Number 10’s cowardice won’t allow it to support Boris Johnson

Did you know that your brain is essentially a skull-encased lump of sand? Clever researchers told New Scientist magazine in 2009 that the brain operates “on the edge of chaos” and that, far from “ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer,” is subject to bursts of creativity and clarity arising from a whirlwind of fragmented ideas suddenly collapsing into reality, like a sand dune. It is a beautiful image.

“As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These ‘sand avalanches’ occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising.”

This is what others might call “brain waves,” arising from the ordered chaos of our minds. I imagine the skull of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to contain a particularly creative bundle of swirling sand. He has a way with words — even if they’re often used to insult people — and his command of the ancient languages informs a wide-ranging vocabulary.

As newspaper columnists go, you can hardly imagine that Boris the Scribe ever had weeks when his mad mind didn’t create half a dozen ideas for him to write about; the collapsing sand dunes inside his skull, while chaotic in themselves, would have been ordered in their own way. The problem is that Johnson is no longer a newspaper columnist; he’s Britain’s top diplomat. And the chaos in his mind is starting to seep out.

With chaos can come anarchy, gibberish or pointless meandering, but chaos also occasionally brings brief moments of purely accidental clarity. That was what Johnson happened upon when he allowed a sand avalanche inside his head — this time about Saudi Arabia — to come tumbling out. He was addressing a conference in Rome a couple of weeks ago. While most people have erected careful barriers around the collapsing dunes inside their heads, Johnson hasn’t. That’s why most of the things he says are fairly stupid, because they come out in speech just nanoseconds after they avalanche spontaneously into his consciousness.

By chance, however, on this occasion he managed to say something quite brilliant; that Saudi Arabia is engaging in “proxy wars and puppeteering.” It wasn’t him speaking, no doubt — it was the chaotic sand within his head — but chaos is beautiful because it occasionally brings forth brilliance.

What Johnson said was fundamentally true. Saudi Arabia is fighting a proxy war against Iran in Syria, and more directly in Yemen (although Iranian support for the Houthis is often slightly overstated). Saudi Arabia does have rebels in Syria whose strings it pulls with oil money. Though many of these groups existed in and of themselves before the Saudi money arrived, they wouldn’t continue to exist were it not for the government in Riyadh. Nor is anyone going to argue against the fact that Hezbollah is fighting many of these groups in Syria, and that Iranian troops are also present, and therefore there exists, by any reasonable assessment, a proxy war.

Johnson also said that the House of Saud “abuses Islam.” That is true. Its monarch is the Custodian of the Two Holy Places (the mosques in Makkah and Madinah), and it has forced a particular brand of Islam not just on its own people — many of whom aren’t natural “Wahhabis” — but also on many other countries around the world. The Saudis do this not because of any particular deference to Allah; you only have to look at the infamously lascivious lifestyles of the Saudi princes when they visit London’s nightclubs each summer to know that. They appeal to Islam because they want personal profit and to maintain their own power, which is an abuse of Islam. The faith decries excess personal profit and engenders social justice and equality. Nothing in Saudi Arabia remotely smells of either.

So what Johnson said was right. Why, then, was 10 Downing Street so keen to disavow his words? This was not just because Theresa May doesn’t like Boris Johnson, who she still perceives as a threat. It was also because the prime minister’s staff are cowards. They are cowards not to back, in an age when straight-talking politicians are in vogue, a random moment of brilliance from the foreign secretary. They are cowards because they prefer to kowtow to Riyadh, and the big oil and defence companies, and not to back anything remotely resembling a moral (ethical, even) foreign policy. They are cowards because while it is the British way to be practical in our overseas alliances, it is also British to be practical when considering whether our friends are really our friends; and it is very British to be decent and honest and hopeful that human rights will spread.

From the scrapping of a legitimate fraud investigation into BAE Systems under Tony Blair which would have implicated members of the Saudi royal family in massive corruption charges; to the instigation of a politically motivated investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood by Cameron; to the embarrassing attempts to win Saudi business whatever it takes; in all of these and more, Saudi Arabia uses Britain. You could go so far as to say — and to use Johnson’s analogy — we are the Saudis’ puppet. Johnson was right, for once, to say what he did. There is no doubt that he should be praised for it, not left to the media wolves.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.