For politicians, smiling is no laughing matter

Boris Johnson’s ready smile is one of the secrets of his success – it wins trust and helps people relax

Have you noticed how Boris Johnson is always smiling? Meeting Macron or Merkel, breakfasting with Trump in Biarritz, entertaining schoolchildren at No10, he is beaming all the while. Even when being earnestly quizzed by beetlebrowed political correspondents desperately channelling the prorogation outrage, there is an impish grin playing around the Prime Minister’s mouth as he offers his genial replies. That’s why he is going to win this thing – and the election that follows it. His smile is his secret weapon.

I know because some years ago I did research on happiness with the late, great Dr Anthony Clare, professor of clinical psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, and fondly remembered for his radio interviews, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. Dr Clare made a study of successful politicians and concluded that the most successful were the ones who smiled the most. Grinning is good for your health, and

people warm to you. When you smile, dopamine, endorphins and serotonin are released into your bloodstream, lowering your heart rate and your blood pressure, relaxing your body and enabling you to function more effectively. Better than that, when you smile, people treat you differently.

Look at the footage of Mrs May with world leaders: compare and contrast with her successor. When Bojo bounces onto the dais, everyone is beaming – even against their better judgment. Dr Clare explained to me that whatever the truth might be, a smiling person is perceived to be more appealing, sincere and trustworthy than a po-faced one. According to the science, seeing a happy face activates your orbitofrontal cortex, the part of your brain that processes sensory rewards. When you look at a person smiling, you feel that you are being rewarded – and you smile back. It’s an unconscious automatic response (triggered in the cingulate cortex) and it explains why Boris, in spite of everything, has got to where he is today and looks set stay there. The scowling Jeremy Corbyn, poor fellow, doesn’t stand a chance.

You will recall the moment in the 1967 film, The Graduate, when the young Dustin Hoffman, just out of college, at a party by the family swimming pool, is given a piece of career advice by a middle-aged neighbour: “In a word, plastics.” If

I was asked to give a comparable piece of advice today, it would have to be: “In a word, tattoos.” When I was young, only sailors and people in prison had tattoos. Now everyone in the world under 40 seems to be emblazoned with them. Our new national hero, Ben Stokes, has both his brilliant batting arms crammed with “tats” (as they are known in the trade), while he has a three-lions-meet-māori design on his back, which the New Zealand-born cricketer created as a 16-year-old to appease his parents after being told by them that he could only get a tattoo if it had a meaning.

Friday’s Telegraph boasted a picture on the front page of American actress Scarlett Johansson at the Venice Film Festival showing off her back tattoo featuring an elaborate climbing rose and a lamb – a tat tribute to her daughter Rose.

Tattoos are big business. I know a man who got into tattoo ink only 10 years ago and is now worth in excess of £10million. My publishers suggested to me that if I had the title of my new book tattooed somewhere about my person – “anywhere” they said – it would “guarantee great publicity”. I told them I am already doing Twitter and Instagram. At my age, that is quite enough.

It seems that – like smiling – learning poetry by heart is good for you. It stimulates the brain in all sorts of ways and helps keep dementia at bay. Successfully memorising a piece of verse is satisfying: performing it alongside others is as rewarding as being a member of a choir. That is why, with support from the Duchess of Cornwall, patron of Silverline and wife of the founder of the Prince’s Trust, I am launching a modest project designed to get young and old away from their iphones and television screens for a few hours, and doing something active and amusing together. With the Poetry Together project, groups of schoolchildren (aged anything from five to 18) are learning a poem by heart and inviting old people from local care homes to learn the same poem. Then, around National Poetry Day in October, the old and the young are going to meet up to recite their poem together and have tea.

We did a pilot of the idea earlier in the year at the Chelsea Hospital and to see 80 and 90-year-old soldiers marching up and down with primary schoolchildren while reciting AA Milne’s poem about changing the guard at Buckingham Palace was heart-warming. And, yes, it had everyone smiling. (If you know a school or care home that might like to take part, details are at poetrytogether.com).