The end of leadership | thearticle

What kind of leader do we want? What kind of leader do we expect? What kind of leader do we deserve? These questions, and more — but particularly these — have sprung to mind in the last few

weeks, as scandal and disgrace have engulfed the British government. But these questions have become especially pressing in the last 24 hours. Last night, a mob accosted Keir Starmer and

David Lammy in the street. The crowd shouted abuse that included the suggestion that Starmer, when he was the chief public prosecutor, had failed to prosecute the notorious paedophile Jimmy

Savile. That same allegation was recently thrown at Starmer by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister’s accusation both amplified and gave credence to a conspiracy

theory that had previously been circulating in the darker recesses of the internet. Days later, a violent mob was shouting the same lie in the street. And it is a lie. The suggestion that

Starmer failed to prosecute Savile or that he was somehow remiss or negligent over the Savile case is a lie. Despite this, various Conservatives came out to defend the prime minister’s

remarks about Savile. In one especially egregious interview, a senior Conservative attempted to draw an equivalence between the scrutiny of the Prime Minister’s social activities during

lockdown and Keir Starmer’s record as a public prosecutor, suggesting that both Starmer and Johnson have been making highly personal comments about one another and it was time for them both

to stop. It was an appalling piece of sophistry. The Prime Minister, it should be recalled, only recently apologised to the Queen for his poor behaviour. His government is under

investigation by the police. A senior civil servant made clear in a recent report that the culture that existed in No10 was rotten, and we await her full findings. These things are real. The

apology, the police investigation, the report — all real. They happened. The allegation about Starmer, however, is a lie. It did not happen. The real and the false cannot be weighed against

one another as if some moral balance were being struck. To do so is intellectually dishonest. What is notable in this is that the Prime Minister has refused to retract his lie or even

apologise for it. Even after Starmer was harassed in the street, he still will not admit it. Perhaps he thinks “Conscience is but a word that cowards use/ divised at first to keep the strong

in awe.” It certainly looks that way. Is that what we want in a leader? Johnson’s form of leadership is subversive, not for its substance, but for its style. He destroyed the careers of

David Cameron and Theresa May to promote himself, and when in No10 he was more than happy to wipe out an entire section of his own party. But it’s his slippery relationship with the truth

that marks him out as something fundamentally new in British politics, because the dismissal of truth — the inability to register its importance — is the way down to something much darker. A

country like ours doesn’t really work if the prime minister is a habitual deceiver. And that is what he is. Wives, employers, friends, colleagues — at one time or another Johnson has

chucked all of them under a bus. But a liberal democracy requires truth and constancy at the top, or else voters have no idea who or what they are voting for. And when politicians start

lying about each other, when for example Johnson lies about Starmer, as he has recently done, some voters will develop a terrible and false conception about the Labour leader. And so in this

way the lie infects and distorts and finally breaks the democratic process. The obvious parallel is with Trump and the appalling lies he promoted about Clinton. But he and Johnson are part

of a greater, far more worrying trend in global leadership. Since the end of the Cold War and the financial and economic opening up of China, western governments and the international

diplomatic and economic structures they created, have operated under the assumption that the more economically open the former Soviet nations and China became, the more they would become

like us. The orthodox view was that market reform would lead to a greater dispersion of wealth throughout society, therefore economic power would become decentralised and so would political

power. But this assumption has turned out to be wrong. Russia and China have not turned out that way. Market liberalism has not brought political openness. Russia has become ever more closed

under Putin, just as China has under Xi. And as those two have forged their nations in their own authoritarian image, killing opponents, rubbing out journalists, conducting operations

intended to crush entire sections of society — Putin in Chechnya, Xi in Xinjiang — other nations have begun to take on similarly authoritarian characteristics. Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orban,

Erdogan amongst others have, in their way, followed the lead given by China and Russia towards a new, more inward-looking, paranoid strain of nationalism. It is against this increasing

authoritarian trend in global leadership that the United States ended up with a president who incited an attack on the Capitol while the results of the presidential election were being

ratified. And now, here in Britain, we have a prime minister who has falsely accused his opponent of being responsible for the actions of a paedophile. This then is the great irony — that

China and Russia didn’t become more like us. We have become more like _them_. As proof of that fact, you need only look to the unrepentant liar in No10. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the

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