Boris Johnson ‘Personal Responsibility’ & ‘Common-sense’. A sense of class arrogance.
Boris Johnson has laid out measure to relax legal rules around COVID-19 and replace them with guidance based on advising people to use their common-sense and take personal responsibility.
These are not terms that have an easily definable meaning. For bosses seeking to maximise profits, health and safety might not be quite as much of a priority as it should be. For those employed however a cautious approach to COVID based on mask wearing and social distancing might seem more reasonable.
We might surmise that a Johnsonian approach to common-sense formed as it will have been at Eton and in the Bullingdon Club is highly likely to be foolhardy.
It is too soon for Johnson to attract the attention of historians but he does have biographers. One, Sonia Purnell (Just Boris) does record an occasion when something that Johnson actually thought was just ‘common-sense’ turned out to be anything but, and to his personal detriment.
This was in October 2004 when Johnson was still editing the Spectator. Purnell notes that short of a leader column as the deadline appeared (no doubt due to laziness on Johnson’s part), right-wing columnist Simon Hepher was prevailed upon to write something at short notice.
He focused on the minutes silence at an England Wales football game for Ken Bigley a contractor from Liverpool who had been murdered in Iraq.
The leader criticised the ‘mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief’ and argued that Liverpool was a ‘handsome city with a tribal sense of community’.
Apparently some of Hepher’s copy was edited but the section on Liverpool was seen as just common-sense. Johnson didn’t bother to check the detail of the context of the Hillsborough tragedy and how many had died.
Purnell relates that the references to Liverpool were thought to be just ‘common-sense’. There was uproar.
Johnson was despatched on a tour of apology to Merseyside but, rightly, has been despised in the City ever since.
For Johnson common-sense is about class arrogance. For others it should be about collective community solidarity.
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