Confidence Man - What Exactly Do The Conservative Party Have Confidence in Boris Johnson For?

According to last week's confidence vote, the majority of Conservative members of Parliament have confidence in the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. 211 out of 359 MPs, or 59%.

But what does this actually tell us? And why do we care about their levels of confidence? Should confidence have anything to do with governing in a democracy? And, if it does, ought the question of confidence be put to the demos - the whole population - rather than merely the MPs of the current ruling party, many of whom are frontbenchers dependent on the very Prime Minister whose confidence is in question for their current political and financial success?

I guess the question I really want to ask is: what exactly were the MPs being asked if they have confidence in? Because the following statements are not mutually exclusive:

A) I have confidence that Boris Johnson will be able to push through our agenda even if it means breaking the Ministerial Code, lying to the public, and blustering his way through a wide range of scandals and transgressions.

B) I have no confidence in Boris Johnson as a righteous or moral person.

As I can hold both (A) and (B) in my head at the same time, when asked if Johnson can command the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, it really needs to be made clearer what kind of confidence we mean.

Consider the many evangelical conservatives in American politics who are believed to have hated everything that Donald Trump stood for in terms of his personal ethics and his political honesty, but who supported him consistently because they had confidence it would be an effective means to the end of limiting access to abortion in the country. If asked to vote on their confidence about Donald Trump, such evangelical Christians would certainly need to know if the question of confidence was focused on their confidence in him enacting their anti-abortion agenda, or their confidence that the former President would be ascending to heaven when he dies. As an advocate for their policy preferences by any means necessary, confidence was huge. As a role model of supposed Christian ethics, I would imagine very few would be confident at all.

The presumption I am making, of course, is that ethics has anything to do with leadership. Perhaps it doesn't matter the sort of confidence on the former as only the latter matters when it comes to politics? That certainly would be true of a dictatorship. There need be no question of the kind of leader in a dictatorship as long as we have confidence that they will be strong and unyielding in their vision. But, at least in theory, neither the US or the UK are dictatorships. They are democracies. And this is why moral character matters greatly, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. After all, another two statements which are not mutually exclusive might be:

And

C) I have no confidence at all in Boris Johnson's trustworthiness.

One can also hold position (C) without it affecting their simultaneously holding position (A). Yet trustworthiness seems an essential feature of democratic politics, especially in a representative democracy like the UK's. Because the legitimacy of the authority elected politicians hold over the people in a representative democracy comes via a form of social contract, one where the electorate agree to pick a representative of best fit for their views to enable to pragmatic running of government without the unmanageability of large-scale direct democracy. This means that we have to trust what the pool of potential representatives are saying when we elect them or else our contract collapses and cannot be made in good faith. You don't need to be a Kantian to see how lying undoes the very concept of truth and breaking promises the very concept of making them. If Boris Johnson is untrustworthy than that is a significant issue within a democracy because, if we cannot trust that he will represent the views of the people, then we no longer have a democracy.

On both moral character and trustworthiness, however, Johnson has been fairly consistent since childhood. Fired from multiple jobs or positions for dishonesty, we have seen in the recent "Partygate" scandal just more of the same. Perhaps the problem is not, therefore, trustworthiness alone, for we can trust Boris Johnson to lie to us again and again and shirk responsibility and accountability for his actions. The problem is our lack of confidence in his ability to tell us the truth; to do what he says he is going to do, and to do the right thing in any given situation. Again, such a lack of confidence in Johnson - one reasonably supported by an entire history of evidence across his political and journalistic career - seems important in a democracy, and is quite different from the question asked only to those members of his own current political "team", all with a vested interest in his success or failure, about their confidence in his ability to command them as a majority so that they can push through their own particular political agenda(s). If anything, it is Johnson's moral failings that make him so effective at pushing through some of those agendas. An expert propagandist and marketer, we all use the language of "Brexit" and "levelling up" even as the North awaits its promised regeneration and, if you ask anyone in Ireland, Brexit still seems far from "done". The ability to repeat a lie and epistemically pivot to spin untruth into witty deflection is precisely what gives Conservative MPs their confidence in the Prime Minister as a politician and political leader.

But that doesn't necessarily mean he should be Prime Minister in a country which purports to be a democracy.

In a democracy, at least in the sort of democracy the UK has established itself to be, the only vote of confidence which ought to count is the confidence of the governed population. A general election. And after showing us that despite all of Boris Johnson's demonstrable and proven lies, his ill-judgment over both the initial Downing Street lockdown parties and the subsequent "Partygate" scandals, his consistently getting the "big calls" wrong on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and his daily jeopardising of the Irish peace process, 59% of Tory MPs still have confidence in Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, then I suggest the Conservative Party now stand before the British public and see how confident we are in them and their judgement.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com