Will they all one day look back fondly on old BoJo?
THE RISE AND FALL OF BORIS JOHNSON
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Does nostalgia sanitise all political legacies? Once upon a time George W Bush was a dim warmongerer, a kind of dangerous Forrest Gump, these days he represents a version of conservative sanity compared to what would follow in the US Republican party.
In her heyday Margaret Thatcher was seen by many as a class enemy and heartless martinet but then the passage of time turned her into a feminist icon. Even our own leaders, like Bertie Ahern, who were reviled toward the end of their reigns, have been rehabilitated by the retrospective patina of statesmanship. So how, when the dust has settled, will we really view Boris Johnson?
The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson hasn’t left it long enough to be sure, I suspect.
The hurt at Britain, or London at least, having been seduced by his flopsy hair and devil-maycare quips is still too recent and white hot. Its makers, like the child of divorced parents, are not ready to be convinced there was something good about Daddy after all.
They look back at his premiership frightened that the chaos behind them is also just up ahead. The question of whether he might come back hangs over it all and their origin story is the making of a monster.
Johnson himself grew up with the bad example of his blithely womanising father, Stanley, whose behaviour sent Boris’s mother into a psychiatric hospital for a period and they would later divorce.
Boris was a petty, attentionseeking child who once pushed his sister aside on her birthday to hog the room with a little speech, although the foreboding with which this is related belies the fact that it’s fairly normal childish behaviour.
As with many documentaries there is an embarrassment of talking heads and here the likes of Toby Young, a contemporary of Johnson at Oxford, vouches for his vaulting ambition and Petronella Wyatt, one of his former mistresses, tells us that underneath the bumbling bravado there is actually quite a sensitive and loyal soul.
Except to his voters and wives, obviously, and to Jennifer Acuri, another old flame, whose calls he once blocked and when he did deign to pick up, he pretended to be a Chinese person. He was a “spineless coward,” she hisses and it’s hard to disagree.
Johnson’s sometime biographer Andrew Gimson, meanwhile, recounts the former prime minister attempting to pay him off from writing a book about him. A funny book would be OK, Gimson recalls Johnson saying, but “nothing could be more damaging” than one that told the actual truth.
As his career gets bigger so do the fibs. He assures the Telegraph he’s not running for parliament at the same time as swearing to his potential constituents that he’s going to forsake his column.
All those anti-Europe diatribes he wrote are characterised by Gimson as the imaginings of a dramatist and a former colleague recounts him shouting at a houseplant to get himself in the mood for more.
To be fair, unlike a lot of the Donald Trump analysis of the last few years, this series does also capture what made the public so enthusiastic about Johnson – the sense that his gaffe-prone persona was more authentic than that of other politicians – and it doesn’t gloss over the few genuine successes that happened on his watch, including the 2012 London Olympics.
His real downfall, of course, was being an utterly unserious politician during a deeply serious time: the pandemic, in which Britain lost more lives than most developed nations. Again there are nods back to the childhood that forged him; an almost touching clip of him being interviewed on radio refusing to condemn Stanley for skipping off to Greece during one of the travel bans.
It’s almost enough to make the viewer a bit sorry for old BoJo but with the spectre of his comeback not definitively ruled out, that rehabilitating revisionism seems further off than ever.