Today, Explained - BoJo

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

Boris Johnson wanted a Brexit and now he’ll have to figure out how to make it happen. The Atlantic’s Tom McTague explains how a self-proclaimed “blithering idiot” became prime minister. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, the Conservative Party announced the winner of its own leadership election. Jeremy Hunt, 46,656. Boris Johnson, 92,153. And therefore I give notice that Boris Johnson is elected as the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. The Conservative Party is the largest party in the House of Commons. In coalition with a smaller party, they have a majority in the House of Commons

and that makes him Prime Minister. In coalition with a smaller party, they have a majority in the House of Commons, and that makes him Prime Minister. After that, on Wednesday, we saw the formal changeover of power. Door of Number 10 opening, here is the Prime Minister and her husband, Philip. And this was when Theresa May, the ex-leader of the Conservative Party, but still remaining as Prime Minister, went down to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen. She left out the back of 10 Downing Street.

I'm about to go to Buckingham Palace to tender my resignation to Her Majesty the Queen and to advise her to ask Boris Johnson to form a new administration. She's going with her husband. To the Black Jaguar, Prime Minister Theresa May, saying goodbye to Downing Street, which has been her home for the past three years and a few days. It was driven down the one-mile straight journey in central London

to Buckingham Palace in the Prime Ministerial car. The Queen will be waiting on the first floor in her audience room. She went in for the audience with the Queen. Once she'd finished in that meeting, Theresa May left Buckingham Palace in a private car. So that first moment of that handover of power has happened. And from that moment, Boris Johnson was driven down the Mall, the grandest street in Britain, to Buckingham Palace.

Boris Johnson just comes behind us in the car behind us right now. Where he went in for his own audience with the Queen, where she appointed him Prime Minister. When he comes back out of this building, Alistair, he will be Prime Minister. This all happened on Wednesday. When he left Buckingham Palace, he left in the prime minister's car for the short journey back to Number 10 Downing Street, where he took over as prime minister

and gave that speech on the steps of Downing Street yesterday. Good afternoon. I have just been to see Her Majesty the Queen, who has invited me to form a government, and I have accepted. The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts because we're going to restore trust in our democracy. And we're going to fulfil the repeated promises of Parliament to the people

and come out of the EU on October the 31st, no ifs or buts. Tom McTighe, staff writer at The Atlantic. Am I allowed to call Boris Johnson Bojo? You can do. We all call him Bojo here, or lots of people do. It gets to the heart of the Boris Johnson enigma, really. He's one of the few politicians who's known by his first name, and he's this kind of lovable rogue figure. The thing I've got to find out, really, is most politicians, Frazak Worker, are pretty incompetent,

and then have a veneer of competence. You do seem to do it the other way round. Yes. You can't rule out the possibility, you know, beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot, there are lurks of blithering idiots. Well, which is it? Are you a blithering idiot? No, of course not. No, no, no, my dear fellow. What's this about you driving a tractor through a barn, then?

And this is part of his appeal. It makes him seem like he's a different kind of politician. It's part of the charm. It's part of the celebrity. And, you know, you speak to journalists and they get very frustrated about this, but that is how he is known. So how did Bojo land this gig at the top of the British government? Because that's what you'd really like, isn't it? You've been... I think...

People in your life have criticised... Your ex-mother-in-law said Boris is very ambitious and always said he wanted to be prime minister. Yeah, my ex-mother-in-law is in many ways a wonderful woman. Did I used to say that? Maybe I did. I suppose all politicians in the end are like kind of crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced that they're going to make it and get out and survive. And of course, I think I got lost in my metaphor here about the wasps in the jam jar. But the point is... It's been a lifelong quest for Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson was born in Manhattan. He was a US citizen for a while. He had hopes of being... He used to joke about being

US president and world king instead of British prime minister. So he's had to tone down his ambitions somewhat, but he led the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union and won, costing David Cameron his job as prime minister. After that, he was appointed foreign secretary on the basis Theresa May thought that keep your enemies close and only for him to resign from government and then launch a campaign against her from the back benches, which cost her her job as prime minister. So he's effectively taken out two prime ministers and now has been appointed prime minister himself. She never fully had the party behind her, does he? No, absolutely not. He does not have the party fully behind him. Now, he has 75% or more of the Conservative Party electorate that have voted for him. Now, that gives him some protection

because all those MPs, members of parliament who were opposed to him, realised that their own voters and constituents back in their local constituencies like him. So that gives Boris some protection. But there is absolutely no doubt there is a significant minority of Conservative Party MPs who, A, don't think he's fit to be prime minister, and B, just don't like the guy at all. You know, so this is this is a major problem for him. And it wouldn't be a problem if he had a huge majority, if the Conservative Party were the dominant player in the House of Commons. But that's not the case. They have an absolutely wafer thin majority with the support of a small group of Northern Irish MPs from a different party. So, you know, Boris has got the same problems as Theresa May when it comes to Brexit. What's his plan? Well, you know, if we

knew that and if he knew that, you know, life would be a lot easier. I don't think he has a clear plan. He has an idea to renegotiate the deal that Theresa May negotiated, and then to put that to MPs and to get out of the European Union with a deal, most people think that is nigh on impossible. The European Union have said the deal on the table is not up for negotiation, and he doesn't have a majority to leave without a deal. But he is confident that push comes to shove. He'll be able to take the UK out with or without a deal by October the 31st. It'll be a Halloween Brexit.

