Notices by a Claes unto himself 🇸🇪🇭🇰 (clacke@libranet.de)

♲ @joerg_fliege@pluspora.com: David Davis has left the chat: ‘In the Name of God, Go’ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/boris-johnson-winston-churchill/621294/

If you wanted to choose a quotation to wound Boris Johnson—a man who wrote a biography of Winston Churchill as a coded advertisement for his own virtues—then this would be it. When Johnson’s fellow Conservative David Davis stood up in Parliament today and said these words, he must have intended them to be a fatal blow. Davis was not comparing the prime minister to his hero Churchill. He was comparing him to Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s weak, appeasing predecessor.

The quotation comes from a 1940 debate on Britain’s conduct in the dispiriting first months of the Second World War, as Britain failed to defend Norway from a German invasion. The Conservative Leo Amery compared Chamberlain’s attitude toward Adolf Hitler to that of a lion hunter caught sleeping by the lion. “That is, in brief, the story of our initiative over Norway,” Amery said. Then he built to a conclusion that quoted Oliver Cromwell, who overthrew and executed King Charles I. “This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’”

When Davis repeated these words, it was an extraordinary moment. After the rowdy heckling of Prime Minister’s Questions—at which Johnson bullishly defended his record in the face of questions about lockdown-breaking parties—the House of Commons fell silent. Davis is not only a fellow Tory, but a Brexiteer and a former cabinet colleague of Johnson’s; he is also a known maverick with a taste for drama. Everyone knew that he was capable of throwing a grenade. And he did.

Johnson’s response was to claim that he didn’t recognize the quotation. Either he was lying or someone else must have written his Churchill book. The day after the Norway debate, Germany invaded France and Chamberlain resigned from office—to be replaced by Churchill. How could a Churchill biographer not know the most famous quote from that pivotal debate?

A simple explanation for why Johnson’s Churchill factor evaporated is that he used to smell like a winner, and now he doesn’t. His fate has a certain poetry. Boris Johnson has finally had the experience that he has inflicted on so many others: being used up and discarded. Unlike his idol—whose successors have aspired to “Churchillian” greatness—Johnson’s name will not become an adjective. The class clown has become a punch line.