The great American humourist James Thurber recalled in his memoir a local character from his childhood in Columbus, Ohio: the Get-Ready Man. "The Get-Ready Man was a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world, "GET READY! GET READ-Y!" he would bellow, "THE WORLLLD IS COMING TO AN END!" His startling exhortations would come up, like summer thunder, at the most unexpected times and in the most surprising places."
Thurber’s favourite memory of him was his invasion of a production of Shakespeare’s suitably apocalyptic play, King Lear. “The Get-Ready Man added his bawlings to the squealing of Edgar and the ranting of the King and the mouthing of the Fool, rising from somewhere in the balcony to join in. The theatre was in absolute darkness and there were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning offstage. Neither father nor I, who were there, ever completely got over the scene, which went something like this:
Get-Ready Man: The Worllld is com-ing to an End!
Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen!
Edgar: Take heed o’ the foul fiend: obey thy paren----
Get-Ready Man: Get Rea-dy!
Edgar: Tom’s a-cold!
Get-Ready Man: The Worr-uld is coming to an end! . . .
They found him finally, and ejected him, still shouting. The theatre, in our time, has known few such moments.”
This last week in British politics has been like the mad scenes in King Lear, with the Get-Ready Man as the chorus. The political theatre, in our time, has known few such moments. It began – if anyone can remember back that far - with the launch of the £100 million Get Ready publicity campaign by Michael Gove, with a rolling programme of giant display ads and TV, radio and online commercials. According to the London Times there was also "a substantial order placed for branded mugs and T-shirts". And all of it is meant to shout: "GET READY! GET READ-Y!" "NO DEAL IS COMING!" Or, as the Westminster parliament put it instead: no it's not.
A twist
So while the Get-Ready Men – Gove, Boris Johnson and the prime minister Dominic Cummings – were bawling out their warnings through an incredibly expensive megaphone, a little bit of King Lear was playing out in the House of Commons. The play, after all, is about the collapse of political authority in Britain, caused by nothing more than a caprice. It shows the potentially terrible consequences of political self-indulgence. But in this Westminster production, there was a twist.
Bluffing is not Johnson's only weapon – he does bluster and bullying as well – but it has been at the core of what passes for a strategy
As everything falls apart, Lear conjures the image of state power as a farmer’s dog barking at a beggar: “There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.” The twist in this week’s surreal version of the play is that while a dog may be obeyed in office, Boris Johnson is not. The “great image of authority” is an impotent prime minister running through a bad student debating routine of hammy harangues, bad jokes and schoolboy insults (“big girl’s blouse!”, “chicken!”) while losing vote after vote and being powerless even to resign and run to the country.
At the heart of this collapse of authority is a game of Call My Bluff that Johnson has lost. Bluffing is not Johnson’s only weapon – he does bluster and bullying as well – but it has been at the core of what passes for a strategy. He is good at it: after all, he has bluffed his way into 10 Downing Street. But, having got there, he has in fact been trying to pull off an outrageous double bluff. On the one hand, Johnson has been trying to make the EU believe that he really is perfectly happy to leave with no deal on October 31st, in the belief that they will get scared and rush to mollify him with last-minute concessions. But he has also been trying to do the opposite: to convince sceptics in his own parliament, and especially in his own party, that he doesn’t really want no-deal after all and is only threatening it as a negotiating ploy.
Political genius
It would take a political genius to pull this off, and Johnson, as we saw this week is not quite one of those. The ploy has always been innately absurd. It assumes that there are two entirely different audiences, one in Brussels and one in London, and that neither has any idea of the show that is being performed for the other. It ends up scaring the wrong people. The "GET READY! GET READ-Y!" "NO DEAL IS COMING!" manic street preacher act is meant for the Europeans and the Irish. But it can only be played out in Britain itself. Johnson has managed to preach the approaching apocalypse in the wrong churches. In the corridors of Brussels, it has left everybody entirely unmoved. But it sure put the wind up at Westminster.
Johnson tried to close this gaping hole in the only way he knows: by lying
It is also innately self-contradictory. It relies on no-deal Brexit being imagined as simultaneously terrible and harmless. To work as a threat, it has to be a portent of doom, a vision of hell that can be avoided only if the EU repents before it is too late. To be acceptable domestically, it has to be just (in the official, endlessly repeated phrase) "a bump in the road".
Johnson tried to close this gaping hole in the only way he knows: by lying. He and his toadies insisted that the megaphone diplomacy was working. Serious negotiations were under way in Brussels and the Europeans, scared to death, were on the brink of making great concessions. The only thing that could deprive Britain of this great triumph was weakness on the home front. Using the language of the second World War that is so bizarrely encoded in the whole Brexit project, Johnson talks of “collaboration” and “surrender” and draws implicitly and explicitly on the belief that this is all a test of nerve and that the Brits always win those through sheer pluck.
But there are still – just about – enough people in parliament who cannot swallow such a big lie. Johnson’s last resort, of course, is to try to create, through a general election, a parliament in his own image: careless about truth, reckless about consequences, bent only on keeping office at any price. When it comes, as it must soon, it will be an election that pits the true English spirit against the collaborators and the surrender monkeys, the treacherous Scot and the perfidious foreigner, that sets “the people” against the “elites”. It will offer the true believers a vision of redemption through pain – pain made acceptable by the assurance that the “citizens of nowhere” will suffer even more. It will be very nasty. Get ready.