Don’t fall for the donkey leader shtick
I posted the blog below on Medium a while back in response to the imminent demise of Boris Johnson and the politics of campaign group Led By Donkeys. Reposting here now because I see that Led By Donkeys’ extremely effective exposé video of the role of the ‘Tufton Street group’ of lobbyists is trending. I don’t disagree with anything in the video and I’m delighted it’s bringing these issues to wider attention. I still think, though, that ultimately its effect is to reduce politics to questions of competency and ethics, and to legitimate anyone who can present themselves as competent and command the confidence of the bond markets (which is what Jeremy Hunt is attempting to do at the moment by legislating for what looks like a devastating programme of renewed austerity). Whether the donkey is a bloviating Johnson or a sleep-walking Truss, in other words, opposing them on these terms won’t save us.
It’s almost exactly a month since Tory MPs gave a ‘vote of confidence’ in their leader and confidence has never been so fatally undermining. While MPs chose not to defenestrate Johnson on 6 June, their message was clear. Johnson performed worse, proportionally speaking, than either Margaret Thatcher in 1990 or Theresa May in 2018 (both of whom left office as a result), and John Major, who went on to fight the 1997 election, but lost it by a historic proportion. The only recent Tory leader dealt a bigger blow by MPs was Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. He was replaced within a week, and he’s Iain Duncan Smith…
The commentariat all agreed a month ago that sooner or later Johnson would be ‘toast’, that he was a ‘dead man walking’ (it’s always metaphors of extreme violence with these people), and they have been proved right. Last night, the Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak both resigned, in a move that the reliably credulous Robert Peston asserted was ‘not coordinated’. In so doing, Javid distinguished himself by leaving the same government twice ‘on principle’, and Sunak’s letter was a transparent and belated attempt to distance himself from the harm he was inflicting on his old boss — not so much an iron fist in a velvet glove as a brick in a sandwich bag.
Sunak and Javid were swiftly replaced by Johnson’s stalwart lieutenant, Steve Barclay (brought in as Chief of Staff to re-establish order at Number 10 in February) and Nadhim Zahawi, whose £100m+ net worth makes him only half as rich as the former Chancellor, but still the country’s third richest MP. Zahawi was replaced at the Department for Education by Michelle Donelan, whose response to a crisis in universities has been to amplify far right talking points against the sector. Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Moog and Priti Patel have attempted to shore up their naked emperor’s position with the party’s hard right by pledging continued allegiance. Clearly Johnson has decided to go down swinging, and a tattered collection of rentier millionaires, culture warriors and ultra-loyal technocrats has decided to stick it out in his corner — for now.
All of this will be claimed by the left — justly — as both a victory and an opportunity. Anything that weakens the Tories’ grasp on power is both. Brutal, regressive policies will be stalled, and will prove easier to challenge while those set on implementing them have lost all credibility and a party distracted by vicious attacks on each other is easier to remove from office. The long-standing and now rapidly expanding chaos of Johnson’s operation in Downing Street, as well as its increasingly blatant corruption, has created this opportunity. But it also represents a trap that we must not fall into.
Johnson’s rise to Prime Minister was achieved in the context of a genuine threat from the Brexit Party to the Tories’ right. Thanks to his willingness to court outriders in the right wing press and engage in ruthless party management even by Conservative standards, not to mention an extraordinary inability to experience shame, Johnson was able to exploit this situation to his advantage. But he also depended crucially upon extreme centrists in the mainstream media and political class, whose aversion to a Corbyn-led Labour government outweighed all else. It’s not the first time Johnson had benefitted from the favour of the liberal centre. He successfully challenged stalwart of the Labour left Ken Livingstone in May 2008 to become Mayor of London, thanks in part to the platform he was offered, by programmes like Have I Got News for You? in the early noughties, to lure us into chortling submission at his posh blether. This communications strategy reached its zenith when Johnson stole the show at the 2012 Olympics by dangling in the drizzle, apparently marooned in the centre of a zip-line.
Boris Johnson in a mishap turned publicity stunt that saw him hanging in the centre of a zip line holding two small Union Jack flags.
