Boris Johnson was undone mainly by the fact that he is a habitual liar, and to a lesser degree by the fact that he is lazy and does not seem to actually believe in much of anything. Neither was he undone by some unforeseeable shift in public opinion, nor by factional plotting within the Conservative Party, though that party is famously a nest of vipers. Forget, for our purposes here, the confessional: The character of elected leaders has immediate practical importance - which begins with their importance for the workaday concerns of the careers of those leaders.īoris Johnson was not undone by bad ideas or bad policy, though he had some bad ideas and bad policies. As I have been arguing for some years now, character and all those virtues we used to talk about are not mere accoutrements to a political career - nice if you can get them, but not necessary - or issues of concern only to history and the afterlife.
In retrospect, it is clear that at least some of us were not all that serious about that.īut the issue of character is worth thinking about - not as an abstract philosophical and ethical concern (though such inquiries are of interest, too) but as a practical issue. There were some good books about the character of presidents ( Peggy Noonan wrote one) and whole sprawling business empires built on virtue. But the character of both private and public figures, and especially the character of the president, used to be a very big deal to conservatives. It’s a kind of squeaky sound.Ĭonservatives are a little bit embarrassed by the word character just now, for obvious reasons. The differences are significant, but the performance of the eccentric gentleman representing Uxbridge and South Ruislip (born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) as prime minister of the United Kingdom does shed some light on a subject of urgent and immediate importance to the very different office of the U.S. And so Boris Johnson’s one big thing at home was Brexit, an issue that aside from being an inspiration to right-wing populist movements around the world was of little importance outside of the European Union and the United Kingdom, while his blue-ribbon foreign-policy achievement - getting the Russian war on Ukraine just right - was of limited practical value. Prime ministers of the United Kingdom are different from American presidents in that they occupy a relatively large office - wielding both executive and legislative power - in a much-less-consequential country.
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James Garfield, who died from an assassin’s wounds six months into his administration, had too little time in the office to achieve anything, while Andrew Jackson had two full terms to prove that he never should have been elected to the office in the first place. Clinton was a slacker, but some eminently capable and experienced men end up accomplishing relatively little as president: Ulysses Grant was one such, and George H. Clinton did not shape events but was carried forward by them: the post–Cold War restructuring of the global economic and diplomatic environment, the Internet, the Bosnian War, the ascendance of a new kind of Republican power in 1994. Some presidents make a great noise but don’t actually get much done: Bill Clinton had the great good fortune to be president when the first big technology boom was reaching its height but long before #MeToo. (So, a mixed record.) Ronald Reagan, in a similar way, got one big win at home by overseeing a major reform of economic policy and one big win abroad by setting up the kill shot on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, though the hammer-and-sickle flag didn’t come down at the Kremlin until Christmas of 1991, when Reagan was enjoying his retirement in Bel-Air. A few really extraordinary presidents get to do two big things: Franklin Roosevelt did the New Deal and rallied the whole of American power to save - the world, really.
Richard Nixon ended the American involvement in Vietnam. Some of those one big things are bigger than others: Barack Obama signed a health-insurance bill, but Abraham Lincoln saved the Union. presidents get to do one big thing - if they’re lucky. The Tuesday is available only to NRPlus members: If you would like to become one of those - and I hope you will - you can sign up here. Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about divers and sundry topics. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson makes a statement at Downing Street in London, England, July 7, 2022.
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