White Renegade of the Year — 2022

Credit Image: © Pa Video/PA Wire via ZUMA Press

The White Renegade of the Year is not the person who is the most anti-white. It’s not the person who is the most destructive. He is the person who could — or should — have done the most good, but instead did the most harm. This year’s winner is Boris Johnson, former British prime minister and former leader of the Conservative Party. Though he lost power in September 2022, 2023 could be his comeback, if only because other Conservative leaders are even more unpopular. He has so thoroughly wrecked his party that it may still need even him. This paradox sums up his career.

Boris Johnson had the potential for greatness. You want to like him. He is an excellent writer and speaker and has a roguish charm that gives him an authenticity that so many politicians lack. It’s not just because of his blonde hair that so many compare him to Donald Trump. Other than Nigel Farage, it was Boris Johnson who delivered victory in the Brexit referendum. His closing speech was magnificent.

Unfortunately, like President Donald Trump, Boris Johnson betrayed those who believed in him. Unlike Donald Trump, Boris Johnson can’t blame saboteurs within his own government and party, a ferociously hostile media, political inexperience, or Big Tech censorship. Whatever Donald Trump’s failings, our former president faced obstacles he never imagined when he descended the escalator in 2015. The New York businessman who bragged about his ability to beat the sharks in Manhattan’s real estate market was — somehow — too naïve. Boris Johnson has no excuses. He sabotaged himself out of sheer self-indulgence.

It’s difficult to overstate Boris Johnson’s potential in 2019. By putting himself at the head of the Brexit movement, he did what was almost impossible: He redefined the governing Conservative Party without destroying it. He managed to make a nation’s rulers look like populist outsiders. Though he didn’t take over the Conservatives immediately after Brexit, he was by far the most charismatic and interesting of the Tories. When he took charge, patriots had many reasons for hope.

In December 2019, Mr. Johnson led the Conservatives to an overwhelming victory in a general election that promised a political realignment. He smashed Labour’s “Red Wall” in northern England, humiliating socialist Jeremy Corbyn by making his party look completely out of touch with the English working class.

Matthew Goodwin, co-author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, suggested “Johnsonism” might be the key to victories for center-right parties around the world: “Boris Johnson and his team have grasped the new unwritten law of politics which is you really need to lean a little bit left on economics and a little bit right on culture and identity to unlock lots of territory, lots of seats you didn’t previously have.” Andrew Sullivan wrote: “The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left-economics and a celebration of the nation-state.”

For example, Prime Minister Johnson promised that the Conservatives would fully fund the National Health Service, robbing the Left of one its key issues. Improving the NHS would be a potent way to show the British people that “taking back control” of their finances from the EU had practical benefits. For American conservatives wedded to “limited government,” a right-wing that defends the welfare state is heresy. Yet it’s tactics like this that keep conservatives in power in Poland and Hungary. Prime Minister Johnson had the potential to secure Conservative rule in England for the indefinite future while quelling separatist tendencies in Scotland.

Mr. Johnson had plenty of time to show what he could do. Even by 2021, when it was clear that he was making a mess of things, a northeastern English constituency that had never, ever voted Conservative blew Labour away in a by-election. “With a historic majority, at the helm of the country during its greatest moment of political change since Suez,” recalled Aris Roussinos in Unherd, “Johnson had the potential to lead a radical reformist government and arrest the nation’s seemingly endless decline.” Mr. Johnson failed, but Mr. Roussinos excuses him: “forces of inertia and dysfunction were too great.”

No. It was Boris Johnson’s fault. His personal and political choices were so stupid that one wonders if he has a psychological need for self-sabotage. Leaders of great nations can’t indulge neuroses. He’s like a murderer who wants to be caught, but his victim was England itself.

When mediocre “elites” act as if they are exempt from the rules they force on everyone else, populists will strike. However, a populist leader can’t survive hypocrisy, either. Whatever one may think about COVID-19 vaccines and lockdowns, by early 2021, Boris Johnson’s government looked like it was sailing serenely through the crisis. Unfortunately for him, proof emerged that he and his friends had been drinking and partying while he was telling the rest of the country to stay home and sacrifice for the good of all.

Even the late Queen Elizabeth II had to mourn her husband Prince Philip alone because of COVID-19 restrictions. Boris Johnson acted as if he didn’t need to obey rules that bound the sovereign herself. He also lied about those rowdy parties. Mr. Johnson thus became the first Prime Minister to be found guilty of breaking the law while in office. It may seem a small offence, but no patriotic leader can put himself above the people he claims to lead or ask them to do things he won’t, especially when the Queen is doing her duty. It doesn’t help that Mr. Johnson lied again when he said he didn’t know about allegations of sexual misconduct by a party official, Chris Pincher. “Partygate” and the Chris Pincher lies brought Mr. Johnson down. When people who have been burned by the political establishment for decades put their trust in you, you certainly can’t betray it.

