Toxic Leadership

Populism, Blame Avoidance and the fight for better standards

I have a chapter in this new book from Oxford University Press, The Politics and Governance of Blame. My chapter is entitled:

Rethinking the Politics of Blame Avoidance under Populism - Strategic Lying, Bullshit, Boosterism, and Scapegoating

It’s a bit of a mouthful. The chapter is about Boris Johnson’s leadership during the Covid-19 crisis. It draws on material that predates the official Covid-19 Inquiry. However, I don’t think the Inquiry, which issues its first report this week, would change the conclusions much. I had the benefit of the Joint Report from the House of Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Select Committees. This reviewed the evidence to 2021 and took evidence from a range of sources.

The concept of Blame Avoidance comes from the experienced and respected academic Christopher Hood. In his book, The Blame Game, Hood sets out his argument. His pioneering work identifies ‘the management of blame risk’ as a key driver of political, official and organizational behaviour. He suggests three broad strategies of blame avoidance—presentational, agency, and policy. Presentational strategies are about the framing of blame and what is at stake. Agency strategies deal with the question of who can be held responsible. Policy strategies on the whole relate to the frameworks within which blame-producing activity may take place. I summarise the arguments from the chapter in this piece. The academic references and data on which they rely can be found in the published chapter itself.

My chapter questions whether the Hood model requires adjustment for analysis of populist blame avoidance. Populism is a performative strategy of perpetual blaming, notably blaming the failure of the ‘elite’ to deliver for ‘the people’, but also others beyond the in-group—victims, minorities, and outsiders. Populist leaders do not feel subject to accepted liberal institutional rules and norms of public discourse. The acceptance of blame requires some sense of shame, but this is not ordinarily an emotion which populist leaders are recognised as experiencing. For the supporters of populist leaders, their partisan identity has upended civic norms, providing an alternative moral framework for the evaluation of public standards.We have seen this in the behaviour of some newspapers since Brexit.

The UK prime minister’s ambition at the point at which COVID-19 became salient as an issue, was to achieve Brexit, the UK’s exit from the European Union, which had dominated UK politics for the previous five years. Johnsonian populism in the UK has its own specific characteristics, highly personal to its leader. Over time, Johnson has sought to develop a persona—‘Boris’, the ‘politician celebrity’—different from other politicians. The exaggerated personal attributes of a dishevelled appearance and a bumbling approach are designed to stimulate affection in the audience as part of a relentlessly performative approach of promises and pictures, typified by his employment of a photographer in Downing Street to capture critical moments of his premiership. Johnsonian populism was reinforced by repeated lying, bullshit, scapegoating, boostersm, and rule-breaking.

I am not going to rehearse the Covid ‘charge-sheet’here, but it was reviewed by the Joint Select Committee Inquiry and has been under scrutiny for over a year in the Covid Inquiry. It is not the purpose of my chapter to assess where blame sat, but rather to identify the range of blame-avoidance strategies of the UK government. I identified a wide range of blame avoidance strategies utilised by the government which coincided with Hopd’s model. But I argued that there were specific strategies deployed by the Johnson government which were derived from its populist approach, These were:

• scapegoating individuals and groups

• strategic lying - a term coined by other academics

• strategic bullshit - constant narrative displacement and distraction

• strategic boosterism

I give examples of all these in the chapter. I argue that it is entirely possible to assess the performance of the UK government during COVID-19 in the traditional language of blame avoidance. But is this really helpful to understanding what happened during COVID-19 in the UK? Does the relative neutrality of the language of blame avoidance obscure more than it reveals? Worse, does the process of analysing populist approaches in such neutral terms risk overlooking or normalizing the populist assault on civic norms and public standards?

My chapter contends that the language of blame avoidance needs a rethink, or possibly a reset, in times of populism. The populist approaches deployed by the UK government were strategic: they sought to frame the crisis in the government’s terms, to delay blame judgement, and to distract through strategic lying, bullshit, boosterism, and scapegoating. These were clearly performative, presentational strategies. Populist blame allocation involves real issues of power where populist governments seek to blame populations or sections of populations for the social problems which afflict societies. The existing language of existing blame-avoidance models is inadequate to—and distracts from—the task of allocating blame and responsibility under a populist government.

I’ve argued before on this site that Brexit populism has undermined the Nolan principles. My new chapter demonstrates in the context of Covid the specific strategies that populists use to avoid blame and to reframe the argument on their terms. We have had eight years of populist governments, whose behaviour became even worse following the election of Boris Johnson as Conservative leader in 2019.

That populism has been a form of toxic leadership, a subject to which I will return. It is corrosive, but populism is not the only cause of the kind of toxic leadership which we see in many institutions, public and private, and in many different societies of different ideological make-ups.

Thankfully, since the morning of 5 July we have had a government which seeks to restore public standards and basic competence. There have been some encouraging moves already. The new Prime Minister has also been very clear in his general statements of principle.

But public standards demand constant vigilance. And decisive action when necessary.