The greatest mistake opponents of Boris Johnson made was assuming he couldn’t threaten British democracy because “he wants to be loved”. He’s a performing clown, they told us, a needy celebrity who just wants to hear the audience’s applause. They did not grasp that there is no more dangerous desire than the need for others to love you. When love is refused, the needy turn nasty. What is an egomaniacal fault in the actor or the singer becomes a public menace when a celebrity assumes power.

Democratic politicians should not expect to be loved. The best they should hope for is the respect of a part of the electorate and a modicum of sympathy from the historians of the future. When they demand love, instead of earning respect, they see the usual constraints of a free society as insults. The personal becomes political. The neurotic strongman casts himself as the embodiment of the people’s will. All who question him are insulting the nation he, in his vainglory, thinks he personifies.

You can feel the craving for affection in Johnson’s willingness to promote nobodies who love him (or can pretend to love him) and sack Conservative politicians with the spirit to argue back. Johnson’s Britain is closer to an absolute monarchy than a democracy. And palace politics always leads to mediocrity, sycophancy and, in the end, ignominy. Fear replaces intellect as the motor of public life. Acquiescent courtiers push aside the talented and the independent-minded.

In 2005, Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer prize for Team of Rivals, her account of how Abraham Lincoln persuaded Republican party adversaries to join his government, win the American civil war and abolish slavery. Johnson does not want a team of rivals. He wants a team of toadies. For only toadies will give him the love he needs.

Opposition politicians and ordinary citizens remain free to denounce Johnson in the strongest terms. But they cannot threaten him. Anyone who can hears a voice familiar to all who have lived in dictatorships or worked for bosses who are dictators of the workplace. “I know you think I’m a jerk. I know you find me obscene. But I know that you know that you can never say so.”

In a perfect example of the humiliating subservience demanded by unconstrained power, Dominic Cummings told reporters asking about high-speed rail last week: “The night time is the right time to fight crime. I can’t think of a rhyme.”

What?

“I thinks we need PJ Masks,” he continued as he babbled catchphrases from a children’s television show. “PJ Masks. They’re your guys.”

The journalists might have told Cummings to go to hell. (I would have used stronger language.) They might have said that as chief special adviser to the prime minister he should uphold the dignity of his office. But just as Donald Trump believes the Republican base so loves him, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”, so Cummings and Johnson believe Conservative voters so love them that there’s nothing they cannot do. And if reporters don’t love them back, Cummings and Johnson have shown that they will ban them from receiving government briefings and ban ministers from appearing on their radio and television shows.

Let one incident illustrate how freedom rots in countries where the leader wants to be loved. Last week, the unlikely figure of the Rt Hon Lady Justice Simler drove Johnson and Cummings to fury when she failed to show them the affection they are owed. Simler’s decision at the court of appeal to temporarily halt the deportation of Jamaican criminals produced “molten anger” in No 10. Cummings said it was “a perfect symbol of the British state’s dysfunction” and promised “urgent action on the farce that judicial review has become”. He talked more sense when he gibbered about PJ Masks, but I doubt many realised it.

Dominic Cummings: he and ‘Johnson believe Conservative voters so love them that there’s nothing they cannot do’ Photograph: David Mirzoeff/PA

The Johnson administration wanted the public to believe that the courts had intervened in politics. After the Windrush scandal, Labour MPs pointed out that a portion of the “Jamaican criminals” were Jamaican in name only. They had been in Britain since they were children and the government was dumping them in a foreign land. As it happens, the courts took precisely no notice of the political debate. The charity Detention Action went to the court of appeal because the mobile phone system covering the immigration removal centres near Heathrow had been disrupted for weeks and inmates could not contact their lawyers.

Johnson’s Home Office accepted the “Jamaicans” were entitled to legal representation. But it was forced to admit that, with characteristic negligence, “although it became aware of the communications outage on 13 January, it did not begin issuing working SIM cards to all those scheduled to be removed from the country until 5 February”.

The right of access to a lawyer is not a politically correct fad imposed on the poor old Home Office by elitist, leftist judges. It is an old and basic protection against the over-mighty state. The founders of the United States included the right to counsel in the sixth amendment to the US constitution in 1791. British courts have recognised the right of defendants to have a lawyer represent them since the middle of the 18th century.

Geoffrey Cox, as the attorney general, said ministers must not use the case as an excuse to rush “headlong” into the “impetuous reform” of the judicial system. Johnson promptly sacked him to make way for Suella Braverman, a nobody lawyer who showed the depth of her love for Johnson when she said that the Tory state must take power from the courts.

If you are a judge, journalist, civil servant, Conservative MP or British citizen who needs the protection of the law, you should get ready for what is coming. If you challenge the lovelorn Johnson, he will hate you and do all he can to destroy you.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist