Boris Johnson is all Christmas and no Easter

The prime minister can't engage with the story of Christ's Passion, writes George Pitcher. That's because it demands contemplation and reflection - qualities he lacks

Remember how our prime minister promised us a five-day amnesty from lockdown at Christmas? How he clung to that vision of joyful and festive family gatherings against all expert advice? And how he was forced to cancel them with a “heavy heart” and enough alases to fill several Greek tragedies?

Boris Johnson said at the time that he loved Christmas because it was all about “hope”. But what have we heard from him and his Government about the forthcoming greatest holiday (in the literal sense of that word) of the Christian calendar, the one that gives us the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, God’s great triumph over death and darkness – Easter Day? Not a peep.

You’d have thought that this year, of all seasons, he might have grasped at least the symbolism of Easter, of renewal and rebirth, of new life, indeed eternal life. We might not have expected him to address the theology, but he surely wouldn’t be shy of seizing the political capital – the vaccination programme has saved mankind, spring is all around us and we can make a fresh start. Rejoice and vote Conservative in the local elections in May.

But no. The roadmap out of lockdown has next Monday March 29th, when families and friends can once again meet outside in limited numbers and then, on April 12th, we might be able to have a pint in a pub garden. But Easter Sunday April 4th is airbrushed off that roadmap as if it’s a slightly embarrassing landmark – a colonial statue perhaps, or a former wife’s family home.

Part of the reason, for sure, must be that Johnson has reined in his galloping tendency to over-promise, on parade last Advent. And he won’t want any comparisons with Donald Trump’s insane presidential aspiration of last year to have “packed churches” and families having a “beautiful time” at Easter. If Johnson hadn’t spotted that, his spin doctor Allegra Stratton surely would have done.

Hail-fellow-well-met

But there’s something else going on here and it’s this: Boris Johnson, as a person and as a political phenomenon, is all about Christmas and nothing about Easter. Christmas suits him – he can be all ding-dong and hail-fellow-well-met.

As it happens, the reality of the Nativity raises some tough issues, among them colonial oppression, misogyny, refugees and asylum, illegitimate childbirth and infanticide. But it’s all prettified and romanticised into carols, flaming puddings and pints of foaming English ale – all safe and sound Johnsonian territory.

Easter is different. Because we can’t really have Easter without Good Friday. As the Jesuit says, if we don’t die with him on Friday, we can’t rise with him on Sunday. That means, on Good Friday and indeed throughout this two weeks of Passiontide, we face injustice, torture, hopelessness, guilt and innocence, death and despair.

All of that requires contemplation and reflection – and a degree of humility into the bargain. Johnson is temperamentally incapable of any of that, self-sacrifice and humility - even, tragically, selfless love - being unknown quantities to him. He is a rejoicer, a boosterist, a man to be found with chocolate egg on his fingers and around his lips by 11am on Easter Sunday.

In that latter gluttony, of course, he is little different from the majority of our population (who can forget Tesco’s 2017 advert for cut-price booze that read “Good Friday just got better”). But of all the charges that can be laid at whichever door Johnson is residing behind, stupidity is seldom one of them. He is not thick. It follows that he has made a ruthless decision to refrain from contemplation and reflection.

Crucifixion, c.1450, by Andrea de Castagno

This matters, because as we follow the story of Christ’s Passion and approach Easter’s eternal truths, Johnson is still lying. The record hardly needs rehearsing, from the side of a campaign bus to misleading the monarch as he rode roughshod over constitutional due process, but even this past week he has appeared before parliamentary scrutiny breezily to accept he was cutting the numbers of British armed forces when he had given a firm election manifesto promise that he would never do so.

It matters because the leader of a democracy who moves from post-truth to post-shame is the head of the fish from which the rot starts. The public example that is set is one in which high office is impervious to censure and accountability.

If you’re a Home Secretary who is found to have breached her ministerial code, why resign, as precedent has always required? Indeed, Johnson enjoined his cabinet colleagues to “form a square round the Pritster”. If you’re third-rate, you’re his kinda gal.

Elsewhere, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick doesn’t do resigning. Arguably she should have gone when police officers shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes in the London Undergound on her watch in 2005 (breathtakingly, she said that on that day she didn’t think “anybody did anything wrong”).

But Johnson creates the climate in which she stays in office, not only when her force has systemically promoted an alleged psychopath to its armed elite but even after that force has grotesquely violated women holding a vigil for his victim. She even apes Johnson in speaking of “armchair critics” with the same contempt for the public they are both meant to serve. If he can get away with it, why shouldn’t she?

King of the World

Never mind being a critic, but one should perhaps resist the temptation to be an armchair psychologist by asking why Johnson has annexed his self-awareness and conscience. It may be an emotional development issue. His father Stanley was, by his own admission, domestically violent and there are aspects of the Johnson children’s upbringing that sound more than borderline abusive – a brutally competitive environment in which a child finds a formative comfort in aspiring to be “King of the World” (another claim, incidentally, he’d struggle to assimilate with Easter).

It can be little surprise that a man who had to shut away his moral compass in a childhood drawer is going to be ill-equipped to navigate the meaning of Easter. But if it wasn’t good for him then, it isn’t good for us now, because it matters for the qualities of our democracy and of our public life.

Next Friday, we will consider again the story of how an insurgent preacher stood shackled in front of a local Roman governor who knew no democracy and, with his silence, how that prisoner inverted all the worldly power in the room. “What is truth?” asked that governor rhetorically, and perhaps in frustration.

The implicit answer to that question is that it is whatever you want it to be (though Pontius Pilate may not have meant that). For Johnson, truth is whatever he wants it to be. That doesn’t make him a Pilate, but it does make it as hard for him as Pilate to understand what is happening in that room.

Truth versus power. You just know which side Johnson is going to back. Which is why he can’t countenance what happens next week. It’s a shame really, because it ends in the kind of joyful human celebration with which he should enjoy being associated.

But he’s long ago shut himself out of it, because it requires contemplating matters that are too painful or arduous for him to address. Because good news is what he makes it. Because he makes up his own stories. Because he’s all Christmas and no Easter.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.