A Half-Serious Man
Boris Johnson got a couple of critical things right, but he never could or would have become a good prime minister.
A review of Unleashed by Boris Johnson, 784 pages, HarperCollins (October 2024)
Boris Johnson was mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, foreign secretary from 2016 to 2018 and prime minister of the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2022. That’s fourteen years spent in high—and finally the highest—political positions in the country. A vigorous and generally successful mayor, he was a disaster as foreign secretary, impatient with detail and prone to insulting or mocking leaders from allied states.
He carried most of these habits into the role of prime minister, a post he had long craved, but he did have two redeeming episodes. First, he succeeded in pushing Brexit through the House of Commons, finally honouring former prime minister David Cameron’s promise that the result of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership would be implemented. Without that, the chasm between the largely working-/lower-middle-class citizens who voted for Brexit and the largely middle-/upper-middle-class citizens who voted Remain would have been wider than it presently is—a poison to run through British politics for decades.
Second, he immediately saw the need to support Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The British have proved to be among the staunchest of Ukraine’s Western allies since the conflict’s first heady months, when Russia found itself unable to seize Ukraine’s leadership, execute its remarkably brave president Volodymyr Zelensky, and end the country’s independence.
In his new memoir Unleashed, Johnson—with his blonde mop of hair, inelegant attire, and omnipresent smirk—seeks to present himself as a serious politician. The attempt is only partly successful. On the one hand, he demonstrates a command of some of the larger issues that dominated his brief premiership and writes perceptively about them. But these reflections are offered at leisure and in retrospect. Actually serving as prime minister means acting as the highest representative of a nation—in Britain’s case, a nation at the heart of European (and occasionally world) affairs.
Most of his predecessors have comported themselves with a certain decorum in their public self-presentation. Britain, made flesh in the form of its first citizen, must never be less than dignified. Johnson made desultory stabs at that, but most of the time, he remained Boris Johnson, a construction that took a good deal of energy and ingenuity to maintain. His formal introduction was “The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr Boris Johnson.” But in his own mind, he was “Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.”
Johnson reveres Winston Churchill, and wrote a biography of the man in 2014 titled The Churchill Factor. Johnson does in fact have some of his hero’s characteristics—a love of oratorical rotundity (though Johnson stresses in the biography that Churchill’s speeches were “a triumph of effort and preparation”), a good wit (overused by the disciple), and above all, a romantic streak that led Johnson to prefer Byronic poses to dispassionate analysis. “If there is such a thing [as the British character],” Johnson declared in that book, “then it has morphed around the features of Winston Churchill—broadly humorous but occasionally bellicose, irreverent but traditionalist, rejoicing in language and wordplay of all kinds; keen to a fault on drink and food.”
In his new memoir, Johnson also mentions Churchill and dwells less on another admired predecessor—Benjamin Disraeli, who was British prime minister in 1868 and 1874–80. But there is much of Dizzy’s dash, arrogance, attention to the condition of the working classes, and love of a long-reigning queen in Johnson. Disraeli’s charm worked well on Victoria, but Johnson’s apparently worked less well on Elizabeth II, who, he writes, warned him not to “give in to bitterness” during his last audience at Balmoral, days after his resignation from the premiership just before her death.
Johnson’s efforts to assist the low-paid by “levelling up” chimed with Disraeli’s long-running sympathy with the working poor, reflected in his 1845 novel Sybil, or The Two Nations. Disraeli was especially moved by an official inquiry into children’s work, the UK and Ireland Commissioners’ Report of Children’s Employment in 1842, which laid bare the exploitation of those as young as five. In office, he passed a range of legislation aimed at improving working conditions, and with the 1867 Reform Act, he enfranchised part of the skilled working/peasant classes, if they owned property or land or paid rent of £10 a year or more.
Johnson applauds these initiatives, yet during his own term as prime minister, he remained vague about what increasing the life chances of the lower classes would mean in terms of policy. Michael Gove, who was placed in charge of the Levelling Up department, did seem to be committed to his brief, but the Treasury squeezed his resources, and Gove eventually resigned having achieved little. (Sir Keir Starmer, first as leader of the opposition and now as prime minister, backed the levelling-up agenda, but we are still awaiting clarity about how these goals will be met.)
Johnson’s airy but passionate commitments informed his governing style, and his memoir tends to clothe discussion of his ideas with clips from his reading. He compares his support for levelling up to De Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” and quotes a couplet from Thomas Gray’s 1750 “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
In a breezier comic mode, Johnson laments that educated elites are in the habit of marrying each other, thereby widening and entrenching the class divide. “To beat assortative mating,” he flippantly suggests, “more female graduates should be encouraged to marry hod carriers and dustbin men,” something that, he laments, “doesn’t seem to be happening, at least not yet.” It’s a light piece of cynicism, and not entirely free of condescension. But as the philosopher Michael Sandel notes in The Tyranny of Merit, it is true that the iron cage of assortative partner choice has produced a much less socially diverse political class than the one that governed in the 1960s. Fewer than two percent of US Congress members today have ever held working-class jobs. In the UK Labour Party, meanwhile, 37 percent of MPs came from a manual-worker background in the 1960s, but only seven percent did by 2015.