Which sounds funny, but is consequential. We've talked about it on the show before, but Tom, could you just remind us what a no-deal Brexit would potentially mean for the UK and for the EU? No-deal rips up the status quo. All the trade deals that you have with the EU, the legal structure for how your businesses interact and sell things to the EU and import things from the EU. It all goes at the stroke of a pen.

And that's what's so radical. So you go from having zero tariffs on each other's goods and having exactly the same rules made in Brussels with British input that apply to all goods crisscrossing across Europe, to having tariffs immediately on goods crossing the border, and different rules made in different places. So it's a dramatic upheaval, and nobody is really sure what the impact would be, because nobody has ever done anything like it. He is Prime Minister of the UK at a time of genuine historic significance. You know, he has the power to do something great or disastrous.

You know, he's almost certain to go down in the history books for doing something big. Now, we just don't know what that is at the moment, whether he's going to take Britain out without a deal, which would be revolutionary, or he will somehow manage to succeed where Theresa May failed and take the UK out with a deal. After the break, a bit of background on this bojo who's about to do something that's never really been done. Our friends at Stitcher would love me to tell you about a brand new podcast called The Secret Lives of Black Women. It's about black women striving to live their best lives and trying not to lose their minds in the process. It's hosted by Sharla and Lauren.

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And she said it to me in a way that was just like, like she felt bad for me. Like, oh, you were a diversity hire. And I just remember when she told me that, like, first of all, why was that a big secret? Like, like as if it was something that she had to keep from me. And second, why is that something that I'm supposed to be ashamed about? Look for The Secret Lives of Black Women wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you like what you hear, you can hit subscribe. Tom, what's Bojo's background? Where did he grow up? What were his early days like?

So he grew up all over the place. He was born in Manhattan. His father and mother met at Oxford University. His father was a poet, his mother is an artist. They followed the father to America, who held various different jobs in academia at the World Bank. They actually spent as much time in the United States and continental Europe as they did in Britain growing up. When he came back from the US, they spent time in London. And then they moved to Brussels, where the father was working for the European Commission, ironically. And it was there that Boris Johnson became fluent in French and attended a European school and met his future wife. And at that point, his mother,

she had a mental breakdown, a very serious breakdown and had to return to England where she went to a psychiatric hospital for nine months. So Boris and his sister were sent to boarding school in England from when he was 10 or 11. And then he got into the most prestigious boarding school in England called Eton. He then goes to Oxford University. So he's treading the path of the elite in England from Eton to Oxford studying classics. And over time, he emerges from this kind of bookish reserve child into this flamboyant extrovert center of attention kid who's very popular and very academically gifted what does boris do once he gets out of this sort of elite educational world he then goes back to

london where he becomes a journalist first for the times of lond, where he actually gets sacked for making up a quote from his godfather. It was awful. I remember a deep, deep sense of shame and guilt and just not knowing how to sort it out. And it was a bit of a bummer for me. And then he joins the Daily Telegraph, which was the biggest conservative daily newspaper in the UK. And that's when his career really takes off. And he moves back to Brussels as a

young reporter to become their Europe correspondent reporting on the European Union from Brussels, and he becomes a superstar reporter over in Brussels, sending copy back to London of these dastardly attempts by European bureaucrats to stifle British democracy, import crazy rules on what we can and cannot do. I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall. I'd listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England. Everybody I wrote from Brussels were having this amazing explosive effect on the Tory party. And it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power. And these stories

were lapped up back in London. He was Margaret Thatcher's favourite journalist, it's reported. He later became editor of The Spectator, a conservative magazine, and then he got into Parliament as Conservative MP. So I guess as a journalist, if you get a reputation for making stuff up, it can kind of present itself as a problem. So it made perfect sense for him to get into politics. Yeah, I think he has a reputation for taking risks and doing things that you would think would kill off other people's careers and doesn't kill off his. And there's something about him that people forgive things. It's because he burns brighter than most people. He's more charismatic.

In columns before that you've written, you've referred to black people with watermelon smiles. You've talked about tank-topped... In a wholly satirical way, by the way. Tank-topped... Can I finish, please? Yes, of course you can. Tank-topped bum boys, women in burqas who look like letterboxes. And I want to put it to you that you're not homophobic,

you've supported gay rights, you've supported women's right to wear the burqa, but you'll just say anything to get a laugh. No, I think if you look at each and every one of those columns or articles, you'll find that the quotations have been wrenched out of context, in many cases made to mean the opposite. He sounds like a dubious journalist, Tom. How does he fare as a Member of Parliament?

He carried on being the editor of The Spectator. He managed to combine the two jobs at the same time. After that, he was actually sacked for lying about having an affair. But again, that didn't derail him. A few years later, he was the only candidate the Conservatives thought who could win the London mayoralty. Now, London is a overwhelmingly left-wing liberal city, and this was a city that twice voted for Boris Johnson. He was a national celebrity at this point, having become famous for TV appearances when he was funny and bumbling and kind of comedic figure. You know, there are some jokes about Boris Johnson where David Cameron gone into trouble because he didn't know the price of a loaf of bread.

