Little and Little: Johnson and Corbyn, a double act for this diminished age

The old legal maxim, bad cases make bad laws, applies equally to political leadership. Thus, the question (who would be the more disastrous prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson?) is not worthy of serious consideration, for the obvious answer is, both.

Corbyn, if we imagine him in the nation’s highest office, would at least be sincere in what he tried to achieve. The same could not be said of Johnson, whose opinions on anything on any given day correspond to his estimate of which view at which moment is likely to command most support among Tory voters.

Corbyn’s Downing Street office would be adorned by busts of Keir Hardie and Karl Marx. A small likeness of Clement Attlee atop the drinks cabinet (sans drinks, naturally) would be offset by signed photographs of Gerry Adams, Nicolas Maduro and the Hamas leader Khaled Mashal.

The Johnson office would, naturally, feature a bust of his hero, Winston Churchill, and a signed photograph of Donald Trump sporting his trademark Churchillian pout.

Guarding Corbyn’s outer office would be chief-of-staff Seumas Milne, known to colleagues as “Cerberus”. The only people allowed past Milne without a written invitation, other than the Cabinet Secretary and Diane Abbott, would be his director of communications, perhaps Owen Jones if he behaves himself, the Chancellor, John McDonnell, and Len McCluskey, general-secretary of Unite.

The De Pfeffel inner circle would, one imagines, be headed by Jacob Rees-Mogg – probably as Chancellor, though just possibly as Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal – with Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss as joint keepers of the drawbridge.

I am no Shakespeare scholar, but I can’t help feeling that there is somewhere in the vast corpus of the Master’s work a character who closely resembles Jeremy Corbyn. Polonius seems to me too shrewd; Lear too tragic; Leontes too unremorseful; Falstaff too frivolous (with a preference for sack over coconut water). All I can come up with is Beatrice’s remark in Much Ado About Nothing: “He is no less than a stuffed man.” But perhaps there are Reaction readers out there who can remedy my ignorance.

For Johnson, I would suggest the (suitably amended) soliloquy from Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3:

What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Boris loves Boris; that is, I and I.
Is there a scoundrel here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a buffoon. Yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a liar and a card.

As Labour’s eighth prime minister – the first head of government to sport a beard since the third Marquess of Salisbury in 1903 – Corbyn would consider himself first and foremost a servant of the people, provided only that the people know what’s good for them – namely an undiluted dose of socialism. He is not a man riven by doubt. Like De Gaulle, but without the General’s backstory, when he needs a second opinion, he looks more deeply into himself. Either that or he consults Milne, his Jesuitical alter ego, who once described The Economist as “the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy”.

Boris would, so far as I can make out, be our first blonde PM (though as most early holders of the office wore wigs, it is difficult to be sure). Beyond that – the Blonde leading the blind – it is impossible to say what he represents. The real Boris may not exist. It is possible that there is a hard core of principle buried somewhere deep inside him, but if so the chances are that his name runs through it like the name of the resort in seaside rock.

Johnson and Corbyn: a double act for our times. The good news, if there is any, is that they both can’t win. I suppose there is a chance, if Johnson successfully manoeuvres himself into Downing Street and everything then goes belly-up, that Corbyn might still be around to pick up the pieces. But what would he do with them? He could no more put the country back together than he could send soldiers into battle.

Perhaps the truth is that we have got the leaders we deserve. Not so much Churchill and Attlee as Little and Large, with both of them as Little.