politics & paranoia michael burleigh

Et Tu, Rishi? Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson

By Ferdinand Mount (Bloomsbury Continuum 304pp £20)

Let’s begin by saying what this book is not. In 1938 the Manchester Guard- ian’s former Berlin correspondent Frederick Vo i g t p u b l i s h e d a r e m a r k a b l e b o o k , Unto Caesar. It chronicled the rise of religio- fascist regimes, including the one that brought to an abrupt end Voigt ’s twelve years of reporting in Germany. A year later, Alfred Cobban, a distinguished historian of France at UCL, published Dictatorship: Its History and Theory, another fine book which is not remembered much today. The advent in our own time of Trump, Bolson- aro, Erdoğan, Orbán and Putin has simi- larly given rise to works about dictators and tyrants by writers such as Frank Dikötter and Timothy Snyder, as well as an ava- lanche of works about populism in various geographies. Many of these expertly explain the contrived politics of ‘them versus us’ and how renegade members of the elite posture as men and women of the people.

There is not much of any of that in Ferdinand Mount’s book, which is stronger on Cromwell than almost anyone else. Mount is a novelist and constitutional thinker whose experiences include a twoyear stint in Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit and the editorship of the TLS. His new book is in essence an excoriating attack on Boris Johnson (with a few remarks about the ‘Instagram diplomacy ’ of Liz Truss) swaddled in a lot of history about regressions from parliamentary government and the rule of law.

There are three basic problems with what is otherwise a thoughtful and cogent account of the Johnson premiership. Mount never properly explains who or what is a Big Caesar or a Little Caesar (nor does he mention Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 gangster film Little Caesar, incidentally), though Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History seems to have something to do with it. He mentions Erdoğan, Orbán and the rest of the current crop of strongmen a few times, and talks a bit about Trump, whose rise surely speaks to an excessive faith in the abilities of businessmen. As for Johnson’s own putative Caesarism, we can be fairly sure than in fifty years neither his tactics nor his literary output (his 2004 novel Seventy-Two Virgins has not aged well) will be studied much, whereas Caesar’s works are in universities and military academies two millennia after his death. Johnson is a Lilliputian figure in a country he has done so much to diminish.

The well-connected Mount is somewhat incurious about how Johnson rose once he took his finely honed bohemian act onto a bigger stage than ‘School’. How many friends of the jovial alleged wife-beater Stanley decided to give his ‘boy’ a leg up at The Times, The Te l e g r a p h and The Spectator? Johnson’s career choice helped him ensure that the press was well disposed towards him when he swapped amusingly lying about Brussels, bananas and condoms for riding the up escalator to become an MP, London’s mayor, foreign secretary and prime minister. As with Trump and The Apprentice , Johnson’s appear ances on Have I Got News for You helped establish his credibility, but we learn little about the TV producers who helped sell these wild-haired blond ‘characters’ to the public.

Mount takes the non-elective institutional buttresses of our polity seriously, at one point comparing Johnson’s ‘Five Acts’ of 2019–22 with the notorious Six Acts of Lord Liverpool’s government two centuries before. Centring on ‘wedge issues’, these illiberal measures were designed to consolidate support for the government in the face of liberal opposition. During his premiership, Johnson ended the Fixedterm Parliaments Act, expelled twenty-one very able MPs, sacked five permanent secretaries (as well as the Cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill, whom he replaced with a courtier, Simon Case) and sought to curtail judicial review. Whereas it was made easier for (largely Conservative-supporting)

expats to vote, ways were found to discourage the most marginal people in our society from being able to vote, while the Electoral Commission was neutered. Although Mount is entirely right in his defence of Parliament and the rule of law, he does not explore how we might make young citizens care about them. Perhaps explaining what happens in Russia if an average family’s saloon collides with an oligarch’s speeding SUV convoy would bring home the consequences of state lawlessness.

We a r e p r o b a b l y d o n e w i t h J o h n s o n , despite the efforts of Peter Cruddas, Nadine Dorries, David Frost, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest of the tribute act to bring the aged rocker back for a final gig should Rishi Sunak fall off his shaky stage before the next general election. Speaking of Frost, Mount is incorrect in saying he was ‘one of the few in the Foreign Office who had always loathed the EU’. Frost certainly did not espouse that view during his stints in the Foreign Office and the Department for Business, where he ser ved as a trade expert, or as CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association, a position he took after his diplomatic career had hit a ceiling.

Unfortunately, Trump is another matter. Despite being the subject of multiple investigations and lawsuits, he is currently poised to secure the nomination as Republican presidential candidate and win a second term. The brave few who stood up to his bullying, notably Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, are justly praised in Mount’s account. The United States is not Lilliput. Trump’s slogan is ‘I am your retribution.’ His victory would mean the sacking of about fifty thousand officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the State Department (thereby extinguishing years of expertise), the mass deportation of illegal migrants, the transformation of education into nationalist and religious propaganda, and the deployment of the military domestically to bolster the already over-militarised police. Internationally, Trump would provoke tariff wars with the EU, Japan and South Korea, defund NATO, drop support for Ukraine and sidle up once more to Putin. He also plans to pardon the mob he unleashed on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, for, like the plebeian mobs of ancient Rome, they are a key part of the new order, as every would-be Caesar knows.

Literary Review | july 2023 6