Rake’s progress: My Political Midlife Crisis, by Rachel Johnson
FRANCES WILSON
Rake’s Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis By Rachel Johnson Simon & Schuster £16.99
The British love a good failure: the pluck, the brio, the have-a-go approach.
True failure is a form of heroism and a mark of patriotism; it is also a competitive sport and Rachel Johnson, the most competitive woman on earth, learned that the best way to survive in a family of winners was to fail better than anyone has failed before.
She therefore stood as an MEP for Change UK in 2019, a party of Remainers whose policies were ‘just some wishywashy, hopey-changey “set of values” ’. While all political careers, as Enoch Powell noted, end in failure, Rachel’s ‘began with failure, too’. Change UK had, she stresses, ‘a fight to lose’ and lose they would, so long as she was on the tour bus.
Having failed at the first post, she tried again, failed again, and failed better next time. Her overall failure, she boasts, was ‘land-speed record quick’.
‘You’ve been fired by everyone,’ her admiring husband put it, ‘and even the public has sacked you now. It’s a badge of honour.’ Rachel Johnson, with her ‘reverse political skills’, was the Eddie the Eagle of British politics.
Rake’s Progress is about how she failed to get herself elected at the same time as her brother Boris strolled effortlessly into Number 10. It’s full of slapstick and faux pas and nearly-missed planes: she washes her hair in dog shampoo the night before the party launch; she tells the Times she’s the rat that jumps onto the sinking ship; she screws up her postal vote so that even Rachel Johnson didn’t vote for Rachel Johnson.
Struck dumb in every interview, she is aware that her ditsiness reaches its crescendo when, asked by the Today programme to name a Lib Dem policy she disagrees with, she can’t think of a single Lib Dem policy. The second hand ticks loudly as she racks her brain: one, two, three … six … eight … ten seconds. On its website, the Spectator invited readers to ‘click here’ so they could listen to the sound of silence themselves.
‘I refuse to be embarrassed by it,’ writes Our Girl. ‘In a campaign desperately needing wins, it felt like an achievement.’
As Rachel soldiers on, the villain of the piece is Ann Widdecombe, then standing for the Brexit Party, whom Rachel last met in the Celebrity Big Brother house (Widdecombe was the runner-up; Rachel was the second to be evicted). On the political front, Widdecombe also ends up being more popular than Rachel.
Johnson’s political mortification is measured against her other mortifications, such as the time she made a joke on Have I Got News For You which, when no one laughed, she made again. ‘ “Rachel, a word of advice,” said Paul Merton. “If a joke bombs the first time, don’t repeat it.”’
She quotes Paul Dacre’s comment that her Mail on Sunday column gave ‘banality a bad name’; she reminds us that she won Celebrity Pointless and the Bad Sex Award. She resents being known as Boris’s sister and hates being told how ‘irrelevant’ she is – but these are precisely the cards she plays. She has a degree in Classics from Oxford, but writes articles about her bum.
There must have been difficulties over the Brexit division among the Johnsons, but Rachel is a clan member first and a publicity whore second and so the inside story will remain unpublished.
What she gives us instead is a wildly entertaining look at the workings of British democracy and a baffling insight into the workings of Rachel Johnson.
Why, I wondered on every page, can’t she take herself a little more seriously? She does, after all, care with passionate intensity about the European Union, and Brexit is the only subject on which she and her husband have ever agreed.
Why would a shrewd and intelligent woman with a high level of self-esteem and 25 years of media experience not prepare for interviews? Just as Boris’s ‘whole “bumbling buffoon act” ’ is, she writes, ‘well, an act’, so too is Rachel’s performance as a blonde show pony.
Spectacular failure is a complicated joke but then humour, Rachel explains, is her currency. ‘I find anything straight and sincere squirm-making. Jokes, yes. Passionate intensity – please, God, no.’