I vividly remember the morning Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street: 28 November, 1990. I was an undergraduate student, and mum of three young children. I dropped them off at school/nursery and was planning to go home to get on with some essay writing. I turned on the BBC News while I made a cup of tea… and of course, was immediately hooked by the coverage.
As I remember, it was a cloudy/sunny morning, which seemed very appropriate to me. Thatcher was a controversial figure throughout her entire time at No 10, becoming increasingly unpopular as she moved to the end of her premiership. I could see she was on the verge of tears as she made her brief speech, and I thought, good. You deserve to cry, so many tears have been shed because of your callousness.
Depths of anguish
I, like a vast number of other British people, really didn’t like her. But now, as I approach the age she was then, I realise that, as Thatcher disappeared around the corner of Downing Street on her way to the palace, I had no idea of the depths of anguish that a truly wretched prime minister, and the complicit cronies appointed by him, could take me to.
I won’t repeat my story of both my mother and brother dying alone over the lockdown period, and of watching their funerals on video. Suffice to say that my brother died on the day of the Secret Santa party in Downing Street, and I’ve already said a lot about this in Yorkshire Bylines, Byline Times and Talk TV.
My experiences are utterly dwarfed by the testimony of this lady, prevented from travelling to provide care for her anguished daughter by the lockdown laws that Boris Johnson and his team had crafted. As a result, she subsequently had to deal with the aftermath of the young woman’s suicide under the premise of these same lockdown laws, while Johnson and his aides were flagrantly disregarding them.
TRIGGER WARNING: The audio file interview attached to this tweet relates to a harrowing description of suicide.
The Johnson trauma effect
The anger and sadness of many British people, as Johnson leaves his parliamentary seat in disgrace, is much deeper than the general irritation at the time of Thatcher’s resignation; many of us have had experiences that placed us in the realms of what psychologists refer to as ‘trauma’. As I said in 2022:
“When I see Johnson spluttering justifications for his behaviour – trying to convince the public he was actually obeying the rules (because the party he was at wasn’t really a party) and attempting to excuse the fact that a party was ongoing in Downing Street on the actual day my brother died – I am continually reminded of my recent bereavement experiences.”
For me, the relatives who died could not have been saved – my brother had a terminal illness; my mother was 92 and in the final stages of Alzheimer’s. It was just the manner of their passing during the lockdown period that added considerable distress.
At the time, I was reassured by being part of a national collective effort to curtail the spread of Covid, famously also adhered to by the late Queen at the funeral of her husband of 74 years. But when I found out that Johnson and his aides had been partying all the while, another feeling crept in – like the duped feeling you get when you’ve fallen for an online scam, but additionally laced with guilt and regret.
My memory of that feeling is most triggered by Johnson’s giggling press officer Allegra Stratton, gleefully sending up a “fictional party that was a business meeting… and it was not socially distanced”. While tens of thousands died alone.
I shudder to think how that feeling would be multiplied by a memory of a situation in which you were prevented from travelling to comfort your daughter and being impelled to cope with her subsequent suicide under strict lockdown regulations.
The fact that Johnson now has the effrontery to present an ‘honours’ list packed with his cronies, several of whom worked in his office over that period, is shocking. And this is further exacerbated by the current prime minister’s lack of attempts to take steps to prevent its passage. Given the findings of the parliamentary committee investigation, the response from many will be both grief and bafflement.
The deluded and the demonic
And to add insult to injury, now it seems that Johnson will still not go quietly; he is set to cast aspersions on the oldest parliament in the world, because they have called time on his riding roughshod over the ordinary people of the UK. His narcissism, callousness and entitlement clearly know no bounds.
The difference between Johnson and Thatcher is plain. Thatcher was of course arrogant, but sincere in her politics; the evidence suggests that she genuinely believed she was doing her best for the nation. It is with hindsight, nearly half a century later – living in the terminally sick world economy and deteriorating natural environment that she and her US ally, Ronald Reagan, took major roles in creating – that we can see how wrong she was.
In contrast, Johnson’s most recent biographers reflect:
“[Johnson] didn’t know what he was doing, barely bothered learning, and was… lacking in moral seriousness… What weighed most heavily in his choosing leave over remain… was his own personal ambition. From this unfolds a tale of power pursued without much purpose, or latterly dignity.”
Compare also Thatcher and Johnson’s attitudes to refurbishing Downing Street: Thatcher spent £1,836, the equivalent of £7,250, and while it is not yet clear exactly how much Johnson spent, it is rumoured to be in the region of £200,000, including £840-a-roll gold wallpaper. His fleeting successor, Liz Truss, who along with her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng took the British economy to the edge of ruin, is reported to have had the walls painted over, because the paper had started to peel off.
When it was made plain to Thatcher that her time was up, she promptly resigned. And although she was clearly upset about the brutal manner of her defenestration, she didn’t make wild public allegations of ‘kangaroo courts’ and ‘hit jobs’; she cared enough about her nation and her party not to seek the destabilisation of either.
21st century populism
Johnson is already being compared to Donald Trump, the US president who refused to accept that he lost the 2020 election, and who has just been arrested for the second time. Whether this presages the future for Johnson is not yet clear. As Simon Jenkins points out:
“Johnson’s… attitude to parliament was orchestrated by ethically neutered aides imported by him into Downing Street. He sacked the abler half of the existing cabinet on suspicion of disloyalty – a contempt for his parliamentary party Margaret Thatcher never showed… Partygate was merely the last straw.”
On that November morning 33 years ago, I believed that the Thatcher regime was the worst that Britain could possibly expect in my lifetime. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and we were secure in our place at the heart of the European Community.
Now, looking back across the wreckage Johnson left behind, I know I was very, very wrong. Johnson’s government was of course a descendant of Thatcher’s, but also a product of Tony Blair’s failure to dismantle the neoliberal structures that Thatcher had embedded at the heart of the nation; a core issue for the contemporary Labour Party to ponder. The abolition of the House of Lords, now fast becoming a crony depositary, is a certainly a welcome prospect.
Won’t get fooled again?
Behind his dichotomous affable public persona, Johnson is the most dangerous politician ever bred by the British parliamentary system. He ran Downing Street in the manner of a gangland boss, handing out lucrative favours to cronies from a pit of public funding he treated as bottomless. His office partied on, as a series of crises rocked the UK, from Johnson’s ill-conceived ‘oven ready’ Brexit deal to Covid-19 crony contracts and high levels of Covid deaths, to a Brexit ‘hobbled’ UK economy. The British people are poorer, hungrier and colder due to Johnson’s disastrous regime and its aftermath.
Surely the least our current government can do is to cancel his ‘dishonours’ list and set up further investigations into his conduct in office, with a view to further punitive sanctions if additional wrong-doing is uncovered.
We must better protect ourselves from such charlatans, carpetbaggers and coercive controllers in the future, so, in the words of the old song, we ‘won’t get fooled again’.
