Our PMs are either bookies or bishops. My money’s on raffish Boris – not the angry, finger-wagging high priest of Marxism
TO SUCCEED pre-eminently in British public life,’ observed the great journalist and political commentator Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘it is necessary to conform either to the popular image of a bookie or a bishop.’
He was right, and in Boris Johnson we have the first bookie premier for many years, pitched against a Labour leader who for s ermonising preachiness and expertise in guilt-inducement can beat any bishop.
History has produced several successful bookie premiers – including the two who won the First and Second World Wars, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill – but the great majority of Prime Ministers in the modern era have been of the episcopalian kind: politicians who treat the despatch box as a pulpit like John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May did.
( In his private life, of course, John Major acted much more like the popular image of the bookie, but we did not find that out until after he had left No 10.)
The first of the great bishopbookie clashes was that between Charles James Fox – who was quite literally a bookie on occasion, taking huge bets on the horses and cards from his rich Whig friends – and William Pitt the Younger, who, despite his heavy drinking, lived a blameless private life and was a careful custodian of the public finances. Pitt won, and spent nearly 19 years as Prime Minister, whereas Fox never made it to the top place.
The next clash was the long duel between Benjamin Disraeli – whose witticisms, financial precariousness and risk-taking made him the quintessential bookie premier – and William Gladstone, who translated Homer, thought joking tasteless, and whose audiences with Queen Victoria reminded her of threehour sermons. Once again, the bishop premier won, with Gladstone spending a total of 12 years 126 days as Prime Minister, against Disraeli’s six years, 338 days.
WITH the bookie premier Winston Churchill spending longer in office than either of his bishop premier predecessors Neville Chamberlain or Clement Attlee, the time has now come for Boris to even the score.
The ebullience, good humour and general sense of raffishness that one associates with a bookie Prime Minister, combined with a transparent enjoyment of the job and a willingness to take risks, appeals as much to one section of the British population as it horrifies the other.
Similarly, the way that the bishoplike Prime Ministers lecture, fingerwag and virtue signal puts off the first set of people, but shames the second set in to voting for them.
The question in this Election will be whether the prospect of a funny, jolly, life-enhancing turf accountant will have more followers than the humourless, angry, strangely introverted Marxist high priest.
There have been Prime Ministers who have tried to present themselves as bishops but who have turned out to be bookies – both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson fit into that category.
Tony Blair, too, did more than his share of moralising, but ultimately took the huge gamble of fighting the Iraq War, just as David Cameron took the major risk of calling the EU referendum. Of all the bishops in modern politics, only Jo Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon are more assiduous than Jeremy Corbyn in making their listeners feel guilty for leading such hedonistic lives that their only hope of redemption is to vote for them.
Boris, meanwhile, jumps off his campaign bus with a smile on his face, a joke on his lips and heads to the local chippy for a second l unch ( as he did l ast week in Weston-super-Mare).
Perhaps it was his years as a newspaper columnist, but he has a preternatural ability to simplify his message. His Brexit deal, he says, is ‘oven-ready’, and a ‘Blue Peter’ deal in that, ‘It’s one I did earlier’. With such phrases, everyone knows what he means.
No bookie offering five to one at the top of his voice for the 2.30 at Uttoxeter could make himself clearer. Bishop Corbyn’s Brexit plan, meanwhile, takes two paragraphs at the minimum to explain.
The use of humour is, of course, central to the bookie’s art. Charles
James Fox, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan all had fine senses of humour, able to slip gags i nto speeches at unexpected moments that kept their audiences listening i ntently i n case t hey missed them.
Even at the most serious moments in their careers, they would make jokes, and not in the painful setpiece ways of humourless modern politicians.
Here in typical Boris style is his refutation of Project Fear over Brexit, which he slipped into his Tory Party Conference speech this year when almost every other British politician would have resorted to outrage and umbrage:
‘People say that after we leave there will be no drinking water and planes won’t fly, and I read the other day that the Ministry of Agriculture said that there will be no milk solids and glucose and whey to make the Mars bars on which our children depend.’
How marvellously un- PC, at a time of national concern over childhood obesity, to joke about how our children ‘ depend’ on Mars bars.
In his obvious relishing of power and his life in Downing Street, Boris is almost the mirroropposite of Prime Ministers such as Gordon Brown and Theresa May, who made it seem as though they were enduring the job rather than enjoying it. The public can sense this enjoyment and does not mind at all, provided that the premier in question is doing it well.
Although of course Boris is walking a tightrope even harder and higher than any of his last three predecessors, he doesn’t make heavy weather of the fact. There is a liberating power to ebullience. It is not quite charisma – an artificial construct in my opinion – but it certainly is star quality.
The vertiginous ups and downs of Boris’s career – the sex scandals, multiple sackings, principled resignation, and so on – are all part of the bookie’s progress, which in retrospect we ought to have recognised could only really have ended in Downing Street. It was once said of Disraeli that he deliberately
Boris possesses a liberating ebullience as PM – he exudes star quality
placed obstacles to his own career, including two near-bankruptcies, to increase his pleasure of overcoming them. Might it have been the same for Boris? Certainly no bishop premier would have had the sheer guts to try to prorogue Parliament, which, though it didn’t come off in the short term, was the key indicator that let the British people know he was willing to go to any length to get their 2016 referendum vote honoured. If this does turn out to be a People vs Parliament Election – as it clearly ought to be – the attempted prorogation will ultimately be seen as a master-stroke. Bookies tend to be great patriots, and here too Boris has cornered the market. While we might all laugh at the way he was caught suspended mid-air on that famous zipwire, we also recall that he was holding a Union Jack in each hand, just as we remember that Jeremy Corbyn refused to sing the national anthem on Remembrance Day with the Queen present. These are images that should register with voters next month. If Labour lose, they should think twice before they replace Corbyn with another bishop leader when they will be up against a consummate bookie premier. Whatever the result, Malcolm Mugge ridge’ s political parlour game of the 1960s clearly still has a powerful relevance half a century later.