Like all guilty pleasures, though, Johnson’s antics always produced outrage with the chortles — and sometimes from the same people at the same time. Marina Hyde, for one, has long made hay in the sunshine of his brazen refusal even to pretend to be trustworthy, reaping the rewards of liberals’ masochistic delight in her Guardian column every Saturday. ‘Isn’t he awful?’ we all echoed, retweeting along… The focus of this brand of outrage has always been Johnson’s performance of power. His refusal to behave responsibly and abide by ‘standards in public life’ put him beyond the pale for the liberal press, but their lists of his lies and incompetences seemed to serve mainly to egg him on to goad the ‘Islington lawyers’ all the more.
To be absolutely clear: many of those outraged by Johnson remain keen adherents to the myth of New Labour’s progressive credentials, perfectly willing to continue to turn a blind eye to that government’s lies, and its prosecution of illegal wars in flagrant disregard of the ‘rules-based international order’ so central to liberal governance (but in fact only ever a euphemism for what global powers could get away with). Anyone willing to overlook more than half a million excess deaths caused by the invasion of Iraqi isn’t really interested in ‘standards in public life’. They are interested in looking like they are. Johnson doesn’t appall these people because he lies. He appalls them because he lies so much and so flagrantly while the caravan of government rolls on that it becomes almost impossible to argue that ‘standards in public life’ actually matter very much.
Since 2018, this strand of dissent against Johnson has been prominently represented on social media by a group of four self-appointed gadflies of the Brexit movement, known as Led By Donkeys.
Members of Led By Donkeys pasting up a billboard representing Dominic Raab’s comment that he hadn’t realised how reliant the UK is on the Dover-Calais crossing as a tweet.
Led By Donkeys set out with a clear, satirical strategy: to call out as publicly as possible the hypocrisy of advocates of Brexit. They began by pasting images of tweets or quotes presented as tweets over existing posters, such as Dominic Raab’s brain-bending suggestion that he hadn’t realised the extent of Britain’s trade reliance on the Dover-Calais crossing of the English channel. By using crowd-funding to support their campaign, they were able to go on to purchase billboards, and mount stunts such as projecting their campaigns onto the white cliffs at Dover. As time went on, the group was increasingly associated with the doomed People’s Vote campaign, which infamously (and perhaps somewhat deliberately) produced a situation that caused Jeremy Corbyn to be manoeuvred into supporting a second referendum, making the 2019 election all but impossible for Labour to win. Arguably, Led By Donkeys’ contribution to the campaign therefore did more to contribute to Johnson’s success than to undermine it: emphasising his narrative that key issue to be decided was whether or not Britain would ‘get Brexit done’.
Led By Donkeys project the findings of ‘Partygate’ investigations onto the Palace of Westminster.
Having proved themselves less than skilled in the arena of political strategy, Led By Donkeys returned to its core business during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has offered a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hypocrisy to expose. In 2020, the group projected calls from NHS workers for proper personal protective equipment to be supplied by the government, attacked Dominic Cummings for breaking lockdown rules, and worked with the group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice to project their messages onto the Houses of Parliament. They repeated this format in May this year, projecting the findings of investigations into parties in Downing Street during lockdown onto Parliament. Then, before the June confidence vote, the group released a video on Twitter addressed to Tory MPs, depicting Johnson as an arch-donkey: incompetent, untrustworthy, sexually incontinent, and thus definitively ill-suited for high office.
Predictably enough, Led By Donkeys have been proved right. The man who was sacked twice from important jobs for lying is going to lose the job he always wanted in just the same way. Johnson has found himself caught in a lie from which he can’t escape. When the Tory Deputy Chief Whip, Chris Pincher, was accused of groping two men in the Carlton Club last week, Johnson’s line — trotted out by spokespeople and ministers — was that he had no knowledge of previous allegations against Pincher. When it was revealed Johnson had known of these allegations, which were upheld by formal investigations (and might have even joked ‘Pincher by name, pincher by nature’), he claimed in Parliament — via a statement by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Michael Ellis — to have forgotten. The conclusion is surely inescapable: Johnson is either incompetent or untrustworthy, or — and almost certainly — both. We’ve been led by a donkey.
