SATURDAY ESSAY BUFFOON ENIGMA THE
It’s an eternal paradox: From Disraeli and Eden to JFK and Trump, some of history’s most flawed leaders are also the most popular. But, asks Boris Johnson’s biographer, will his latest betrayal finally bring him crashing to earth?
THE sex is difficult. So said Tony Blair’s biographer, John Rentoul, when I sought his advice as I set out to write the life of Boris Johnson. Fourteen years later, the sex is still difficult, and has precipitated the former Foreign Secretary’s second divorce.
Friends of Johnson and his estranged wife Marina Wheeler will think that the collapse of their marriage is a dreadful waste. Is it really necessary that two people who undoubtedly love each other — for otherwise they would not have stayed together for a quarter of a century — should split up?
Tellingly, Johnson himself once wrote, in a trenchant defence of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair, of politics being ‘turned into hell for so many of its practitioners’ by the public’s belief in its ‘democratic right’ to insist on its leaders taking no mistresses.
It is very true that we live in a contradictory age, with people in some ways far more relaxed than they used to be about sex.
Yet politicians still have to be worried about intrusion into their private lives.
Not for today’s generation the cloak of secrecy that shrouded from the public John F. Kennedy’s sexual shenanigans and compulsive womanising in the White House in the early Sixties.
While I was writing my biography of Johnson, whom I have known since 1987 when he sought my somewhat superfluous advice about finding a job in journalism, he was at first immensely keen on encouraging my research and anxious to help in any way he could. However, he then got very cold feet.
One evening, when we met in New Palace Yard in Westminster after he’d taken part in a Commons vote, he mentioned the book. He said: ‘If it’s a p***-take, that’s OK. But anything that purported to tell the truth really would be intolerable.’
I put it to him that politicians almost always get into trouble not for telling the truth, but for trying to conceal it.
Painful episodes in Johnson’s past, of which there were already several, would lose their power to hurt him once they were known, I argued, and it would be much less dangerous to deal with this awkward stuff now than if he ever became Prime Minister.
HE
WAS not persuaded by this argument and began to offer me larger and larger amounts of money not to write the book, eventually offering me £ 100,000 to give it up.
I am the kind of Englishman who feels insulted by the idea that he can be bought, so I turned him down, after which he proposed, instead, to give free Greek lessons to my children.
But many of us know that getting things out in the open
does have quite a bit to recommend it. This is what Johnson has to some extent now done with the announcement about his divorce.
The latest official statistics, for 2016, show that there were nearly 107,000 divorces in England and Wales that year. Marriage breakdown is not unusual, either, among those who aspire to lead us.
Looking back in history, the Duke of Grafton got divorced while Prime Minister, using a special Act of Parliament in 1769. In more recent times, Sir Anthony Eden, got divorced before becoming PM in the Fifties.
Only someone with exceptionally rigid moral views would nowadays contend that we cannot have a Prime Minister, or indeed a King, who has been divorced. Indeed, three of the Queen’s four children have been divorced.
Johnson’s critics will nevertheless seize on his divorce, and the reasons for it, as yet more evidence that he is hopelessly unreliable, unserious and untrustworthy. There have always been people who reckon he would prove a national embarrassment if he were ever to be Prime Minister.
Indeed, on these pages, Max Hastings has written that he would leave the country if Johnson ever became PM.
The fact is that Johnson attracted many enemies by leading the Leave campaign to victory in the EU referendum.
His much-disputed assertion that quitting the EU would mean Britain getting £350 million extra a week to spend on the NHS certainly helped convert scorn of him into hatred.
The truth is that there has always been something about Johnson which is an affront to serious- minded people’s idea of how politics should be conducted.
By refusing to adopt their solemn tone, and by making jokes about things which they consider to be no laughing matter, he implies that they are ridiculous. Indeed, the dreadful thing, from their point of view, is that millions of people agree with him.
He is the Lord of Misrule: the Merry England candidate who shows that politics does not always have to be practised in an unrelentingly humourless way, with high-minded members of the Establishment deciding among themselves what is good for the rest of us.
Where I live, in North London, I find that on social occasions it is tactful not to say anything which might be construed as support for a Johnson prime ministership.
Instead, I wait politely to see what others have to say.
Generally, even if they do not vow to emigrate to New Zealand in the event of Johnson in No 10, such a prospect has them choking on their canapes.