If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure

There is a great line in the movie All The Presidents Men, when Jason Robards, who is playing Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, says: “If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure.” I am reminded of this line not in connection which happened nearly 50 years ago, but the politics of the here and now. And in particular the question of whether Boris Johnson should resign as prime minister for lying. Well, he should, shouldn’t he?

Johnson’s shtick is that he is a liar. People seem to accept that his lies are baked-in to the ‘Boris’ package. And he gets away with more lies than any other politician of his generation. Where people normally treat lying politicians with the contempt they deserve, ‘Boris’ gets a free pass. He’s different from other politicians. You can say that again.

Labour leader Keir Starmer is criticised by the hard left in his party, and indeed outside it, for not calling for Johnson to resign. To them, mainstream Labour, or the right wing, as useful idiots like Owen Jones call anyone right of Jeremy Corbyn, are the real enemy. Starmer, they argue, is ‘Tory lite’ because he stops short of calling for Johnson to go. But that rather misses the point Ben Bradlee made.

There comes a time when, yes, a politician calls for another politician to quit, but that should only be when there is a realistic possibility, a probability even, that they might succeed. That’s what smart politicians do. It’s only useful idiots like Corbyn and Jones repeatedly call for people to resign and when those people don’t resign, momentum is lost, the pressure valve is eased, “everybody feels more secure”. And when the next opportunity to call for a resignation comes along it can be viewed opportunistic. “Oh here we go again. He always says this.”

Starmer, I suspect, understands this far better than I do. He is clearly not in favour of empty gestures, as his predecessor was. He wants to pull the trigger only when there is a chance of hitting the target and fatally wounding him or her.  Although some people treat politics as a game, serious men and women don’t.

And anyway, Starmer has given Johnson plenty of rope with which to hang himself by getting him to lie in parliament about the parties which took place at 10 Downing Street. That’s on the record.

So let’s have some serious politics. Not empty rhetoric and vacuous slogans but holding politicians to account. There may come a time that Johnson will have to resign, although his narcissism means he will not go without a fight. Johnson out, for sure, but timing is everything.