And he said, Oh, Oh, I don't know because I have a bread maker. And this was caused hilarity because it was just so out of touch with ordinary people, you know, who buy their loaves of bread down the shop every day or every week. And Boris Johnson was asked the same question. He said, I'm not, you mustn't,

I can tell you the price of a bottle of champagne. How about that? So when it came to the London mayoralty, they chose Boris and then he won it again four years later. So he served eight years as London mayor, and that was the time that London hosted the Olympics. This was his high point as a popular figure, both with young liberal voters and with conservative voters on the outskirts of London in the suburbs. He was an extremely popular figure. There was a moment where he was leading a crowd of thousands of people in Hyde Park, one of the central parks in London, on the opening weekend of the Olympics. And a day or so before,

we'd have Mitt Romney, who had come over to the UK, and he'd questioned whether the UK was ready to host the Olympics. And Boris had stood on stage and whipped the crowd up into a sort of frenzy saying... There's a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we're ready. He wants to know whether we're ready. Are we ready?

The crowd was sort of cheering at this and then they started this chant. Boris! Boris! Boris! And I've spoken to his aides who have said he will never get to that level of popularity again. That was his greatest moment as a politician because he was a unifying figure based on optimism and a kind of can-do spirit. From that moment on, he's never quite been able to hit those heights. He's become a much more divisive figure instead. The Brexit campaign really gets underway in earnest while Boris is still mayor of London, right? How does he, how does he weight himself into the campaign?

I apologise for being slow with coming down. You know, you want to ask my views on Europe, don't you? Let me tell you, let me you? Let me tell you where I've got to. People were desperate to find out what he was going to do. And he ummed and ahed and waited up for such a long time, as long as he possibly could. And the story goes that the weekend before he announced it in his newspaper column, he actually wrote two columns, one in favour of staying in the European Union and one against, so that he could sort of test the arguments of what he thought was strongest. But after a great deal of heartache, I don't think there's anything else I can do. I will

be advocating vote leave because I want a better deal for the people of this country. And in the end, lots of people on both sides, whether you're a Remainer or a Lever, will say that he was absolutely crucial in tipping the balance to Brexit. So what does he do after the Brexit vote? So after the Brexit vote, all hell broke loose. David Cameron that morning announced

he was resigning as Prime Minister because he wasn't able to see through the vote to leave the European Union. he didn't have, he wasn't able to see through the vote to leave the European Union. He didn't have the authority to do so. So that sparked the first Conservative leadership contest in 2016. I am honoured and humbled to have been chosen by the Conservative Party to become its leader. Essentially, what happened is all the Brexiteers stabbed each other in the back and none of them made it through and Theresa May came through the middle, who was a Remainer,

and swooped in and stole the crown. We are living through an important moment in our country's history. Following the referendum, we face a time of great national change. And I know because we're Great Britain that we will rise to the challenge. So after Theresa May won the election, she then appointed Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary, resurrecting his career, giving him the power and the tools to then kill her off two years later.

It's a kind of extraordinary story. It is, yeah. A self-proclaimed blithering idiot, a known liar, a known racist will now make the UK's most consequential decision since, like, what, World War II? Remind me how this happened? Well, I think it's partly because the kind of politicians that Boris is evidently not don't do the job that they say that they're going to do, or that is the perception of the public at large. You know, we've had some quite big events that have happened in the UK, just as in the US, that have shaken people's trust in the political system. So we've had the Iraq war under Tony Blair in 2003. And then you had the financial crash,

which is probably the biggest event of our lifetimes in 2007, 2008, which in the UK, because its financial sector is so much more outsized compared to the rest of the economy than in the US, meant an enormous bailout from taxpayers to the banks, which has led to 10 years of austerity for public services, schools, hospitals, all of those kind of things. So ordinary people paying the cost for a financial crash, which they don't really understand, had nothing to do with them, and seems to benefit people that they don't particularly like in the city of London. So this is the background for, I think, what is happening now, and a frustration that seemingly sensible, straight-laced politicians like Theresa May

can't do what they say they're going to do, like take Britain out of the European Union. So they go for a guy who looks completely different, sounds different, acts different, and is a little bit, in some ways, more like them in that he looks flawed and he makes jokes when he perhaps shouldn't make jokes. But in other ways, he's completely not like them.

You know, he's an elitist who speaks Latin and reads Homer. You know, so he's a real contradiction. He's hard to grasp what he is. And that's part of his success. He's all things to all people. The point is that in a Darwinian way, in a Darwinian way, the public needs politicians to want to get as far as they can, and that's Hyde. In a Darwinian way, are you fit enough to survive?

Well, probably not, but in an evolutionary sense, it's vital that everybody should have the delusion that they could. Tom McTague wrote a big piece about Boris this week for The Atlantic. It's titled Boris Johnson Meets His Destiny. You can find it at theatlantic.com. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.