Cowardice is usually perceived as an absence – the lack of courage. But Boris Johnson manages to make it a substance. The foreign secretary is unprinciple incarnate. A brave politician, confronted with a three-line whip in parliament behind a proposition he has pledged to oppose, resigns his ministerial office. That is what Greg Hands, an unassuming trade minister, did last week to be free to vote against a third runway at Heathrow.
Johnson also opposes the runway. He promised to thwart its construction by placing his own body between bulldozer and sod. A lesser coward might keep the ministerial job by obeying the whips and wriggling out of the pledge. Not so the foreign secretary, whose doctrine of cakeism (having baked goods and eating them) is familiar from his Brexit prospectus. True to that creed, Johnson has reaffirmed that he doesn’t want Heathrow expanded, while skipping the vote. His no-show in the Commons is an insult to any MP who has ever agonised over dilemmas of conscience, loyalty and duty.
Compare this with the debate on Dominic Grieve’s amendment to the EU withdrawal bill last week, specifying the terms of a “meaningful vote” on a final Brexit deal. Grieve is a former attorney general and a thoughtful, accommodating man. Like many pro-European Tories, he is not by temperament a troublemaker. He was persuaded to vote against his own rebellion with the offer of written ministerial clarification on a fine point of parliamentary procedure.
It is possible to admire Grieve’s legal fastidiousness, while suspecting also that he is a mug who brought a textbook to a gun fight. He fretted about the integrity of the constitution, while his opponents just wanted to shut his rebellion down. The government whips gamed the pro-Europeans’ habit of rule-abiding diligence to divide and defeat them.
Grieve brings lawyerly concern to the task of disentangling Britain from the EU, which is, above all, a legal entity. It exists as a collection of rules, adjudicated by courts, binding members to commonly agreed behaviours. But hardline leavers don’t care about that stuff. They talk about quitting without a deal as if it were a question of guts. They do not mention that reneging on international treaties is the behaviour of a rogue state.
Grieve and Johnson sit on different sides of the Tories’ European schism, but they also represent rival conceptions of politics. For the ex-barrister, it is about drafting the rules. For the former journalist and TV panel-show personality, it is about performance. Grieve could do his job without being observed by a camera. “Boris” only exists for the lens. A reliable method to predict the next eye-catching intervention by the foreign secretary is a period of media attention lavished on Jacob Rees-Mogg. The two men compete not on policy, but as character actors on the same stage, playing cartoon versions of themselves, blurring the line between politics and entertainment.
At least in Britain the line still exists. The sinister consequences of its dissolution are clear across the Atlantic. The capture of US politics by the idioms of show business has long been obvious – and bizarre – to outside observers, down to the way American news bulletins are narrated like movie trailers. Donald Trump’s success in 2016 owed much to the cultural superiority of a celebrity brand over a political one. (And before Hillary Clinton was a politician, she was a lawyer – one of those dull, rule-writing types.)
There is no democracy without some showiness. Rhetorical flair is how arguments are won. An effective politician has a lawyerly side and a theatrical one, and the perfect balance is rare. But it is a feature of the current populist moment that the juridical style feels outmoded, marginalised. The constitutional nerds are drowning in the demagogic tide.
That is why remainers never get any traction with one of their favourite arguments: they accuse leavers of hypocrisy for not wanting parliament to have a stronger say in Brexit. After all, wasn’t parliamentary sovereignty the great cause of Euroscepticism? Yet this isn’t the great “Gotcha!” that pro-Europeans think it is. The charge is logical but Brexit was never a promise of analytical rigour. Johnson and Nigel Farage aren’t shamed by inconsistency. They measure success in laughter and applause. The leave campaign was a show, not a lecture (which helps to explain why it won).
Politics based purely on performance is unsustainable in a democracy. At some stage, campaign pledges are meant to become law. Candidates are supposed to make the transition from actor mode to lawyer mode. But what if there is no lawyer mode? First, the actor dreads disappointing and so losing the audience, therefore the performance gets increasingly outrageous to sustain the ratings. Second, the actor demands that the script become law without the need for fiddly constitutional processes. This is what we see in Trump: a despotic urge to rule by proclamation. On Sunday, the US president called for undocumented migrant deportations “with no judges or court cases”.
This is where the cult of political celebrity leads: to the inflation of individual vanity until it squeezes out old-fashioned notions of due process and the rule of law. This is why British politics can do without so many charismatics, cartoon characters and comedians. It needs people who understand how law is made and why law matters. It sounds dull, but backstage legal bores are our antidote to Boris-style bullshitters. They are the types we will need one day to clean up this mess. Without them, democracy itself becomes little more than a show.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist