The PM has risen to his new role and Remainers are stumped
When Boris Johnson published his biography of Winston Churchill five years ago, his detractors were scathing. The book, they told us, was self-serving propaganda. Boris had refashioned Britain’s war leader as a prop in his own drama. He had reinvented Churchill as a witty speaker and Right-wing journalist, a popular MP who was unjustly overlooked by the Conservative top brass until the hour of crisis. However indirect and implicit the comparison, the critics sneered, it was outrageous for Boris – at that stage a mere mayor – even to hint at it.
In fact, of course, Boris has never been so presumptuous as to compare himself to Churchill. Yes, he has named the great man as one of his heroes. He has also, from time to time, named Pericles, PG Wodehouse and the mayor in Jaws who defied the health and safety fanatics to keep his beaches open (true, in the 1975 film, the mayor turned out to be wrong; but, in real life, what are the odds of there actually being a man-eating shark?)
There is a difference, though, between equating yourself to a hero and being enthused by his example. It seems clear that Boris has drawn inspiration from at least one element of Churchill’s story, namely the absolute and total resolve that he displayed after 1940. The aspects of Churchill’s personality that drew scorn from his pre-war critics – his indiscipline, his orotundity, his penchant for madcap schemes, his weakness for rogues and chancers – fell away. He rose to the occasion, like Prince Hal at the end of Henry IV Part Two.
Today is Boris’s hundredth day in office. If, as the biographer Robert Caro says, “power reveals”, then those 100 days have revealed in him a highmindedness and strength of purpose that have astonished even his fondest admirers. It is as if, Churchill-like, he saw the whole of his life as a preparation for national leadership.
I should, I suppose, declare an interest. Boris and I have known each other since we were Telegraph leader-writers in our twenties. He launched my very first election campaign 21 years ago, and repeated the favour several times. Like most people who have worked closely with him, I know him to be brilliant. I don’t just mean that he can compose Greek odes on the spot – though, oddly enough, he can and does. I mean that, two words into your sentence, he knows where you’re going. I mean that, for all his faux-forgetfulness, he never misses a trick. I mean that he susses people out immediately, instinctively and accurately.
Several times over the past three months, I have heard former Telegraph colleagues voice their wonder at the PM’s newfound qualities. “Blimey,” they say. “Boris, eh? I mean, we all knew he’d be clever and charming and whatnot. But who knew he could be so single-minded?”
Indeed. Boris now speaks at the Dispatch Box with a power and fluency that he never showed on the back benches. All the verbal fumbling has gone. The jokes are still there, but they have been pressed into service: they are these days deployed to make a point memorable, never as ends in themselves. Nor does the PM display that need to be liked that is a strength in a commentator, but a weakness in a leader. WB Yeats shuddered in awe at the way the amiable Prince Hal turned into
All those who dismissed Boris Johnson as a clown seem outsmarted and outmanoeuvred
Henry V, “as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force”. Then again, Henry V won when it mattered.
If Boris’s friends, who were aware of his genius, are impressed by the way he has gone up a gear, what must his opponents think? All those Euro-fanatics who had come to believe their own propaganda about him, who truly thought of him as a gadfly, a flâneur, a clown? All those opposition politicians who couldn’t wait to crush the dilettante Etonian in a snap election, and who are now staring in slack-jawed despair at the opinion polls? No wonder they sound so tetchy.
It must be dawning on them that they have been outsmarted and outmanoeuvred. Boris is not just going into this election campaign with the only serious economic policy – something that is often true of the Conservatives. He also offers the only credible policy on the EU.
Ask yourself how Britain can reasonably hope to move on from the nastiness of the past three years. The Liberal Democrats propose to annul the referendum, a policy at which even many convinced Remainers baulk. Cancelling the result wouldn’t restore the status quo ante; rather, it would institutionalise the alienation and anger that envelop our politics.
Labour, meanwhile, wants to string the argument out through another referendum – and, in doing so, to string out the uncertainty for our exasperated businesses. Jeremy Corbyn proposes, with a straight face, to secure a better deal from Brussels and then campaign against his own deal.
And the Brexit Party? Sadly, it has been becoming clear for some time that the party is less interested in the first word in its title than the second. It was always going to oppose any Brexit deal, even if that meant staying in the EU (which would, of course, keep it in business). In order to justify itself, it has to insist that leaving the EU is “not Brexit”, that taking back control of our money, laws and trade policy count for nothing and that Boris, who was the leader of the Leave campaign, is somehow not a Leaver. Unsurprisingly, two thirds of Leave voters back Boris’s deal, with only one in 10 opposed.
Unlike Churchill, Boris has not been called to lead us in war. However serious our travails, we are not, thank God, fighting for our national survival. Still, don’t underestimate the gravity of what is at stake. This election will determine whether the legitimacy of our parliamentary system endures.
Next week, as every year at this season, orange sparks will rise from 10,000 bonfires. We can be a surprisingly unhistorical people, but there is one date that we all “remember, remember”. Ponder, as you stand before the roaring flames, how unusual it is that our greatest surviving folk tradition is a celebration of parliamentary sovereignty. No other nation in the world defines its identity through its elected assembly.
For three years, the authority of our parliamentary institutions has been prejudiced, and faith in our democracy undermined. The next election will determine whether we rebuild that trust.
Are we still the people we used to be?