Yahoo News The Tories said we could have our cake and eat it – now they are stuffed and voters are hungry
Boris Johnson rose to the top by getting people to like him. His problems are the result of them subsequently getting to know him. There is no mask that has slipped, just a change in the light that gives a dark edge to the same features.
It is often this way with leaders on the way down. The trait people dislike is the origin of previous appeal inverted. The stolidity that once recommended Theresa May and Gordon Brown turned robotic. The charm of Tony Blair and David Cameron went from smooth to slippery.
With the current prime minister that trait is indifference to difficulty – meeting adversity with good cheer; solving problems by declaring them non-existent; clearing practical obstacles by leaps of the imagination. The ethos is expressed in Johnson’s subversion of a famous proverb: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”
Related: No new Covid restrictions before Christmas, Boris Johnson confirms
It has been a catchphrase of his for years, but it was the dilemmas posed by Brexit that turned it into a doctrine – cakeism. In the cakeist view, Britain could retain the benefits of EU membership without any obligation to European law. It meant leaving a trading bloc without loss of trade. It meant having different customs regimes for Great Britain and Northern Ireland without erecting a politically toxic customs border between them.
Watch: COVID-19: What are the rules in the UK's four nations for Christmas and beyond?
“I want you to see this as a cakeist treaty,” Johnson said of the post-Brexit trade deal he signed in December 2020. A year later: there is no cake, Conservative MPs are hungry, and voters are abandoning the bakery. Europe is not the proximate cause of that discontent, but cakeism has evolved into a creed for the denial of all the choices that make governing difficult. It explains a “levelling up” agenda and a “green industrial revolution” that presuppose massive increases in public investment without offending Tory ambitions for a smaller state.
It is the vain hope of limiting the spread of Covid infections without imposing restraints on individual freedoms. A cakeist pandemic strategy urges people to avoid mixing in crowds, without instructing them to stay away from shops and bars. It results in a cabinet meeting to debate new restrictions that concludes, after two hours, with a decision not to decide. It is the prime minister saying he “will not hesitate to act” as long as that action can wait until after Christmas.
When Johnson was at the height of his powers he would prevaricate at leisure, comfortable in two minds or more, happy to make eager courtiers compete for his ear and hang on his decision. When the Covid crisis first struck, he used delay as a management technique, letting time and events winnow the options while ramping the urgency, until the lockdown decisions made themselves. Now, brought low by scandal and besieged by aspiring successors, inaction is the course imposed by an absence of authority over his party.
Those are the different stages of cakeism, from insouciance to paralysis, via denial. At its core sits monumental arrogance – a feeling of superiority to forces that constrain the inferior class of politician who submits to history instead of mastering it. From that vanity it follows that rules are for the little people. Helmsmen of history are allowed to unwind over cheese and wine on the Downing Street terrace, even while the families of Covid victims hold funerals by Zoom.
The prime minister might not have issued an explicit licence to flout lockdown rules in government, but none was needed. He radiates the entitlement to self-gratification and the pomposity that justifies it as fair recompense for a hard day’s service to the nation. It is a particular type of corruption, common to revolutionary regimes that have lost ideological momentum. It is the decadent stage that comes when the party elite has understood that the utopia they promised is unattainable, but is enjoying the trappings of power too much to break the bad news to the people in whose name they seized power.
Watch: Has Boris' Bubble BURST? Tories Despair of Shropshire Fail
The pandemic has dominated Johnson’s time in office, but Brexit gave him his mandate. It was the cause that won him an election but, more important for his style of government, that victory was understood by Eurosceptic hardliners as an expression of the true will of the people. It was the refutation of the naysaying, cosmopolitan remainer elites, fussy civil servants, busybody bureaucrats, bean-counting trade experts and meddling judges who claimed that Johnson could not have his cake and eat it.
To that roster of shame can now be added “unelected public health spokesperson”, which is the term one Tory MP used to denounce Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, for daring to sound downbeat about the spread of Omicron in the runup to Christmas.
That is where cakeism tends – the suspicion that science itself is part of an elite conspiracy against liberty. That is not Johnson’s view, but he has lost control of the doctrine he pioneered. Having acquired the taste for unlimited cake, the Conservative party will not easily be put back on a calorie-controlled policy diet.
Cakeism is not a formula that works in government because, in reality, the cake has to be rationed and people notice. They notice, too, when the prime minister and his friends help themselves to the fattest slice, while urging the public to abstain out of civic duty. They see how the man who treats everything as a joke is also laughing at the people who elected him. That is when the light changes, the smile darkens into a sneer, the populist loses his people, the polarities of his magnetism are flipped, and the force that was once attraction turns repulsive.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