For white advocates, the far more important failures lie in immigration. Though it was not the sole cause, opposition to mass immigration was an important reason why so many Britons defied the political establishment and voted to leave the European Union. Boris Johnson himself accused then-prime minister (and Conservative leader) David Cameron of betraying voters by not cutting immigration. “It is deeply corrosive of popular trust in democracy that every year UK politicians tell the public that they can cut immigration to the tens of thousands — and then find that they miss their targets of hundreds of thousands,” he said in May 2016. In 2019, after Brexit, Boris Johnson and the Conservatives ran and won the election on a strong anti-immigration platform. Immigration then increased.

According to Labour insider Andrew Neather, leftists engineered more immigration to change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” What was Boris Johnson’s excuse? Immigration fell in 2020, though this was because of COVID-19 and Brexit. However, it then surged. From 2019 to May 2022, visas issued to Indians surged by 164 percent, Pakistanis by 255 percent, and Nigerians by 415 percent. Under Boris Johnson, immigration policy was arguably worse than it was under Tony Blair.

Pakistan was the most common country of birth for both non-UK born mothers and fathers for the first time since 2009.

The second most common country of birth was Romania for both parents https://t.co/0crpdHpAmy

— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) October 14, 2021

That’s legal immigration. As of May this year, at least 9,000 “migrants” were known to have crossed the English channel since the beginning of 2022. No one knows how many more arrived undetected. One of the problems facing the British is a housing crisis, which makes it very hard to start a family. John Derbyshire wrote in July 2022 why patriots should say “good riddance” to Boris Johnson:

I’ve been telling you about the swelling floods of Third World opportunists crossing the English Channel illegally from France in boats supplied by organized syndicates of smugglers. Boris Johnson never showed the least concern about this. It was two and a half years before his government took any action on it at all; and then the action was a mere gesture that everyone knew would have no practical effect.

In 2020, the first year of Johnson’s prime ministership, the population of the U.K. increased by 356,000. In the second year, 2021, it increased another 321,000. For 2022 there looks to be another 291,000 increase.

Migration Watch, the main immigration-monitoring organization over there, tells us that for England and Wales, 350,000 a year was the average annual increase from 2011 to 2021.

The U.K., especially England, is bursting at the seams. In 2020 almost ten million U.K. residents had been born abroad — more than one in seven. Population density in England is now 1,114 per square mile. That is almost twice the figure for Germany (588), and nearly four times the density of France (303).

It could have been even worse. Aside from his self-indulgence, Boris Johnson’s biggest failing is his desire to be another Churchill. Author of a book called The Churchill Factor, he sought greatness in foreign policy, even if it hurt Britain. When the Chinese began cracking down on Hong Kong’s autonomy, it was not Great Britain’s problem. If the British didn’t want Beijing running Hong Kong, they should never have given it back.

Boris Johnson’s response was to offer British citizenship to nearly three million people. That’s a million people more than the population of Northern Ireland and almost as many people as there are in Wales. Such an influx would nullify any attempt to control costs for medicine, housing, transportation, or education. Mr. Johnson said the United Kingdom had to “meet its obligations” in Hong Kong. Unless it was prepared to hoist the Union Jack over Victoria Harbour again, it had no obligations. Her Majesty’s Government had a duty to the British people, not foreigners whose fate it signed away in 1997.

Brexit voters thought they were limiting immigration; Mr. Johnson expanded immigration beyond the European Union. Graduates from certain universities will automatically get work visas, regardless of where they were born. Boris Johnson also offered more visas to Indians in exchange for more trade with the former Raj. Indian leaders must hardly believe their good fortune: They can get more economic benefits and more revenge colonization. Though Boris Johnson’s term lies a-moldering in the grave, his agreement marches on, with India and the UK recently striking another deal. The interests of the British people don’t matter.

Erick Kaufman, author of Whiteshift, wrote:

The problem for Johnson is that the dream of a free-trading global Britain is not why most people voted for Brexit. . . . The 2019 British Election Study shows that 8 in 10 people who voted Conservative or Brexit Party wanted less immigration, and on a scale from 0 (reduce a lot) to 5 (stay the same) to 10 (increase a lot), the average 2019 Tory voter scores little more than 2 out of 10.

. . . Johnson argued that there was “no public consent for the scale of immigration we are seeing”. Yet, six years later, new Home Office figures show that nearly a million people were offered visas last year [2021]: work visas are up 50% from 2019–20, study visas up 58%, visas granted for family reasons up 63%.

What legitimacy does democracy have when people vote for something in the teeth of media and elite opposition only to get the opposite?

In neo-reactionary circles, some muse that Americans might have been better off without the Revolution. The current state of once-Great Britain is the strongest justification for having tarred and feathered Tories. Conservatives under Boris Johnson did nothing to reverse the stifling climate of political repression, Orwellian surveillance, and woke jargon choking the Mother Country.

It is under Boris Johnson that the UK banned people from soccer games for online speech. “Those responsible for appalling racist abuse online must be punished,” intoned Home Secretary Priti Patel in January 2022. Boris Johnson trumpeted this supposed success just before he left Number 10 Downing Street, also warning that social media would be hit with fines if they don’t remove “harmful” speech. A Conservative government that courageously cracked down on people who taunt spoiled athletes all but ignored the mass sexual abuse of its own young women. The Johnson government hid a report on Pakistani grooming gangs, claiming discussion wasn’t in the “public interest.”

