Boris’ politics are more important than his private life
Frankly, I don’t give a damn about Boris Johnson’s purple personal life. What he gets up to in the Cabinet room is much more important than what he gets up to in the bedroom.
But his personal life is the focus of some media attention, the “political significance” of which is duly weighed and speculated upon, to much sucking of teeth and sonorously delivered verdicts.
Yes, Johnson’s allotted role is, it appears, to add to the gaiety of the nation. We can all have a laugh. Yet, it is inappropriate.
There is human misery involved. This is also, so far as I can tell, the story of a family being torn asunder, its privacy invaded once again.
Long after Johnson has repaired his marriage, moved in with someone else, or decided to take vows of silence and join a monastery (the least likely option, but you never know), Britain will be lumbered with a Brexit that nobody wants.
You may rest assured that he will, through his talent for journalism, television appearances and his (no doubt) candid memoirs make more than enough to live on.
Others, effectively victims of his determination to himself before party and before country, will be chucked out of their jobs and face family break-ups of their own because of Brexit, for which he, above all, was responsible.
There are many more family tragedies he will be accountable for across the land.
Brexit will be Boris’s epitaph, not babies, and Brexit was designed principally to strengthen his hand in some long-distant Tory leadership election.
He never intended Leave to prevail. Recall that he wrote those two articles — pro and anti-Brexit — to help him make his mind up. Recall, too, that his column in the Daily Telegraph at the time advocated a Leave vote as a tactical device to get more concessions while staying in the EU.
When it all went right/wrong and Leave unexpectedly won, the Tory leadership campaign arrived early. He was ill-prepared for it, his party saw through him, his closest political ally, Michael Gove, broke the news that he wasn’t up to the job and, thus, we were left with Theresa May, for want of better.
The truth about Boris is that, for all his enthusiastic love-making, he reserves his most ardent affection for his own ego.
It is a long time since it was thought that a man who can cheat on his wife can cheat on his country. I’m not sure it was ever true.
Some premiers have had ‘colourful’ private lives (say, David Lloyd George, John Major) and others quiet ones (Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher).
There is also a long list of other extremely talented figures who have had their careers cut short or derailed because of revelations, or fear of exposure, relating to their sex lives (Jack Profumo, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Portillo, Robin Cook).
On balance, we’d have been better off if the British public hadn’t indulged the periodic taste for moral panic.
If you think Johnson is a modern-day saviour of Brexit Britain, then you shouldn’t care about whatever he gets up to outside his political duties, but you should care about the fact that he tries to busk his way through politics.
If you think he is a an idiot masquerading as a brilliant man masquerading as an idiot, then you shouldn’t condemn any further, and need not for whatever he has done to his family.
Imagine if it was Jeremy Corbyn, say, whose marriage was collapsing. Would you think much differently about his views on much more important issues — the future of his party, the anti-Semitism scandal, his economic policies, Brexit?
The tragedy of it all is that Johnson is being treated as a character in a reality TV show, or soap opera, which denigrates politics. He is much more than that: a potential leader of the country in some diabolical takeover of the Conservative Party by Leave fundamentalists.
What Johnson proposes to do next in his private life is nobody’s business but his own. What he proposes to do to the country concerns all of us, whether he is happily married or not.