Boris Johnson’s memory trick tactics are straight out of the Trump playbook

In a 24-hour news cycle, our brain’s evolutionary need for selective amnesia makes every day a good day to bury bad news and our populist political leaders know it

Recency bias is the blurring memory trick our minds play on us by displacing nearly new events with the very latest. It’s how our brains make processing room for the future; without this fortunate forgetfulness  psychologists think we’d go mad.  

Selective amnesia has always conferred an evolutionary advantage. Until now.  Because in a 24-hour news cycle, recency bias makes every day a good day to bury bad news and our populist political leaders know it.

It’s why Donald Trump tweets. He’s mastered the art of dealing out an incendiary new “line” whenever he feels threatened because it makes it impossible for his opponents to coalesce around a coherent counter narrative. For Trump it’s proving to be an effective short-term survival tactic at the expense of long-term strategy.  

That’s why weekend reports that Boris Johnson is “fascinated” by Donald Trump are so disturbing because it looks like the prime minister intends to follow his lead by lurching.  

The decision to unpick the Brexit treaty has completely wrong-footed the EU, the world’s media, and members of the Conservative Party, who were beginning to openly question their leader’s competence.  

But it’s the timing of this “fascination” that’s so striking – Boris Johnson is having a bad time recently.  

UK U-turns and failures have come so thick and fast that sometimes Boris Johnson can’t remember what’s been happening. That’s why he became so peevish when Sir Keir Starmer tried to jog his memory last Wednesday.

The prime minister’s performance in last week’s PMQs was truly astonishing. Everybody had anticipated the Labour leader’s attack lines except Mr Johnson, who still seemed in holiday mode – unprepared and complacent.  

Starmer could have led on any of the eight documented U-turns taken by Johnson’s government over the summer, but chose to ask when the prime minister had become aware of the algorithm’s impact on the life chances of the most disadvantaged students.  

The prime minister’s refusal to answer established his failure to know or his failure to act. Either way, it was a humiliation he felt very keenly. It triggered his extraordinary attempt to smear the Labour leader as an IRA enabler in his former role as director of public prosecutions.

Over the weekend it also emerged that Johnson had instructed his aides to find more promising material that might stick against Starmer. It’s textbook Trump by way of his mentor Roy Cohn: always hit back and never apologise.  

The signs are ominous: “Get Starmer” and the rekindled Brexit brouhaha are just the first stolen “plays” from the US president’s playbook – the pages of which are well thumbed in Downing Street.  

It’s high risk though. Tampering with the seam of the Brexit ball might make for a bounce in the polls and consolidate his position with his core support, but that shouldn’t be necessary at this stage of an administration with such a large majority. It’s a Trumpian power play that betrays the weakness of Mr Johnson’s real position: he must be badly rattled to risk losing a trade deal to rescue his reputation.

But obscuring a summer of mess by merging it into an artificially constructed one might just succeed because our society’s collective “working” memory is struggling to keep up with events. The news cycle is in permanent overdrive to satisfy our insatiable demand for the next big thing, even if that usually leaves us all facing the wrong way.

Recency bias means that when populists normalise confusion they’re using the media to erase their past failures. Trump only has such  contempt for the “lamestream” media because by making it bark incessantly he has made it lose its bite. He thinks it’s his lapdog and he might be right. The cognitive quirk that evolved to keep us sane is being used to induce amnesia and the media is inadvertently complicit. And that way madness lies.  

Events of the last week suggest that Mr Johnson is attempting the same trick but with higher stakes: the president is only risking his job but the prime minister is gambling his nation’s future.