Llewellyn King: Boris Johnson — the fall of an articulate incompetent

Britain’s soon to be former prime minister, with the famous wild hair

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The best piece of business advice I have ever read was, “Beware the articulate incompetent.” It is important to business decisions but far more so to political ones.

Boris Johnson has always been a poster boy for the articulate incompetent, and yet he rose with wit, bravado and connections to the highest elective office in Britain, prime minister. Now his luck has run out.

Born in New York to British parents, he didn’t renounce his dual citizenship until 2016, when it became a liability politically. He won a scholarship to Eton, the boys-only boarding school where many prime ministers studied, went on to Oxford, and was elected president of the Oxford Union. This is the equivalent of privilege on steroids.

Johnson’s weaknesses, including sloth, disorganization, lack of preparedness, showing off and a disinclination to let the facts stand in the way of a good story, were well known. He was fired from his first journalistic job on The Times of London for fabricating a quote -- from his godfather, of all people. Later Michael Howard, the distinguished Tory leader, fired him from the ranks of the shadow cabinet, also for lying.

After The Times, Johnson worked for the conservative daily, The Telegraph. In Brussels, where he was assigned, he was regarded by his peers as good company but an unreliable reporter. One of them told me that he was often asked to chase up some fabricated concoction of Johnson’s like the banana regulation, allegedly defining the length and curve of bananas allowed into the European Union. The only curve was that of the truth.

Johnson’s editors back in London wanted to hear only bad news about Europe. Johnson obliged: He was playing his part in the movement to take Britain out of Europe, which matured as Brexit.

Johnson went on to become a member of Parliament and editor of The Spectator, an admired British weekly magazine of politics, culture and current affairs, published continuously since 1828. His colleagues at the magazine found him sloppy, often absent and often leaving his work to others. His management was, it is reported, incoherent, a charge repeated about his leadership of Britain.

The Spectator, under Johnson’s editorship, was engulfed in a sex scandal of rare portions. The publisher was cavorting with a British cabinet member, Johnson with the star columnist and an editor with a secretary. It was a literary “Animal House.”

Johnson has been married three times and has six children from those marriages. He acknowledges one love child.

Next step for Johnson was to become mayor of London. His humor papered over the cracks, and he did a good job in defending London’s image -- especially in insisting that the double-decker red buses be retained.

The campaign for the United Kingdom to leave Europe gave Johnson his chance. He went against his old parliamentary friend and Eton and Oxford companion, Prime Minister David Cameron, and campaigned vigorously and with aid of some wild and untrue claims about how Britain would prosper out of Europe. Brexit carried the day.

Cameron was replaced with the dull, dutiful Theresa May. She had the task of trying to make Brexit work without breaking Britain. After three years, she was out, and a shaken party installed Johnson as its leader.

In a landslide, the Conservatives won the first election with Johnson at the helm, and he was expected to be a transformational prime minister. Instead, he has been involved in scandals: He has been caught lying about parties in his official home and office, No. 10 Downing Street, during the Covid-19 lockdown, and recently about the allegations of sexual impropriety of a member of his party, whom he had been warned about but nonetheless promoted. The truth might have saved Johnson; he eschewed it.

Johnson isn’t a fool, but he does foolish, often roguish things. He is a scholar of the ancient world, a biographer, a linguist and a wordsmith. He likes to make comparisons to antiquity: He equated London to Athens and himself to Pericles.

He wrote a biography of Churchill, which I enjoyed but found nothing groundbreaking. It seems to have been written to signal similarities between himself and Churchill.

Johnson will be heard from again as a commentator and author. He excels at the pithy phrase and joking in adversity, as when, as London mayor, he was left hanging on a zipline during a 2012 Olympics event.

His legacy may be that he was the most quotable prime minister of his generation and beyond. Here is a classic: “My friends, I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

On resigning, Johnson said tamely, “Them’s the breaks.”

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Boisterous Boris likely the next PM

Boris Johnson, with his trademark mop of blond hair.

Johnson was one of the Brexiteers being made fun of in this anti-Brexit demonstration in Manchester, England.

Barring the political equivalent of an act of God, Boris Johnson becomes leader of the British Conservative Party and prime minister on July 22.

Johnson is a man who fails upward. So much so that he has said, “As I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, just fresh opportunities. And, indeed, fresh opportunities for fresh disasters.”

