Boris Johnson and the art of distraction politics

The prime minister’s obsession with Churchill is making him look to some like the patriotic guardian-in-chief of statues, standing alone against those who would rewrite Britain’s history, writes Sean O'Grady

Past Tory leaders rarely invoked Churchill, unlike Boris Johnson (AFP via Getty)

It is no great surprise that Boris Johnson has declared, “I will resist with every breath in my body any attempt to remove that statue from Parliament Square”. No doubt Johnson has a genuine affection for a predecessor who invented the euphemism “terminological inexactitude” for a lie, and who showed an unusual degree of political flexibility in his career. After all, Churchill changed his political party twice and forged an alliance with (Soviet) Russia.

Yet for a politician with a liking for vague, patriotic optimism, Johnson’s wholehearted adoption of Churchill is politically smart and expedient.

First, it is obviously an attempt to align himself with the great man, in order to win the support of what you might call the Churchillian vote – those far too young to have fought in the last world war but whose nostalgia for a pre-EU golden age of empire and Ovaltine that never was is as fervent as it is inexplicable. Some evidence of that was on display during the recent VE Day celebrations.

Such an attempt to wrap oneself in the Union Jack is hardly unusual in a Tory. For decades, no Conservative conference or public election meeting was complete without a Union Jack used as a backdrop or draped over the trestle table, maybe secured by a couple of heavy glass ashtrays. Nowadays the daily coronavirus media conferences and prime ministerial broadcasts feature flags in the way such events never used to in the UK.

Churchill himself figured sparingly in the iconography and propaganda of past Tory leaders. William Hague, as a precocious schoolboy, listened to LPs of Churchill’s famous wartime broadcasts but never claimed any mystical communion with him. Only Margaret Thatcher spoke winsomely about “Winston”, even though she never knew him and barely overlapped with the end of his service in the Commons. Those postwar Tory statesmen who actually knew and worked closely with Churchill – Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler and Reggie Maudling – rarely invoked him.

The Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square was boarded up last week as a precaution ahead of protests (Getty)

Yet Johnson can’t help talking and writing and quoting him. Apart from attracting the “patriot”, the tactic of attaching himself so closely to Churchill also means that those who despise and attack Johnson can be baited into despising and attacking Churchill, or rather his statue. That suits Johnson down to the ground. It is like the way a bullfighter goads a bull, waving the red cape around; the memory and reputation of Churchill is being used like the toreador’s cape. It has the additional welcome effect (for Johnson) of making him look like the patriotic guardian-in-chief of statues, standing alone against those who would rewrite Britain’s history.

The politics of statues and history are becoming clearer, and as ever, the statues and the history are turning into fresh fronts in Britain’s ever-more intense culture wars. As with his victories in the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the general election last year, Johnson, consciously or otherwise, has found himself the net beneficiary of this new fault line in politics, cutting across traditional class and territorial lines. His identification with Churchill may yet help Johnson’s populist Conservatism to another triumph, but it has done nothing for Churchill’s unassailable status as the greatest Briton of all time, as judged by the BBC poll in 2002 that so caught the country’s imagination. Johnson has a reputation for using and abusing people, but doing it to poor old Winston is taking the biscuit.