And of course, Johnson has not been keen to lead by example. Both he and his (third) wife Carrie hail from the upper middle class. Johnson’s family tree has aristocratic Turkish and German branches; his father Stanley was a Conservative MEP, an official of the European Commission and the World Bank, and a writer. Carrie’s father is a former Economist, Daily Telegraph, and FT journalist, and was a co-founder of the Independent. The present Labour cabinet has to an extent redressed the balance—several members, led by the prime minister himself, stress their working-class backgrounds, though some, Starmer included, would be conventionally judged as lower middle class.
None of the postwar Labour premiers was working class in background, though their families were often politically engaged. Tony Blair’s father Leo had been a Communist Party member, then a strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher, and only joined Labour when his son became party leader. A PPI poll last year found that both UK Labour and US Democrat voters were more likely to be middle class than working class. These and other surveys show that class is now unmoored from its former partisan berths, and that a claim of working-class membership is as much mocked as admired.
Johnson saw that patriotism was important to those for whom family, place, and work trumped class, and his support for Brexit in the 2016 referendum sprang from this insight. He had opposed leaving the European Union when he was Mayor of London, but reflecting upon the referendum result in his memoir, he enthuses, “For the first time in living memory the wishes of the ruling liberal establishment had not just been ignored, but overwhelmed.” (This is typical Johnsonian hyperbole—the four percent difference separating Leavers and Remainers was surprising but not overwhelming.)
The Remainers, disproportionately drawn from the middle and upper classes, lobbied unsuccessfully for a new referendum. Johnson took a dim view of this move. Whatever their numbers and indignation, repeating a popular vote because it produced the wrong answer, despite a prime-ministerial pledge to respect the outcome, would have broken the already tenuous bonds between people and government. Johnson was right about this (although few Remainers will agree), and he was therefore able to position himself as the peoples’ champion. The presenters of the BBC’s 2019 election-night coverage, he gloats, were crestfallen as they reported his new government’s 86-seat majority, displaying “a strained, sallow, costive look, as if being troubled with some digestive complaint.”
Unfortunately, victory brought the responsibilities of governance that Johnson was ill-equipped to shoulder. Britain needed to use its newfound freedom from the EU to carve out independent trade, economic, social, and other policies. In navigating these delicate and complex issues, Johnson was rather less successful, and in the view of many of the ministers in his cabinet, disastrously so. In July 2022, two senior cabinet ministers—health secretary Sajid Javid and chancellor Rishi Sunak—resigned. The given reason was Johnson’s decision to appoint Tory MP Chris Pincher as deputy chief whip, following allegations that Pincher had sexually harassed other men. The larger reason was their disappointment with Johnson’s chaotic governance.
Toby Young
The chief witness for the prosecution was a man of unusual intelligence, talents, and acerbity. Dominic Cummings had been the intellectual power behind the successful Brexit campaign, the narrow success of which promoted him to the status of a political celebrity. In 2014, while still largely unknown, Cummings had confidently laid out his view of British policymaking at the Public Policy Research Institute. The Economist later reported that his talk was “a screed against the institutions that comprise the British state. Nothing about them ... was good. There are no quantitative skills in Westminster, no management skills, no ambition. Incentives are misaligned, goals are unclear, failure is normal. Decision-making was ‘almost random’ and ‘largely rubbish.’”
Invited to be Johnson’s chief adviser, Cummings quickly became an object of fear and hatred, loudly denouncing the civil service and most of the cabinet members—“fuckwits,” he called them—and swiftly concluding that his prime minister deserved to be regarded through the same caustic lens. Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee investigating Britain’s COVID response, he said, “The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this.” He claimed Johnson had told him he liked to be surrounded by “chaos” in Downing Street, because it meant everyone had to look to the PM “to see who is in charge.” Asked if he believed Johnson was a fit and proper choice for the premiership, he responded with a flat “No.”
The relationship between the two men has not recovered. In his memoir, Johnson blames Cummings for damaging leaks to the media, including the details of parties allegedly organised for Number Ten staffers in defiance of the tight COVID restrictions in force at the time. The former PM continues to insist that these were trivial events—a brief celebration of a birthday or the departure of a colleague. Johnson now reflects ruefully on his “grovelling apologies,” which he complains “made it look as though we were far more culpable than we were.” Sue Gray, then a senior civil servant, was tapped to write a report on the matter as controversy and indignation swelled in the press, and she duly delivered a damaging report.
