Brexit: Boris Johnson may seem invulnerable to domestic criticism but storm clouds are gathering on world stage – Joyce McMillan

If there is one thing we should have learned from the strange presidency of Donald Trump, it is that under 21st-century conditions, it’s possible for some politicians of the right to pull off a spectacular manoeuvre, in relation to public opinion, that leaves them almost invulnerable to the kind of criticism that can damage or end ordinary political careers.

Boris Johnson is attempting to pull off his greatest Teflon manoeuvre of all, in trying to make the EU take the blame for the consequences of his “hard” Brexit in Northern Ireland, says Joyce McMillan (Picture: Stefan Rousseau/WPA pool/Getty Images)

The trick is to create low expectations for your conduct, in terms both of ethics and of political competence, and to do so boldly, with some degree of charm.

Then thereafter, in true showbiz style, the trick is to live down to those expectations, in a spectacular way that keeps you in the news. You lie, you cheat, you fracture social norms and break treaties, you conduct a private life riddled with self-indulgence and betrayal; but always with the suggestion – false, but in the reactionary spirit of the times – that you are just saying and doing what every normal guy would do, given half a chance.

Your political colleagues find your popular appeal seductive; your opponents are at a loss to know how to oppose you, because the more they point out the consequences of your actions, the more they boost your reputation as the bad boy who gets away with things.

And so you become one of a new breed of Teflon politicians, whose supporters expect little from them beyond entertainment, and whose opponents cannot lay a glove on them. The United States, to its credit, has now got rid of its Teflon Donald, at least for a while.

In Britain, though, we are living through what seems an interminable age of Teflon Boris, the Prime Minister whose poll ratings remain a stubborn four or five points ahead of Labour’s, despite displays of incompetence, inconsistency and poor governance, at the height of a lethal pandemic, that would almost certainly have destroyed the career of any politician judged by normal standards.

With more than 100,000 citizens dead, the UK now has second highest Covid death rate per million of population of any nation in the world, causing incalculable long-term damage to our economy and society; and all this is taking place against the background of a shambolic exit from the EU for which Boris Johnson himself carries a heavy personal responsibility, and in which the UK government, four-and-a-half years after the Leave vote, finally reached a deal on Christmas Eve, and issued guidance on the deal to British firms less than 48 hours before it had to be implemented.

And now, in relation to Northern Ireland, we are about to see Johnson try to pull off his greatest Teflon manoeuvre of all, in trying to make the EU take the blame for the dangerous and potentially toxic consequences of his “hard” Brexit in Northern Ireland.

Having twice signed deals which entail custom checks in the Irish Sea, Boris Johnson now finds – to the surprise of no-one but himself – that the deal he signed has upset Unionist opinion, leading to death threats against staff carrying out checks at the port of Larne.

Arlene Foster and the DUP are now campaigning to have the Northern Ireland protocol to the UK/EU trade agreement dropped, since they would rather in any case see a hard border across Ireland, and the Good Friday Agreement consigned to history.

The British government, meanwhile, are still in denial, pretending that Britain can leave the EU, and its single market and customs union, without creating new borders anywhere except where it suits them; and you can bet that so far as the government’s many friends in the British media are concerned, this particular Teflon manoeuvre will work perfectly, with the EU and the Irish government cast as the bad guys, prepared to risk peace in Northern Ireland, rather than let Britain have its Brexit cake and eat it too. Cue soaring popularity rates for battling Boris, as he takes on Johnny Foreigner; and a useful level of collective amnesia about his key role in causing the crisis in the first place.

Whether Boris Johnson’s Teflon manoeuvres will work so effectively on the world stage, though, is more debatable. There are complex cultural reasons why Johnson tends to be treated so indulgently by large sections of British, or more accurately English, opinion; but he generally fails to impress beyond these shores.

The Irish government and the EU have already said that the Northern Ireland protocol is not up for renegotiation, and that they are looking for practical measures to improve its operation; nor, in the continuing negotiation over the detail of future trading relations between the EU and UK, are they short of technical points at which they could bring further pressure to bear on the UK government, without courting the kind of popular backlash they inadvertently provoked last weekend.

And meanwhile, Boris Johnson has now lost his major international ally in the Brexit project, Donald Trump; now replaced by a US President who is not only friendly towards the EU, but also proudly Irish by background, and likely to give short shrift to those who, for short-term political gain, have thrown the fragile peace of Northern Ireland into jeopardy without giving the place a second thought.

Boris Johnson may continue to ride high in domestic opinion polls, in other words. Yet for the UK, storm-clouds of international isolation and economic difficulty, are gathering rapidly, along with the threat of ever-more-bitter dissension among the four nations of the Union; and if all political careers end in failure, the downfall of Teflon Boris, when it finally comes, may leave much more in ruins than his own vaulting ambition, and his childhood dream of becoming “king of the world".

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