Boris and Trump might be gone – but unless we change our politics, we’ll get more malign leaders

The electability of Johnson and Trump resided in their effectiveness as communicators and ability to channel vast populist appeal, writes Mary Dejevsky. Just because they've broken their parties and been discredited, doesn't mean their success was a flash in the pan

We could soon see something similar to them again in the future (Getty)

It is no more than an accident of timing but the parallels are hard to avoid. Over the past week, two big political figures, one on either side of the Atlantic, have been bitterly denouncing the systems that once enabled their power and now want to eject them.

Both are furious, both are challenging the legitimacy of the processes used to evict them, both are speaking of a “witch hunt”. And in both cases, a political consensus has cheerfully danced on what is hoped will be their political graves.

In the UK, or at least in the so-called Westminster village, there was a palpable sense of vindication after the parliamentary privileges committee published its excoriating verdict on Boris Johnson. The committee found that the then prime minister had not just “deliberately misled the House” multiple times, but had impugned the committee and been “complicit” in its attempted intimidation. How could there be any possible way back for him from this?

Meanwhile, in the United States, Donald Trump has just been arraigned on no fewer than 37 criminal charges relating to the removal and alleged disclosure of secret documents from his time at the White House, making him the first former president to face federal charges.

The previous month, he had been found liable for the sexual abuse of a former magazine writer, E Jean Carroll, and there is a whole slew of civil and criminal cases waiting in the wings relating to his defeat in the 2020 election, claims of sexual abuse, and allegations of illicit business practices.

As with Johnson in the UK, the US mainstream response to Trump’s difficulties has been to ask how he can possibly mount any comeback – although there is a slight difference.

Whereas Johnson’s political career is largely seen as over, Trump’s many US critics are more cautious. They note that the more Trump is seen to be vilified by what he and many of his supporters see as the US establishment – whether political, media or judicial – the more he is seen as fighting the status quo on their behalf, and the stronger his showing in the polls. Conflicting with the courts can thus work as a political plus for Trump, while conflicting with parliament does not work the same magic for Johnson.

Or does it?

The confidence that Boris Johnson’s famous ambition to be “world king” is at an end is the dominant view from Westminster, but how far is it replicated elsewhere in the country, and specifically among those whose votes in those red wall seats gave the Conservatives their unexpected landslide victory at the last election? How far, in a tussle for voters’ hearts and minds between MPs and Boris Johnson, are MPs guaranteed to prevail? Remember, if you will – and plenty do – the expenses scandal and the resistance MPs put up to Brexit.

Right now, parliament has one big advantage, which has nothing to do with the credibility (or otherwise) of MPs, and this is that its verdict on Johnson coincides with the opening of the Covid inquiry, where bereaved families are, rightly, being given prominent swathes of airtime. But the idea that the effective removal of Johnson marks a return to what some like to call normal, civilised political conduct, or even an end to a rogue “populist” period of UK politics, is, I suggest, an illusion.

First, because Johnson’s complaints about the process by which he was judged are not completely without substance – in the same way as Trump has at least some right on his side.

The privileges committee straddles a line between an ordinary parliamentary committee, on the one hand, and a judicial process on the other. When the chair is on record as holding strong views on one side of the argument, the justice of the process has to be in question. And in having the power effectively to force a by-election outside the electoral timetable, the committee and its rulings could be seen as posing a challenge to the democratic process.

Add the questions that cannot but hang over the Partygate investigation now, given the then-senior civil servant Sue Gray’s new job with Labour; add the way the identities of so many involved in the scandal have been concealed (for the sake, so it was said, of their careers), and it would not be hard to conclude that the whole search for accountability has been flawed.

As, indeed, Trump has argued of his treatment at the hands of the current US administration. It is after all his successors – and political opponents – who now pull the strings.

Why is there no outcry about Biden’s son’s dubious dealings in Ukraine? Why is Trump subject to federal charges for keeping sensitive state documents (with pictures distributed for media ridicule), while possibly similar actions by Biden himself, Hillary Clinton and maybe others have had no consequences? As ever, those who have won power determine not only how history is written, but how elements of the law and the political process function, too.

The second reason why we may not be seeing an end to Johnson and Trump, and why what some call an aberrant “populist” period may not be over, is that their victories were about more than their respective characters (bolshie and maverick though they might be). They were about a political process that had left many feeling as though they did not have a voice.

And this reflects the fact that, for all their differences, the US and UK political systems are similar in one key respect. They are two-party, adversarial systems, with first-past-the-post elections serving to exclude any third or smaller force, reinforced by a degree of gerrymandering that creates and perpetuates “safe” seats.

The popularity, indeed, the electability, of Boris Johnson – as of Donald Trump – resided in part in their personal effectiveness as campaigners and communicators. But it reflected far more their understanding that a whole swathe of opinion had been left unrepresented in a two-party system that had largely gravitated towards the centre.

After leaving office, both left divided parties in their wake, which complicates any comeback. But it does not follow from this that their victories were mere flashes in the pan. They were rather an expression of profound flaws in the existing political process and an illustration of how the mould could be broken.

This is why, unless the political system changes on both sides of the Atlantic to accommodate a wider range of views, we could soon see something similar to them again in the future – even if not they themselves – and perhaps in a more malign form.