The problem, though, is that we have reached this conclusion before and nothing happened. So what, exactly, does it explain? Do we really believe that lying about Chris Pincher’s history of sexual harassment is the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back? My strong suspicion is that straws don’t break camels’ backs any more than senior cabinet ministers choose to resign without texting each other, and therefore that this narrative is claiming an explanatory power it doesn’t possess. Although, I can’t claim to have a better explanation beyond a general invocation of electoral calculus and careerism. I do, however, have some thoughts about the political work that’s being done by the ‘donkey leader’ narrative and its consequences for the kinds of politics that might emerge once Johnson’s government finally finds itself completely deflated.
There are numerous origins cited for the phrase ‘led by donkeys’. It was attributed by Plutarch to an Athenian general, and was reportedly used both by a Russian officer to describe the British in the Crimean War and the German generals Ludendorff and Hoffman to describe them in the 1914–18 war. It was popularised in this country, however, by a short book about the ‘14–18 war, The Donkeys, by part-time writer of military histories and Tory MP Alan Clark. Clark once claimed it had never occurred to him to wonder what foreign governments (such as Indonesia’s) were doing with the arms whose sale by Britain he oversaw (they were using them to invade and occupy East Timor). He also once had an affair with a married woman and both of her daughters, and was described by his wife an an ‘S-H-one-T’. None of this proves anything, of course, but it might alert us to the possibility that the ‘donkey leader’ framing isn’t inherently so opposed to the interests of Boris Johnson as we think.
Clark’s book was used in the creation of one of the most well-known cultural representations of the ‘14–18 war, Theatre Workshop’s 1963 musical Oh What a Lovely War!, created by the company under the leadership of director Joan Littlewood. Working in early 1963, only just out of the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Littlewood and her collaborators aimed to advance anti-war politics along three trajectories: anti-capitalist, anti-imperial and anti-elite. Of these, the first is the least convincingly developed in the play, only really coming to the fore in a scene at a shooting party in which broad caricatures of capitalists of various nationalities get together to ensure that the war continues to serve their interests. Unfortunately, this scene is better history than it is theatre, and its politics aren’t taken up with any clarity or confidence elsewhere.
By contrast, the anti-imperialist critique embodied by the ‘War Game’ staged at the play’s start, in which European powers attempt to out-manoeuvre each other as though in a board-game, is more fully developed. (I call this critique ‘anti-imperialist’, by the way, because Lovely War fails to engage with colonialism, confining itself to depictions of European soldiers on the Western Front, and territorial objectives within Europe, but that’s another story). The representation of geopolitics in this scene (in which buffoonish leaders trample Europe to prop up their failing power) is mapped onto the wider anti-elite politics of the play, in which — for example — generals order troops to sacrifice themselves on a whim, and a squeamish officer instructs an ordinary soldier to remove a leg that is protruding from his trench (in response, the private in question wonders aloud what he should hang his kit on). The play, in other words, produces an account of war as a social totality in which the vanity, untrustworthiness and incompetence of leaders is reproduced at all levels of class relation: geopolitical, institutional and interpersonal. It’s all a question of donkey leaders.
The problem with this account of politics, however, is that it isn’t political. Politics involves the contestation of interests that can’t reconciled, whereas the donkey leader narrative tacitly suggests that our interests can be aligned. What it represents, therefore, is the shift from one ruling-class ideology to another: from aristocracy — based upon the unassailable assumption of innate superiority — to epistocracy — based upon the assertion of superior qualifications, such as knowledge, competence and integrity. Although these ideologies might seem to be connected to particular forms of politics — neo-feudal on the one hand, liberal capitalist on the other — that is an illusion. There is no necessary relation between them and the material interests to which they are harnessed.
In short, the donkey leader narrative paves the way for a successor to Johnson who can promise change without promising to change anything. Keir Starmer hasn’t even ruled out Labour continuing to deport refugees to Rwanda, or committed to keep wages in line with inflation. Whether we are fighting just against the interests of capital or against capitalism itself, ‘lions led by donkeys’ is not the banner we should choose.