In 2021, the prime minister’s office said developed countries need to do more to stop climate change. Mr. Johnson also said that, after the pandemic, the world should build back “greener,” “fairer,” “more equal,” and “maybe in a more gender neutral, a more feminine way.” Aside from the implied white guilt, what was the point of Brexit if Britain is to be rebuilt by woke bureaucrats?

The Conservative government is now mulling an effort to get “migrants” to move to rural areas to “combat depopulation and replenish ageing communities.” In other words, replace Britons. “So what?” asked former Conservative Health Secretary Sajid Javid when Nigel Farage charged that the people of Britain are being remade. If that’s conservatism, it’s hard to care whether Labour wins the next general election. Labour victory is almost inevitable. The party is up an astonishing 20 points in polls and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wouldn’t even keep his own seat in a snap election.

Part of the reason the United Kingdom is facing recession is because of the war in Ukraine. The European Union and the UK sacrificed access to Russian energy and imposed sanctions to punish Vladimir Putin. That may serve Washington’s interests, but it hurts Brussels and London and undercuts Brexit rhetoric about national sovereignty. Mr. Johnson even blamed the war on Vladimir Putin’s “toxic masculinity.” It’s a bit more complicated than that; Ukraine took down a statue of Catherine the Great in Odessa, the city she founded. It’s a sorry sight to see a man who built his reputation on scorn for political correctness trying to sound like a gender-studies major.

Boris Johnson bears heavy responsibility for the continuing war. According to some reports, Russia and Ukraine had agreed to a deal to end it, with Russia withdrawing to its February 23 positions and Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. Most people would have called that a major Ukrainian victory that could even have threatened the survival of Vladimir Putin’s government. Mr. Johnson reportedly urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks. Now, the war is likely to continue into the spring, with a devasting loss of European blood and treasure, all so both sides can end up in essentially the same place.

Earlier this year, Aris Roussinos of Unheard said this of Boris Johnson: “No one in living memory can have squandered such a far-reaching and revolutionary mandate for reform through such petty and absurd personal failings.” The damage goes well beyond the Tories. Mr. Johnson has so thoroughly wrecked the British Right that separatism in Scotland is once again a major threat. Disgusted voters in northern England may never give the Conservatives another chance. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who campaigned on lowering immigration, is already plotting to bring in more “skilled workers” to replace British labor in the name of growth. The collection of mediocrities and diversity hires that comprise the Tory leadership is so bad that the best candidate for the party’s future might be Boris Johnson himself. The former PM is now aping Hillary Clinton, giving speeches to elite crowds for outrageous speaking fees and waiting for his comeback moment.

Behind his amusing speeches and classical allusions, there’s a gaping void as vast as Boris Johnson’s pot belly. All politicians pursue power. Mr. Johnson put himself at the head of the Brexit parade because he thought it was the best way to win power. Once he got it, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. He pushed a vague neoliberal agenda of growth through endless “skilled” non-white immigration. He got Brexit done, but the point of it for him seems to have been getting to No. 10 Downing Street, not halting British decline.

“To see and not to speak would be the Great Betrayal,” said Enoch Powell. Within 50 years, white Britons will be a minority in their own country. Chest-thumping about Britain’s “Finest Hour” and endless Churchill nostalgia can’t disguise the reality that within a century of its supposed victory, the United Kingdom lost its empire, identity, liberties, and, perhaps soon, its monarchy and political unity. It is one of the most spectacular national collapses in history. Since 1979, it has mostly happened under Conservative rule. “At least, we’re not speaking German,” some Brits might say, but soon anyone remaining could be speaking Urdu or Arabic.

Boris Johnson thinks of himself as a man of letters. Perhaps he knows his Coriolanus.

Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! 

Under the reign of Charles III, the United Kingdom is a nation conquered without blows. At some level, Boris Johnson knows this. He wrote wistfully of a different empire in The Dream of Rome that:

[F]or reasons of racism, religion, and cultural prejudice on both sides, the British have failed to create anything like a comparable sense of Britishness, either abroad or, indeed, at home. Now we are dealing with the consequences, in Britain, of adopting that communalistic approach, as the children of imperial possessions grow up, in our own cities, in a way that is often balkanized and alienated. (page 52)

If a foreign saboteur were deliberately to destroy and discredit his party, his country, and his causes, would he have acted differently? Maybe Mr. Johnson does the posthumous bidding of his Muslim Turkish great-grandfather. Whatever the reason, he has led his country and party to ruin and probably lost the last chance of saving Britain through the existing political system. Despite his erudition, he really is what he looks like — a bumbling wino.

The emotional reaction to the death of the late Queen Elizabeth II despite her failed reign, shows that there is still hope. You could see it in the patriotism gleaming in the eyes of ordinary Britons. They deserve leaders worthy of them. Boris Johnson seemed determined to stamp out whatever hope remained.

If this island nation that has given so much to the world and especially to America is to endure, its salvation will not come from the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson closed that door. “Congratulations” to Boris Johnson, White Renegade of the Year, 2022, who has beat some truly stiff competition to become the most contemptible figure in the entire Anglosphere.