2022.07.05 鲍里斯-约翰逊的游戏（可能）结束了

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The Game Is (Probably) Up for Boris Johnson
His most senior ministers are getting off the carousel of chaos because they just don’t see him governing the country.

By Tom McTague
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty
JULY 5, 2022
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Don’t stop me just because you’ve heard this story before, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson is once again fighting for his political life. And once again, this time it might be the end. After yet another scandal, once again made worse by an absurdly stupid cover-up, two very senior members of Johnson’s government—his finance minister and his health minister—quit in disgust.

Is the game really up, then? For anyone else, the answer would surely be yes. For Johnson, a man impervious to shame, who knows? The answer is probably, though there remains a slim chance that he finds a way to ride it out. Either way, the point is this: Britain is no longer being governed.


The U.K. today is a country without direction, without an idea, and without a government capable of governing. It is a country run by a man whose sole purpose is to remain in his post, supported by people whose sole purpose is to stick around, either because they would not make it into any other government or because they have decided that sticking around is the best way to get Johnson’s job themselves.

All of this is happening less than three years after Johnson won a general-election victory that should have put him in power for a decade, a new Margaret Thatcher able to remake the country in his image, embedding a new economic and social model along with Brexit. Instead, Johnson has thrown it all away with a series of pathetic lies about pathetic decisions that have exposed his own pathetic weakness.

The truth is, Johnson didn’t want to order the country into lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic but did so reluctantly and late—only to not bother following the rules he didn’t believe in. When he was found out, he lied. When he got into trouble because of these lies, he desperately promoted people he shouldn’t have, which he knew because people told him not to. When this was found out, he lied, only to be found out once again. On and on we go, a never-ending carousel of corruption.


Tom McTague: The minister of chaos

Now Britain is back to where it was only a few years ago, when, riven by Brexit and the failure to implement the result of the referendum, the country seemed utterly ungovernable. This, remember, was how Johnson managed to rise to the premiership in the first place: He presented himself as an agent of chaos who would break the rules to end the chaos caused by those who should have known better (himself included, of course; he vacillated the whole time over what to do).

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Today, once again, after a brief moment of calm, the chaos has returned and Johnson, once again, is at the center of it—a malevolent Mr. Bean, leaving a trail of destruction wherever he goes.

What Britain has is a prime minister with instincts, sometimes good, sometimes bad, who almost as a point of principle refuses ever to temper or abrogate them in any way. To do so, in his mind, would be a crime against the thing he thinks is most important in the world: the greatness of Boris, that comedic personification of his dreams and desires. Johnson’s refusal ever to dilute this character has been the source of his success, his superpower in a world of caution and calculation. And it will be his downfall.

On the way up, Boris was a mocking, disdainful jester able to poke fun at the British political class, which had been failing for years even as it patted itself on the back. In power, Boris was occasionally helped by his disdain for the rules of this political class, bulldozing his way through the conventions deployed to stop Britain from leaving the European Union, for example.

His instincts have even occasionally helped after Brexit as well. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Johnson became one of the most popular politicians in that country after throwing billions of pounds’ worth of military equipment at the crisis, more than any other ally of Ukraine in Europe. Although it is true that any other British prime minister would have acted to support Ukraine, Johnson’s rejection of caution meant that Britain was quicker than others to send lethal aid, and it has continued to do so at a much higher rate.


Helen Lewis: Britain is fraying. Why did Boris Johnson get reelected?

Yet these same instincts now look as though they will cost Johnson his job. He continually disregards official advice, and attempts to bypass the rules or ignores them altogether, seeing them as little more than officialdom’s devices to control him. The latest scandal is over the appointment to a senior parliamentary position—responsible for enforcing party discipline—of a Tory lawmaker named Christopher Pincher, who had been accused of sexual impropriety. Johnson had been alerted to Pincher’s misconduct but ignored the warning, and then claimed he hadn’t known about it when Pincher resigned after being accused of further impropriety. Johnson seems pathologically unable to condemn anyone else for personal failings, most likely because he sees in others’ failings a mirror of his own, and he so hates to be on the receiving end of others’ judgment. If this Tory-politician sex scandal proves his undoing, the irony will be that it wasn’t a scandal of his own.

Johnson governs by instinct, because he is governed by instinct. He wants to spend money on schools and hospitals and police and infrastructure, because that would make him popular. And when he is popular, he is happy to increase taxes to pay for it all. But then, when he is unpopular, he calls for tax cuts to ease the pain. He wants a Thatcherite low-tax, free-market economy and he wants a social-democratic society protected by tariffs, high taxes, and big spending. He wants a wife and he wants a mistress, responsibility and freedom, power and popularity.

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Boris Johnson will not change. As he said recently—his one honest utterance in weeks—following demands from colleagues that he change his behavior to stay in office, ​​“If you’re saying you want me to undergo some sort of psychological transformation, I think that our listeners would know that is not going to happen.” This is the great paradox about Johnson: He is both the most self-aware political leader I’ve come across, a leader who seems to genuinely reflect on his character flaws, and the one who seems most determined to do absolutely nothing about them. And so Britain bounces from scandal to scandal, instinct to instinct, without direction or purpose, unmoored and ungoverned.

Tom McTague is a staff writer at The Atlantic based in London.