Johnson has been sacked by an editor, a publisher and by his party leader. He sins, gets caught, wriggles out and comes back emboldened.

His first recorded transgression was when he got the heave-ho from The Times of London for fabricating quotes -- usually a career killer. Instead, he was hired by The Daily Telegraph and sent to Brussels to cover the European Union. He covered it by minting tales of bureaucratic excess. Later, some of Johnson’s suspect reporting entered the mythology that has powered Brexit.

One fib was that the European Commission was laying down requirements for the shape of bananas imported into Europe. Another was that there were plans for the Brussels bureaucrats to build themselves a luxurious skyscraper. He was accused of fake news long before that term was in wide use.

Johnson -- as journalists like to say among themselves – wasn’t one to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. His Brussels colleagues named him as the proprietor of the “mendacious smirk.” He had a way of looking to the side and down, sniggering away the evidence when his facts were challenged.

On the upside, Johnson is articulate and adept at turning disaster into, if not triumph, something that is funny or so outrageous that the blow is diverted. When, as mayor of London, he was stranded on a zipline and left hanging above the ground, he entertained film crews with hilarious commentary. Boris meets Lucille Ball.

It’s generally accepted that Johnson was an adequate mayor of London; although, like all politicians, he presented things already in train as his creations. He’s thought to have handled London’s hosting of the Olympic Games well. He opposed the expansion of Heathrow Airport and understood the importance of city branding, saving London’s iconic double decker buses.

For five years, Johnson was editor of The Spectator, a conservative political and literary magazine. His staff there accused him of being late, disorganized and not showing up at all, charges that have clung to him everywhere he’s worked. But he was a successful editor and presided over a rise in circulation, as well as moving the content towards his own brand of liberal conservatism.

Lazy or not, Johnson’s journalistic output over the years has been considerable and includes a workman-like biography of Churchill.

As a member of parliament, which overlapped with his editorship, Johnson never reached the heights in oratory that had been expected. He described his own parliamentary speeches as “crap.”

As an after-dinner speaker, he’s been brilliant: irreverent, self-deprecating and funny. Johnson has always played the clown -- and it has played well for him.

Born on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Johnson was educated in England and took the upper middle class route through private schools, including Eton, and on to Oxford where he studied Classics. These he loved and has since cloaked himself in his familiarity with antiquity as a way of signaling superiority and intellectual weight. An example is a longish article he wrote later comparing London to Athens and, by implication, himself to Pericles.

Fun and games also have, it might be said, pervaded Johnson’s private life. When he was married to his second wife, Johnson acknowledged a child out of wedlock. When he was editor of The Spectator, the magazine was rocked with scandal. Johnson was having an affair with the top columnist; the publisher, a woman, was involved with a member of the government; and an editor was involved with a secretary. Cupid was not a spectator at The Spectator.

The sins of the flesh would have brought down other politicians, but Johnson has moved on and up. Now he is set to marry a woman 25 years his junior.

He upended his old friend David Cameron when he threw in with the Brexiteers and became the public face of Brexit. Again, facts went out the window. Johnson saw a way to power, and he grabbed it.

Now the premiership is almost his and Britain, going through turbulent times, faces an unsteady, cartoonish hand at its helm.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Brexiteers have no clear road map so it's fear and chaos for business

Anti-Brexit demonstration in Birmingham, England.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Blimey! What a cock-up!

That is what you might say in British vernacular about the mess that Britain is dealing with as it struggles to leave the European Union by March 29, 2019.

With the deadline in clear line of sight, there is no exit plan and Britain is becoming -- depending on whom in the Great British Divide you ask – either critically alarmed or hysterically impatient.

British industry and the whole import-export infrastructure are in panic. Supply lines need to be adjusted and possibly new ones established. Manufacturers are wondering whether it will be possible to continue as Britain-based or whether they should up and move to Europe. The British motor industry, which is not owned in the United Kingdom any longer, is a case in point. Jaguar and Land Rover may be iconic marques, but they are Indian-owned, and will they always be made in Coventry, England? Can London remain the financial center of Europe when Paris, Dublin and Frankfurt are scrambling for the title?

On the impatient side, Brexiteers are screaming for an end to the European linkage no matter what.

In the middle, and in a muddle, is Prime Minister Teresa May, distrusted by the extreme Brexit supporters and considered incompetent by the “Remainers,” who still hope that there will be a miraculous reprieve from the referendum vote of June 29, 2016.

