Citizen Writes
Research hot topics
Was journalist-Prime Minister Boris Johnson brought down by journalism?
2022-07-08
By Tor Clark, Associate Professor in Journalism and Deputy Head of the School of Media, Communication and Sociology
Before the ink was dry on his resignation yesterday (Thursday), conspiracy theories about his downfall were doing the rounds.
Among them was the idea he was brought down by journalism, rather than the voters who gave him such a huge majority in the 2019 general election.
Of course Boris Johnson has rarely been out of the news throughout his public career and not at all as PM. Was the criticism fair? Why were journalists so critical?
The answer lies in the nature of journalism itself.
Journalism has many purposes and many definitions. But the late, great campaigning Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans perhaps summed up the purpose of journalism best when in response to a request from The Independent to define journalism in a 2004 interview, he replied: “The object in journalism is reverence for truth.”
And there you had the problem for Prime Minister Johnson. He never seemed to revere the truth very much. As such it set his conduct and reputation on a collision course with the forces of responsible journalism.
He made his name as a journalist, ironically enough, by covering the European Union for the Daily Telegraph. But he had lost a previous job for making up facts in a story.
He was sacked from Michael Howard’s Conservative Shadow Cabinet for denying an extra-marital affair.
He has denied an affair with London-based American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri while he was Mayor of London. She has offered quite a bit of detail on her version of events.
He told Referendum voters Brexit would bring huge immediate benefits to the UK and an extra £350m a week to the NHS.
He made light of the intractable problem raised by Northern Ireland being part of Brexit UK while continuing to implement the Good Friday Agreement.
He was not at all clear who had paid for his new Downing Street wallpaper.
He told the House of Commons there hadn’t been any parties.
And the straw that broke the camel’s back, he sent out his own ministers to deny he knew about previous misconduct by his deputy chief whip Chris Pincher.
Politicians are famously accused of being economical with the truth. Johnson’s economy was on an industrial scale.
If journalism is about finding the truth and exposing hypocrisy, Boris Johnson’s relations with his former profession were always going to be challenging.
As a Prime Minister and party leader, Johnson deserves the credit for his party’s 2019 general election victory. Yes, it was a party victory, but he was the face and embodiment of that party at that time. It was his stand-out success.
He then got the UK out of the EU, though he hadn’t yet shown anything of the bright future outside the EU he predicted and campaigned for and he was already wanting to rewrite his own agreement with the EU which achieved that.
Mounting evidence – and no doubt a future public inquiry – suggests his government badly handled the earliest days of the pandemic, meaning many more people died than should have.
The Covid vaccine roll-out was a huge success, but whose success was it? Johnson’s government claimed it but many scientists and public servants were involved in that positive outcome and the politicians don’t deserve as much credit as they claim for themselves.
Johnson was dealt a terrible hand – but proceeded to play it badly. When things went against him or things emerged to his discredit his habit of dissembling and denying just dug all his holes deeper. And in the end his own colleagues had had enough of that.
Truth is a vital part of public trust and as long as journalists remember their duty to the truth there is hope its importance in public life can be sustained. In the end it was the truth which did for Prime Minister Johnson. The only mystery is why it took so long.