About all this, Johnson adopts a resigned “Ah well, never mind” attitude, and moves quickly on to “far, far bigger things,” namely “the brutal invasion of a sovereign and independent European country.” And on this, he must be credited with the instant and fulsome enthusiasm he brought to supporting Ukraine after Russia’s unprovoked full-scale assault in February 2022. As he notes with disciplined schadenfreude, this approach compares favourably with that of his fellow European and North American leaders. Many of those allies thundered along with him in public, even as they discreetly sought ways to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin that would allow Russia to keep the territory it had seized in Ukraine’s industrial east. The French president Emmanuel Macron notoriously remarked that Putin should not be “humiliated over this historic mistake.”
“We will never surrender,” Churchill told the House of Commons a month into his premiership as he sought to shame the doubters. In emulation, after being awoken at 4.00am on the morning of 24 February 2022 to be told that the invasion of Ukraine had begun, Johnson immediately proclaimed that Ukrainian president Zelensky had “the complete support of the British people.” The British people were not consulted about this, but Johnson did seem to have read the country’s mood correctly. The polls showed—and continue to show—that a large majority of the British people want the Ukrainians to prevail, and are happy to support them in their fight to do so.
Throughout his premiership—and indeed after it—Johnson has continued to beat this drum. In a September article for the Spectator, he lambasted the US, British, and French governments for dithering about giving Ukraine permission to use the British Storm Shadow, the French Scalp-EG, and the American ATACMS missile systems, all of which can reach bunkers and ammunition stores deep inside Russian territory. A Ukrainian defeat, he wrote, “would mean the demolition of all our claims to be willing to stand up for ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy.’ Above all, a defeat for Ukraine would be—let us not mince our words—a catastrophic defeat for Nato, the explosion of the aura of Nato invincibility that has helped keep us—the British—safe for the past 80 years. It cannot and must not happen. So, for heaven’s sake let us snap out of this trance-like state and stop muttering about ‘escalation’ as an excuse for vacillation.” (For now, these missiles remain blocked for use by the US, though the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, has urged US President Biden to find the “nerve and guts” to allow them to be added to the Ukrainian arsenal.)
Johnson’s foes are legion, but even many of these will reluctantly admit that his stance on Ukraine has been a sterling one (though many grumble that he adopted it out of a love of posturing, not because he cares about the fate of that embattled nation). But it is probably true that he never could or would have become a good prime minister—he’s too sloppy, too lazy, too intolerant of specifics, and too cavalier. Yet his determination to “Get Brexit Done” was also vital, and finally rescued British politics from the interminable bitterness in which the national debate had become mired.
Part of Johnson’s unsuitability as prime minister lay in one of his more endearing, or at least stimulating, characteristics—his unquenchable delight in exercising his wit, often at others’ expense. His August 2018 article for the Daily Telegraph comparing Muslim women who wear the niqab to “letterboxes” released a torrent of indignation from Muslims, leftists, and even some conservatives. Johnson is not—or does not appear to be (for who can know the recesses of the human heart?)—a racist; he simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to fish for a cheap laugh. In a similar vein, Baroness Hale—the president of the Supreme Court who ruled that Johnson’s prorogation of parliament in September 2019 was unlawful—is compared to “Shelob the giant spider from Lord of the Rings” because she wore a small brooch in the shape of an arachnid. When relating a phone call from his private secretary, Martin Reynolds, he describes the man as “characteristically bouncy: you could almost hear his tail thrashing the carpet.” Donald Trump, whom he generally admires, has a “giant inflatable personality.” David Cameron is a “girly swot.”
His foes see this kind of clowning as the entitled behaviour of a hyper-privileged old Etonian, who treats politics and his fellow citizens like coconut shies. Yet he has been—especially in forcing Brexit over the line—more popular among the working and lower middle classes than among his social peers. As John Howarth, a former Labour MEP, wrote in his blog:
The uncomfortable fact is whatever the private Boris, those who voted for him and approve of his actions ... find him “relatable” in a way that other politicians are not. Boris Johnson is different to “them”—he’s more like “us.” Political commentators and observers see a lazy, poorly prepared performer getting away with content-lite bluster. Voters see someone who isn’t putting on a show, someone who is flawed and human, someone who doesn’t necessarily have answers and someone who is not rehearsed, coached or polished.
Unleashed has been negatively received by most of the critics. To be sure, it is much too long, too self-serving, and its author is too prone to blaming others for his own avoidable blunders. But there is—beneath the mussed hair, the crumpled and ill-fitting suits, and the ill-prepared speeches—an intelligence, a democratic instinct, and an idealism that might have served his party and country well. If only he had kept his self-indulgent, self-obsessed, and self-destructive nature on a tighter rein. But this is a bit like saying that if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its backside when hopping.