Collectively, the British media are not helpful. Most of the press (especially but not exclusively those newspapers controlled by Rupert Murdoch) is for leaving, often vociferously so. When it appeared, in the latest development, that more time may be granted for Britain to find solutions to the thorniest issues, such as the Irish border question, they howled in unison for faster action.

The newspapers, representing almost the entire readership of daily newspapers in Britain, have fought for Brexit and fight against reconsideration: The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sun are adamantly and relentlessly for Britain getting out, mostly with little regard to the consequences.

You cannot consider these newspapers without understanding that they have played the same role as Fox News in the United States in inflaming nationalism and worries about sovereignty -- a word that has been taken out of history’s locker for the purpose of stirring up antagonism to Europe.

The newspapers I have cited have been aggressively antagonistic to Europe for decades and were, it could be argued, decisive in the “advisory” referendum in which the British public voted to leave Europe by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent. The die was cast for the most extraordinary change of direction ever voted by a democracy.

The Brexiteers had the advantage of passion, a well-oiled disinformation campaign and the wild-card endorsement of Boris Johnson, the clownish but clever politician who wants to be prime minister beyond all else. David Cameron’s government, which called the referendum, misjudged the electorate through over-reliance on the polls.

Hopes that Parliament will finally assert itself, take charge of Brexit and call another referendum or nullify the first on the grounds that it was not constitutionally binding, are fading. There is wide acceptance in Britain that the nation is set to sail into waters uncharted -- stormy but somehow having the lure of the nation’s explorer past.

Economists are not so sure, and business is looking at decampment to the European mainland.

The Brexiteers see a glowing new era for Britain, which shed its empire with little pain at home, and they may feel this will happen again. British creativity has always been one of its great strengths; for example, creativity in technology which contributed to the success of the empire, including John Harrison’s chronometer and James Watts’s steam engine.

The British will continue to create, to be sure. But how will they sell their creations if they have exempted themselves from their largest market?

The United States, if we do not choke off all immigration, can look forward to a surge of British talent coming across the Atlantic.

Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. A native of Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia), he was a journalist in England before moving to America, where he has been a columnist, editor, publisher and international business consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Llewellyn King: The deluded Trump backers in my old N.E. mill town

In the neighborhood where I live in Rhode Island, Donald Trump is a hero. It is a solid, mostly white, community of working-class people.

They are fiercely patriotic, as the many veterans memorials that dot the landscape testify, as well as the solemnity with which they celebrate Memorial Day.

They are religious. Being mostly of Italian and Portuguese descent, they are practicing Catholics. Plaster Madonnas sit on many lawns.

These people -- these good, hard-working God-fearing Americans --  usually vote Democratic in a state that is more unionized than most. There are deep labor movement roots, and a history of struggle between the mill owners and the workers in the days when New England was home to the textile trade.

But sharing the small, neat lawns with Madonnas are blue Trump campaign signs.

These people are a near mirror-image of the working people in the north of England who voted for Britain to the leave the European Union. They are also working class or, as we have abandoned that term, middle-class people who saw their textile industry implode.

In Rhode Island, these exemplary people clearly are falling for the false music of Pied Piper Donald Trump. His wild, anti-trade siren song appeals here, invoking the time when New England was a manufacturing hub and China was place that you read about in National Geographic.

Their twins in the blighted North of England followed another piper with another myth: the former mayor of London and showman, Boris Johnson. He preached freedom from Europe: a halcyon dream of Britain free of entangling regulation from the European administrative capital, Brussels.

Now Johnson’s bluff has been called, and it is dawning on the good people of the North of England (think of it as England’s Rust Belt) that their well-being -- such as it has been -- has been largely as a result of the European Union. The North, much less prosperous than the South, where London holds hegemony, depends on European Union investments and grants. Now free of Europe, they are free to be poor.

In Rhode Island, after years in the post-industrial doldrums, a zephyr of new hope is just rising, and it has attracted part of General Electric Co.’s digital division. It will sit alongside another global mainstay of the U.S. economy, Textron, based in Rhode Island.

So even as Rhode Island is beginning a new chapter, its citizens are flirting with drinking the Kool-Aid being peddled by Trump.

Johnson and others, mostly Conservatives, peddled the myth that Britain was being hogtied by Europe and was yearning to be free and trade with the world – a sharp contrast to the Fortress America  that Trump is peddling, but appealing to workers who, on both sides of the Atlantic, want a fairer shake.

