BUFFOON ENIGMA
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 man 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 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 No10, such a prospect has them choking on their canapes. And yet, as they utter their
condemnations, I cannot help noticing that in quite a few cases the mention of the word ‘Boris’ has put a smile on their faces.
There is something about him which cheers people up. Even as they say how unspeakably awful he is, some cannot help finding him amusing — recounting his bumbling performances on TV’s Have I Got News For You or recalling him once refer to black children as piccaninnies and talking about ‘watermelon smiles’. As a topic of conversation, he beats Philip Hammond or Jeremy Hunt hands down.
He is marmalade to the vinegar of cautious, professional, career politicians who never take a risk. Those men and women, when interviewed, consider it their duty never to say anything in the slightest bit candid, unexpected or imaginative. In the United States, Donald Trump reached the highest office by shocking the Establishment, and the more he shocks it, the better his supporters are pleased.
He has become their revenge on the prosy, priggish, self-satisfied Washington elite.
Trump’s manners are abominable, but they are authentically abominable. He is a genuine lout, a genuine sexist, a genuine disgrace.
Thankfully, on this side of the Atlantic, we do not have anyone quite as vulgar as Trump.
But we do have millions of voters who yearn to shock the Westminster establishment out of its complacent sense of superiority, and who in the EU referendum found an excellent way of doing so.
They are the British equivalent of those Trump supporters who Hillary Clinton contemptuously described as a ‘basket of deplorables’.
Of course, Johnson is cut from very different cloth than Trump. He is much better educated, much more liberal in his instincts and managed twice to get elected as Mayor of London, a city that has become predominantly Labour and Europhile.
His opponents had confidently predicted that if by some accident he were to become mayor, he would within a short time stand exposed as a laughably incompetent clown.
He proved them wrong by assembling, admittedly with some difficulty and after a number of false starts, a team which included such outstandingly able figures as Sir Simon Milton, who could perform the administrative work for which Johnson himself was unsuited.
And while Trump likes to divide people, and is accused of practising the politics of hatred as far as foreigners and others are concerned, Johnson’s instinct is to get people to like him.
All this said, almost everyone who has ever had anything to do with Boris Johnson has, at some point, become utterly infuriated by him. As Ann Sindall, who worked for him for many years as his PA, told me: ‘We can all hate his guts, we want to kill him, but then he can get us laughing again.’
That is Johnson through and through — he always wants to mend fences if he can.
This philosophy was behind his repeated willingness to be the fall-guy on Have I Got News For You. Like Trump, who revelled in his own role as the controversial host of The Apprentice on U.S. TV, Johnson knew he would be ambushed and risked humiliation.
But he did not crawl away and resolve, as most politicians would have done, never to appear on such a dangerously unpredictable show again. He showed his resilience by coming back for more and expressed his individuality by being the most ill-prepared guest ever to appear.
The whole of Johnson’s life has, in a sense, been a preparation for being unprepared. Unlike most of us, he is prepared to have a go at things which he is no good at.
Of course, this can be a very dangerous characteristic, but it is also an educational one.
He learns by doing things himself, not by watching how other people do them, or by reading the instruction manual.
History tells us that every so often, the Conservative Party finds itself enthused by a showman who can raise people’s spirits in a way which sober, solemn leaders cannot. The greatest of these showmen was Benjamin Disraeli. In his youth, Disraeli seemed, and in many ways was, a ridiculous and disreputable figure. He encumbered himself with enormous debts by setting up a newspaper which immediately failed and by promoting South America mining shares which turned out to be worthless. Then, adding insult to injury, he wrote a satirical novel in which he mocked the investors whose money he had just lost. Yet he became one of our great Prime Ministers, and the only person who could charm Queen Victoria out of her mourning for Prince Albert.
After Disraeli’s death, he was the inspiration for the Primrose League, founded to promote Tory principles by another brilliant but rackety Conservative, Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston.
The Primrose League soon acquired a mass membership and Lord Randolph was told by the wife of an Oxford don that he was duty-bound to give these people a solid political education.
He responded: ‘No. The only way is to amuse them: they’re quite incapable of anything else.’
This is the Tory tradition in which Boris Johnson now takes his place.
His career may well end in failure: Lord Randolph’s certainly did. But it will take a lot more than a divorce to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Andrew Gimson is the author of Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson, published by simon & schuster at £9.99.
He offered me £100,000 to stop writing his biography