鲍里斯-约翰逊的游戏（可能）结束了
他最资深的部长们正从混乱的旋转木马上下来，因为他们不认为他能治理这个国家。

汤姆-麦克塔格报道
英国首相鲍里斯-约翰逊
Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty
2022年7月5日
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不要因为你以前听过这个故事就阻止我，但英国首相鲍里斯-约翰逊又一次为他的政治生命而战。而且，这一次可能又要完蛋了。在又一次丑闻之后，又一次被荒谬的愚蠢掩饰弄得更糟，约翰逊政府的两位非常高级的成员--他的财政部长和卫生部长--厌恶地退出了。

那么，游戏真的结束了吗？对于其他任何人来说，答案肯定是肯定的。对于约翰逊这个不知羞耻的人来说，谁知道呢？答案可能是，尽管他仍有一丝机会找到一种方法来度过难关。不管怎么说，问题是这样的。英国已经不再被治理了。


今天的英国是一个没有方向的国家，没有想法，也没有一个能够治理的政府。这个国家由一个人管理，他的唯一目的是留在他的岗位上，由一些人支持，他们的唯一目的是坚持下去，要么是因为他们不会进入任何其他政府，要么是因为他们已经决定坚持下去是自己获得约翰逊工作的最好方式。

所有这一切都发生在约翰逊赢得大选胜利后不到三年，大选胜利本应使他执政十年，成为一个新的撒切尔夫人，能够按照他的形象重塑国家，在英国脱欧的同时嵌入新的经济和社会模式。相反，约翰逊用一系列关于可悲的决定的可悲的谎言把这一切都扔掉了，这暴露了他自己可悲的弱点。

事实是，在冠状病毒大流行期间，约翰逊并不想命令国家进入禁闭状态，但他不情愿地、很晚才这样做，只是懒得遵守他不相信的规则。当他被发现时，他撒了谎。当他因为这些谎言而陷入困境时，他拼命提拔他不应该提拔的人，他知道这是因为人们告诉他不要这样做。当这一点被发现时，他又撒谎，只是又一次被发现了。我们一直在继续，这是一个永无止境的腐败旋转木马。


汤姆-麦克塔格。混乱的部长

现在，英国又回到了几年前的状态，当时，由于英国脱欧和公投结果的失败，这个国家似乎完全无法治理。请记住，这就是约翰逊当初如何设法登上总理宝座的。他把自己表现为一个混乱的代理人，他将打破规则，以结束那些本应更清楚的人（当然包括他自己；他一直在摇摆不定，不知道该怎么做）造成的混乱局面。

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今天，在短暂的平静之后，混乱再次出现，而约翰逊再次成为混乱的中心--一个恶毒的憨豆先生，无论他走到哪里，都会留下毁灭的痕迹。

英国拥有的是一位具有本能的首相，有时是好的，有时是坏的，他几乎把它作为一个原则点，拒绝以任何方式改变或废除它们。在他看来，这样做将是对他认为世界上最重要的东西的犯罪：鲍里斯的伟大，他的梦想和欲望的喜剧化身。约翰逊拒绝淡化这个角色，这是他成功的源泉，是他在这个谨慎和计算的世界上的超级力量。这也将是他的衰败之处。

在上升的道路上，鲍里斯是一个嘲讽的、不屑一顾的小丑，能够嘲笑英国的政治阶级，多年来，英国的政治阶级一直在失败，即使它自己拍着胸脯说。在执政期间，鲍里斯偶尔会因为对这个政治阶层的规则不屑一顾而得到帮助，例如，他以推土机的方式通过为阻止英国脱离欧盟而部署的惯例。

在英国脱欧之后，他的本能甚至偶尔也会起到帮助作用。在俄罗斯入侵乌克兰之后，约翰逊成为该国最受欢迎的政治家之一，因为他在危机中投入了价值数十亿英镑的军事装备，比欧洲任何其他乌克兰盟友都多。尽管任何其他英国首相确实都会采取行动支持乌克兰，但约翰逊拒绝谨慎意味着英国比其他国家更快派出致命的援助，而且它继续以更高的速度这样做。


海伦-刘易斯：英国正在崩溃。为什么鲍里斯-约翰逊能再次当选？

然而，这些同样的直觉现在看来将使约翰逊失去工作。他不断无视官方建议，并试图绕过规则或完全无视它们，认为它们只不过是官方控制他的手段。最新的丑闻是任命一位名叫克里斯托弗-平彻（Christopher Pincher）的保守党议员担任议会高级职务，负责执行党的纪律，此人被指控有性方面的不当行为。约翰逊曾被提醒注意平彻的不当行为，但他忽视了这一警告，当平彻被指控有进一步不当行为而辞职时，他又声称自己并不知情。约翰逊似乎病态地无法谴责其他人的个人过失，很可能是因为他在别人的过失中看到了自己的一面镜子，而他非常讨厌接受别人的评判。如果这次保守党议员的性丑闻证明他是失败的，那么讽刺的是，这并不是他自己的丑闻。

约翰逊靠本能来管理，因为他是靠本能来管理的。他想把钱花在学校、医院、警察和基础设施上，因为这将使他受欢迎。当他受欢迎时，他很乐意增加税收来支付这一切。但是，当他不受欢迎时，他又要求减税以减轻痛苦。他想要一个撒切尔式的低税率、自由市场经济，他想要一个由关税、高税率和大开支保护的社会民主社会。他想要一个妻子，也想要一个情妇，想要责任和自由，想要权力和人气。

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鲍里斯-约翰逊不会改变。正如他最近说的那样--这是他几周来的一次坦诚之言--在同事们要求他改变自己的行为以继续任职之后，"如果你们是说要我进行某种心理上的转变，我想我们的听众会知道这是不可能的。这就是关于约翰逊的巨大悖论：他既是我所见过的最有自我意识的政治领导人，一个似乎真正反思自己性格缺陷的领导人，又是一个似乎最决心对这些缺陷完全不采取行动的人。因此，英国从一个丑闻到另一个丑闻，从一种本能到另一种本能，没有方向或目的，没有方向，没有治理。

汤姆-麦克塔格是《大西洋》杂志驻伦敦的工作人员。