Johnson says: Europe has hindered us and is undermining our national sovereignty. Trump says: The world is stealing from us. Both are political myths: dangerous, toxic myths. Both share a common lack of coherence, as is now so evident in Britain.

The sin of Johnson against the British people is that the campaign was based on lies, and there was no plan for how to proceed after victory: a well-known political trap (see G. W. Bush and Iraq).

No one I know believes that after Trump presumably gets the Republican nomination in Cleveland he will go on to win. But neither did I know anyone in Britain who thought that the country would fall for the wiles of devious leaders who play on patriotism and frustration for their own ends: glorification and power.

The blue Trump signs outside the modest houses  proudly owned on my street may not get Trump elected, but -- and here is the danger -- they may draw his putative opponent, Hillary Clinton, toward the same trade poison that he is advocating. She already has backpedaled shamelessly on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she helped negotiate, and who knows what anti-trade deals she will strike with the unions?

When politics is informed by myth not policy, democracies are in danger of hurting themselves. We do not need a special relationship with Britain founded on mutual folly. 

Llewellyn King  (llewellynking2@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle on PBS. He is also a longtime publisher, editor and international business consultant.

Llewellyn King: Providence maybe needs a BIG rollercoaster for branding

If your city is mostly famous for being between two other cities, if its main claim to fame is “It’s a great place to raise children,” then it’s time for your city fathers to take a course in branding.

Cities that prosper — that bring in company headquarters, tourists and where the crazy rich want to be — have to have distinguished brands.

New York’s brand is glorious excess. It has the brand of ever higher, stranger skyscrapers. The world’s most successful media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has just plonked down $57.2 million for what looks to be the world’s most lonely living space: the top four floors of a 60-story, bronze-and-glass building of a kind that is now transforming the Manhattan skyline. Take a small plot of land, build until what you get is a slender tower that defies nature and looks as though its purpose is to challenge a strong wind.

Murdoch’s aerie has glass on four sides, and he can see forever, at the least until other towers rise up. If you want to spy on him, you will have to do it by drone. His own paparazzi might try to get a picture using a drone, but where would they publish it?

If you have a few million to spare you can still get in the East 23rd Street building. But those floors that would make an eagle jealous, have gone to Murdoch. Most of us would be scared up there: a new take on “Naked and Afraid,” because without neighbors, there is no need to wear clothes.

Cities in the United States that have done the branding thing right are New Orleans, jazz and food; San Francisco, cable cars and attitude; Boston, higher education and hospitals (eds and meds); and Chicago, wind and the uber-hub airport. Washington is a special case: great museums, the White House and the Capitol, and palpable delusions of importance.

The branding ace, running in front worldwide, is London. The Romans gave it a head start, but it was not until the Swinging Sixties that London became a destination for the globe. You would think that the place had enough branding with the old features: Tower Bridge, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, plus the changing of the guard.

But no. London keeps adding dizzying new features to its brand superiority. There is the Tate Modern, an art gallery in an old power station; the London Eye, a Ferris wheel that has captured world attention and city imitators; a bridge across the Thames River that wobbles, and now a new bridge is planned with gardens and shops on it. Then there are the taxis — black boxes, that remind you where you are in case you have overlooked the big red buses.

The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who has branded himself as a possible prime minister), has been keen to preserve and protect the London brand by insisting on preserving the double-decker buses, distinctive taxis and other expensive city bric-a-brac, because it is a hell of an investment.

Sure, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, but it is aging. Rome has the Coliseum — talk about aging. And St. Petersburg has the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. But for city branding, London is in front and pulling away, as the Brits exploit the cash value of differentness.

Providence and Baltimore are two cities of which I am particularly fond. But I would urge the city leadership in both places to get a brand, a trademark. It pays. Rides (London Eye, Eiffel Tower elevators, the San Francisco cable cars) are sure winners. Could I suggest an amphibious train across Baltimore Harbor, and the mother of all rollercoasters — big, but not scary — in Providence?

Like London and New York, these days you have to think big in city branding, or you will miss the incredible fun and profit of a city being silly.

Frivolity pays. Ask London’s Boris Johnson — and share a thought for Rupert Murdoch, stuck up in the sky.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” on PBS. He is a longtime international media executive, consultant and columnist.