Boris Johnson has desecrated the political structures of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Europe.

             Boris Johnson receiving a sizable advance from a publisher for a book about William Shakespeare but never writing it seems pretty fitting. Johnson's ascent and descent veers between cheap humor and absurdist theatre. It lacks tragedy's majesty entirely. The opening phrase of Mark Antony's elegy for Julius Caesar, "The evil that men commit lives after them," was the only Shakespearean quotation that sprang to me at the time of his political downfall. The coffin will be light enough if Johnson's good deeds from his public life are placed with his bones. But in the upcoming decades, wickedness will have a significant impact.

 

This is what makes Johnson's place in history so peculiar. It is difficult to imagine a person who is both foolish and significant, irresponsible and yet deeply important. His time in power was brief, but his bad effects of it will linger. He was a politician so lacking in ability that despite having a sizable legislative majority, an adoring press, and a cabinet chose specifically for abject self-abasement, he was unable to maintain his position of power. However, he has changed the political structures in Britain, Ireland, and Europe.

 

The sinister genius of Johnson was to mold Britain in his own image. His arrogance has turned it into a renegade state that brazenly disobeys international law. His triviality has made it appear less impressive to the outside world. His persistent dishonesty and plainly self-serving abuse of authority have damaged its standing as a democracy with integrity. His terrible jokes made the nation he claims to love more and more ridiculous.

 

This bizarre tale brings no joy to the majority of British people, the people of Ireland, or the people of Europe. If a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, according to John Donne, another renowned English author. Britain was never just a clod, and Europe is definitely the poorer for it. A complex but delicate web of ties and connections, both to Ireland and to the continent as a whole, have been severed or badly strained. The invasion of Ukraine and the climate crisis are causing two overlapping existential crises for Europe, and Johnson's Britain has turned itself into a source of more turbulence and uncertainty.

 

Johnson finds all of this to be so trivial, which is a shame. His desire for power was intense and real, and it demanded just as much of him as his other, more sensual cravings. But what exactly did he mean by power in the end? His perspective on it was always that of a young offender. He said that his mendaciously anti-European journalism was driven by a desire for controversy on Desert Island Discs in 2005. He said, "Everything I wrote from Brussels, I discovered was sort of flinging these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door." I felt this really strange sensation of power that it gave me.

 

It is a peculiar notion of power. Johnson's political career has been accompanied by the shattering of glass as he throws rocks over the neighbors’ walls across the Irish Sea and the Channel. Johnson's construction projects, including Boris Island, the garden bridge in London, and the magnificent bridge that would have connected Scotland and Northern Ireland, were delusions whose inherent grandiosity rendered them childish. However, at least they never occurred. It was the destructive side, that enjoyment of political vandalism, that materialized, and Britain appears destined to remain there for some time after his departure.

 

His careless sabotage of the Good Friday deal is the worst part of this. Johnson could have been so arrogant as to believe that the political institutions of the UK and the EU were strong enough to survive his own cynical manipulation of them. But even he must have known that achieving peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is a challenging and fundamentally unfinished task. He must have known that in this situation, the implications of inciting tribal identity politics were all too clear.

 

Still, he carried it out. He purposefully downplayed the issues at the Irish border by equating it to the boundary between two London traffic lanes. He derided Northern Ireland as a bothersome appendage or the tail that was wagging the Brexit dog. He played with his supporters' illusions within the Democratic Unionist party, encouraging them or disavowing them depending on his mood. He regularly told lies regarding the intent of the procedure he negotiated. He sponsored measures with the specific intent of escalating tensions with the EU over Northern Ireland.

 

This resulted in two outcomes. It caused the lowest point in decades for relations between Britain and Ireland. And it delighted autocrats all across the world. Johnson turned to uphold the law and treaty observance into yet another of his crude jokes. Johnson tweeted on July 1 of this year, "We made a promise to the people of Hong Kong 25 years ago. We're going to keep it. This was retweeted by the Chinese embassy in Dublin, who responded: "2 years ago, we made a pledge to the Northern Ireland Protocol" (sic). We are committed to dismantling it. The awful thing is that the Chinese were correct in this regard; Johnson's actions have given them permission to disregard the agreements they made 25 years ago.

 

Johnson has brought Britain's standing on the international stage to this point, where it is now open to tyrants' insults. Johnson was helping Ukraine, which is a wonderful thing, but he was also giving Vladimir Putin reason to think that the west merely pretends to defend the rule of law. This decline is not only detrimental to the UK. It is detrimental to all democracies worldwide. Johnson transformed one of history's most illustrious democracies into a country where his own cynicism, recklessness, and lack of honor were enshrined as law. By doing this, he has made it possible for any adversary of democracy to claim that the system's norms and values are fictitious.

 

It isn't, and some people will keep fighting to strengthen and defend it. The key question for Britain is whether it can rejoin that side of the conflict as a respectable, legally obligated, and significant player in world affairs. It is very difficult to imagine that people who permitted Johnson to make such a mockery of their own nation will have an explanation. Johnson has caused harm, and it won't be soon reversed or by those who only found it unacceptable when it threatened their own immediate interests.