Teflon Bojo’s 5 tips for surviving scandal

Behavioral science explains how Boris Johnson gets away with it.

LONDON — The United Kingdom's new prime minister has proved markedly resistant to scandal. Boris Johnson's political career has chugged through multiple affairs, racist remarks, visits from the police, fish-like flip-flopping, failed projects and reports of incompetence in office.

"If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip-wire, it would be a disaster," former Prime Minister David Cameron remarked after Johnson was left dangling during a televised effort to promote the 2012 London Olympics. "For Boris, it's an absolute triumph."

The ability to slip out of trouble is an asset that has served Johnson well as he has climbed the long greasy poll to the country's top job. As an expert in behavioral science, I’ve identified five methods Britain's Teflon prime minister has used to shrug off scandal — and why voters are likely to keep falling for them.

Let's start with the obvious. Johnson is a skilled, emotive politician and an articulate if unconventional orator. For most of his career, he has used this to make people laugh. As prime minister, he's channeled that energy into the effort to leave the European Union — specifically into telling a certain (Tory-leaning, Brexit-happy) slice of the electorate exactly what they want to hear.

If someone seems sure of themselves, we’re likely to take them at their word.

The reason this is a successful strategy is something called confirmation bias — when you offer people a message they want to believe, they’ll eagerly paper over any rational cracks in the argument. Tribalized politics and segregated news and social media reinforce this effect. If you’re primed to like the self-styled champion of Brexit, you’re likely to more easily dismiss reports about his scandals — or maybe never hear about them at all.

Johnson always seems, to put it mildly, very, very sure of himself. Despite well-documented failures during his time as mayor of London — his most high-profile proposals include the never-completed Boris Island airport and costly and also unfinished Garden Bridge project — many voters nonetheless regard him as a highly competent policymaker. He was overwhelmingly picked to lead the Tory Party, after all.

Putting on a show of confidence is effective because of a mental shortcut non-experts use to evaluate the competence of others: If someone seems sure of themselves, we’re likely to take them at their word. Being perceived as successful correlates more strongly with traits such as extroversion and communication skills over intelligence and other cognitive skills. (Johnson is the fourth prime minister since World War II to have attended Eton College, a private secondary school famous for implanting its graduates with an unshakable sense of confidence and entitlement.)

Another reason Johnson has been so able to avoid accountability for his scandals is, paradoxically, that he's had so many of them. Take his offensive description in a column for the Telegraph of Muslim women who wear burqas as "letterboxes." The words set off a furor in the press, but Johnson escaped censure from the Tory Party. The backlash was also short-lived, simply because the incident fit a pattern. This is the man, after all, who accused former U.S. President Barack Obama of having an "ancestral dislike of the British Empire" and once described Africans as "piccaninnies" and "tribal warriors" with "watermelon smiles."

The psychological phenomenon Johnson is exploiting is called "anchoring," by which previous bits of knowledge influence our analysis of subsequent information. With each scandal, we become desensitized and less likely to be shocked or outraged. Like U.S. President Donald Trump (arguably the master of anchoring), Johnson takes advantage of this when he responds to scandals by simply brazening them out, making them feel less egregious — more normal — than if he were to exhibit any amount of shame.

U.S. President Donald Trump uses similar tactics to divert attention from criticism he's faced and allegations of misconduct | Ralph Freso/Getty Images

Voters won't have time to think about your scandals if they’re terrified or angry. Across the Atlantic, Trump has sought to reignite racial divides to divert attention from allegations of corruption, obstruction of justice and foreign policy failure. In the U.K., Johnson doesn't have to look very far for a similarly divisive issue. His aggressive support of Brexit has propelled him into No. 10 Downing street, and as evidenced by his choice of hard Brexiteers for many of his government's top jobs, he seems intent on exploiting the issue to keep himself in power.

Along with his newly appointed adviser Dominic Cummings, the man behind the Vote Leave campaign, Johnson is likely to seek to keep his base fired up and furious. This is confirmation bias at work again. As long as we’re being fed emotive ads and messages that play to our existing beliefs, we’re likely to focus on those to the exclusion of anything else.

Johnson seems aware that he needs to broaden his appeal beyond his Brexiteer base. In his opening speech as prime minister, he positioned himself as a champion of liberal values and government spending that might have gotten another Conservative prime minister in trouble. A middle-ground voter might be more eager than a fiscally conservative Tory to have more money spent on police officers, the national health service and schools. But as long as Johnson keeps his fingers on the red buttons, that's not likely to matter.

We’re less firm about our opinions on pieces of policy, it turns out, than about our sense of identity — in this case party affiliation. The architects of a recent study asked 1,000 people whether they would pay an additional percentage point of VAT to pay for 10,000 extra nurses. The answer depended on whether the respondent believed the proposal came from the party to which they belong. Tories were four times more likely to think the idea was good if they were told it was a Tory policy rather than a proposal from Labour. The same bias toward their own party was true for Labour supporters.

Johnson faces the possibility of an election if he can't get the British parliament or the EU to blink on his Brexit proposals. His behavior in office so far — in his speeches, his negotiating stance toward Brussels, his Cabinet picks — indicates he knows he can't afford to stop campaigning. These five behavioral tricks have allowed him to survive years of scandals. They will likely remain important in the months and possibly years ahead.

Will Hanmer-Lloyd is head of behavioral planning at Total Media.