadership-in-a-time-of-pandemonium?token
It is difficult, to put it mildly, to peer through the blinding blizzards of partisan mainstream media reporting and venomous malice on social media to detect what is actually happening in both American and British political life.
And in fairness to everyone seeking to explain it all, the almost daily shocks being produced by one extraordinary development after another mean that all previous political signposts have been demolished by the storm.
Like the north star, however, there’s one constant we should keep in sight as we try to decipher the fortunes of both US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson. That constant is why each of them was brought to power.
Although the circumstances are obviously different, the reason was fundamentally the same. Millions of people, who had had it up to here with an arrogant and unaccountable political and cultural establishment intent upon destroying their right to live in a national home of recognisably shared, historic values and traditions and under a rule of law reflecting their own sovereign and democratic consensus, seized the opportunity to elect a leader who promised to uphold that right against that establishment.
This titanic political force, which first erupted in Britain’s EU referendum in 2016, transformed politics in both America and Britain. It put Trump into the White House and, three years later, Boris Johnson into 10 Downing Street.
And the point is that this force remains very strong. Which is why, despite all the incompetence and failings that can be laid at the door of these two leaders, so many voters are still prepared to cut each of them considerable slack.
So in Britain, Lord Ashcroft’s latest opinion polling shows that, although voters are exasperated by Boris Johnson’s shambolic handling of the Covid-19 crisis, only one third of respondents thought the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, would have done any better.
True, respondents generally favoured a Starmer-led government to a Johnson-led one by 53 per cent to 47 per cent. But voters who switched to the Tories at the last general election still backed them, by 69 per cent to 31 per cent.
Although the largest group, at 43 per cent, thought Starmer was very different from his far-left predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, a majority of respondents nevertheless thought that the Labour party as a whole hadn’t really changed.
This all suggests that the key “red wall” former life-long Labour voters who switched to vote for Boris Johnson are not, so far, switching back. Their basic, overriding concern hasn’t significantly shifted.
For a similar reason, the hysteria over Trump’s behaviour during the past few days of his illness from the virus misses the point. His foes are beside themselves over the ride he took in his official car to wave to his “patriotic” supporters while he was still in hospital; his resumption of manic tweeting while there; his theatrical gesture in deliberately removing his mask upon arriving back at the White House; and his comment: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
All this has provoked a storm of criticism that he has behaved irresponsibly and badly— by exposing his driver and secret service agents to the virus, by suggesting that Covid-19 isn’t really dangerous, by contemptuously dismissing the 200,000 who have died of it and others who remain unwell, and by ignoring the fact that he had benefited from treatment which is largely unavailable to anyone else.
But the point being missed is that this is all a strategy. Trump needs to energise his supporters to get out and vote. For that to happen, he needs to send them the message that he has not been changed by his illness, that he remains true to himself — and therefore true to them.
It means signalling to them that he has not become, as a result of his illness, the timid, cautious, prudent person that his foes demand. That’s because his voters elected him precisely because he was the opposite of those things.
Indeed, as Freddie Sayers writes on Unherd, he may now seek to flip the liberal consensus totally on its head and turn the bullish attitude to the virus that so outrages his foes into a campaign issue: “Make America normal again!”
Above all, his voters still support him because he’s a president who has actually kept his word to them and delivered precisely what he said he would. Unlike other politicians, he’s shown them over and over again that what they will get is exactly what they see on the tin. Ripping off that mask wasn’t just telling them “it’s business as normal”. It sent the far more important message that he was still in the business of being abnormal.
So it doesn’t actually matter whether the criticisms of his behaviour are valid or not. His voters have already long priced out his failings. Boris Johnson is more vulnerable because the British hate incompetence; and so although he’s getting a strong measure of sympathy over the stupendous difficulties and dilemmas presented by this crisis, the Covid shambles has damaged him.
But both he and Trump were in large measure elected because of public fear of the alternative.
The Democrats have been doing their absolute best to ensure that fear of the alternative to Trump remains sky-high and rising.
Starmer, who wins hands-down on competence, has yet to dispel the belief nevertheless that he’s just another prosecco progressive. If, however, Boris Johnson delivers a deal in the last minute of the post-Brexit trade negotiations which keeps the UK tied to EU controls, the prime minister will be finished.
All that being said, everything can change in a heartbeat. As we can see. For all his bullishness, Trump is by no means yet out of the Covid woods. In any event, in these unprecedented times, there are alas undoubtedly many more shocks still in store.
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