Angela Merkel’s legacy in Germany stands in stark contrast to Boris Johnson

Of the Brits, probably only Tony Blair will be much remembered in future, and then for throwing away all the advantages he accrued through huge electoral victories. Gordon Brown might, if he is lucky, be merely pitied for bungling a job he had longed for all his adult life.

Moving on to the Tories, we found in David Cameron a basically shallow man presiding at a crucial point where the deep new challenges of the 21st century really started to kick in – he never learned to meet, let alone to master them. The UK had already had an Iron Lady in charge, and Theresa May showed how hard it would be to discover another. And Boris Johnson – well, up to now Boris has been a laugh a minute and we can only wonder if he will be able to keep it up.

Of the Germans, Gerhard Schröder, voted out in 2005, has already been pretty much forgotten. But there is little doubt that his successor, Angela Merkel, will carry forward her reputation as one of the most powerful and influential leaders of our age.

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Once upon a time it was British prime ministers that sat comfortably at the top tables taking it for granted that other powers, though already grown greater in their historical role, would defer to the bearer of political wisdom from Westminster. Now nobody bothers about the UK. It is the Germans’ somewhat ponderous sagacity that earns them global respect – especially as they are well able to pay for getting where they want to be.

Here is the kind of real power that for 16 years Merkel has so deftly exerted. She has done so without making enemies among her country’s neighbours and allies. In fact it has no enemies. There is in its behaviour nothing to remind anybody of the German past, and its partners of today prefer to cultivate German goodwill.

We glimpse that in the way Merkel has been able to make ceremonies of her goodbyes. She has given a valedictory address to the Bundestag in Berlin, while in the wider world she has attended her last G7 summit in Cornwall and her final European Council meeting in Brussels.

Yesterday, embarking on a fresh round of foreign farewells, she was in London again. Never one to waste a moment, she mixed business with pleasure. She had brisk talks at Chequers on the latest complications of Covid control. At least Johnson, in one of his occasional bouts of gallantry, will have helped to fix a treat she somehow missed in all these years of getting what she wanted. She had tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle.

It would have been a relaxed occasion. Neither woman is much obsessed with herself and both would have been happy to leave on one side for a while the burdens of buoying up their nations. The wonder about the Queen is that she has done it for so long without flagging. The wonder about Merkel is how she manages to drive awkward customers over long distances to where she wants them to be – not a big problem for the British monarch, except inside the royal family.

Merkel’s own odyssey started long ago in the German Democratic Republic when this daughter of a Lutheran minister cast aside, as if they were gossamer, the penalties that life might have loaded on her. Girls and boys from clerical homes were normally banned from higher education or any sort of rewarding job. But, out of the blue, Merkel won a national prize for her command of the Russian language, and a year at school in the Soviet Union. Today her nearest rival in these accomplishments is Vladimir Putin, who learned German as a secret policeman in Dresden.

She went on to study physics and chemistry at the prestigious University of Leipzig, and was in the early stages of a conventional academic career by the time of the East German Revolution in 1989. She joined the democratic movement and as a bright, ambitious woman was found just right to pursue a political future by Christian Democrats from the West.

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They did not really know what they were letting themselves in for. It was at that time quite a male chauvinist party, usually led by Catholics who gave domineering leadership to conventional good causes. They indulged Merkel because they never thought she could outclass them. How wrong they were. Through a long series of wily manoeuvres she was ready to take over the leadership for herself in 2005.

She has since anchored her nation but only after steering it through awkward manoeuvres. One of her purposes has been to eviscerate the old party system in the Bundestag. The Social Democrats have virtually ceased to be socialists. Instead they accept the watered-down versions of their previous policies that she offers them. Similarly, she has turned her own party greener, closing down both nuclear reactors and coal mines, so that the actual Green party is left with not much to say either.

She has still been far from a pushover on certain principles of her own. Her budgets are as a rule always balanced, if not in surplus, and she insists on fiscal purity from those lazier countries that seek rescues with German money. The euro has been important to her because, quite apart from fulfilling a European ambition, it helps to enforce the kind of discipline she likes. Yet she has made German social security among the most generous in Europe.

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Fellow politicians did well not to underestimate her. She has always made sure to keep her show on the road, and achieves this not by gesture politics but by a painstakingly moderate and methodical approach to doing business. She is the polar opposite to Johnson, in other words (though not perhaps to the Queen). Merkel might regard these virtues as British, or perhaps here we had better say English ones. But she has seldom come across them in the politicians from London she has encountered.

Merkel and Johnson offer an intriguing example of the two nations’ complex relationship. Two years ago, their governments had a brutal fall-out when the Germans proposed that Northern Ireland, on leaving the EU, should retain all its existing regulations in a regime for itself. At this the Brits exploded in fury. Yet two years later that is just what we’ve got. The question figured again yesterday in Downing Street, and probably will keep running as a German plan in British guise.

But one result we can easily identify. The 16 years of Merkel have left Germany happier with its role in the world. The two years of Johnson have done the opposite for the UK.