OPINION: One of the curious aspects of times of political and economic volatility is that you can never be sure when someone or something is finished. It’s a bit like the end of a Hollywood horror film – the baddie may look as if he’s dead, but he’s still got at least another two scene-stealing reanimations in him.
So when it was announced last month that Boris Johnson had resigned as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip with immediate effect, it looked on the surface as if it was the end of his political career. After all, he’d been severely sanctioned by Parliament for lying, having already been forced from office by his own ministers.
No one trusts him, not even his closest lieutenants, and he can’t seem to function without making promises that he has no intention of keeping. As that divisive habit has been thoroughly and definitively exposed, where can he possibly go from here?
I don’t know, but Donald Trump has got indictments, the legacy of the January 6 insurrection, accusations of rape and much more going against him and he’s the Republican favourite to run for US president.
What about Yevgeny Prigozhin? He essentially called for a civil war in Russia, took over two towns and sent his mercenary troops on a convoy to take Moscow.
In Russia, you just have to question Vladimir Putin’s motives and you could be looking at 25 years in jail. Prigozhin, we’re told, will have no charges brought against him and will live to plot another day. And Putin himself? Was the aborted coup the beginning of his end or will he simply retrench and become more paranoid and aggressive?
I’m not comparing Johnson to any of these men, but we live in strange times and Britain is very far from immune to the strangeness. Certainly, in his own mind, Johnson thinks of himself as a modern-day Winston Churchill, a politician who had countless setbacks before being elected prime minister at the grand old age of 76. Johnson has just turned 59.
I was thinking about him and his highly performative political ilk recently when I had dinner in London with Peter Turchin, the Russian-American complexity scientist who has developed a field of study called cliodynamics. Basically, he crunches large amounts of data from throughout history and extracts underlying patterns.
In his recent book, the gloomily titled End Times, he argues that cycles of volatility are produced by two overriding factors: the overproduction of elites and the immiseration of the poor. Characters like Trump, he said over dinner, are merely symptoms of these underlying causes.
As the rich grow ever more powerful and richer, the race to join them becomes ever more frenzied and exclusionary. Turchin compares it to a game of musical chairs, in which most participants end up without a seat at the party. At the same time, the poor in many parts of the developed world are becoming poorer, not just in relative terms but also, in some respects, in absolute terms – life expectancy, for example, is declining in certain sections of some Western countries.
If Turchin is right, we are in for a period of prolonged turmoil that can only be alleviated, he says, by wealth redistribution. Both Johnson (a product of Eton and Oxford) and Trump (who says he’s a billionaire) present themselves as politicians who are concerned about those who are not part of the “elite”. It’s a bogus claim, of course, but if people continue to have cause to feel the existing elite is far removed from their interests, charlatans like Johnson will always find a way to be given one more chance.
