Abstract
The biographer of Boris Johnson explains why the prime minister understands the power of stories better than his puritanical critics
In April 2002, when Boris Johnson was editor of The Spectator and had given me the rather misleading title of foreign editor, I happened to be talking to him in his office when a photographer from The New York Times arrived to take a picture for a profile of him. “You pretend to be me!” Johnson said, before the photographer was shown in. There was, we thought, a good chance nobody in New York would realise, in the short time between receiving the pictures and printing one, that they had got the wrong man. Johnson went out and I posed for the photographer, who was completely taken in. Even when members of The Spectator’s staff put their head round the door and said “Where’s Boris?”, the poor man just said “Oh, are there two Borises who work here?”.
Johnson took an anarchic joy in the idea of making The New York Times, famed for its devotion to fact-checking, look absurd. He did not succeed, for Kimberly Fortier, the American-born publisher of The Spectator, heard of the jape and put a stop to it. I was in some ways relieved, for the photographer would presumably never again have worked for The New York Times.
Many journalists will not find this attempted joke funny. His critics will add it to the evidence which, in their view, proves Johnson to be dishonest, unprofessional and frivolous. They reckon any journalist should have a deep devotion to telling the truth, and they consider him a liar. That is one reason why so many commentators – Max Hastings, Matthew Parris, Rachel Sylvester, Polly Toynbee and Ferdinand Mount among them – have written in such scathing terms about him. He provokes in them a moral revulsion which sweeps away all other considerations.
And yet there are other considerations. Johnson is a deeper and more complicated figure, and a better journalist, than these pundits are willing to see. I first met him in 1987, and in the summer of 2004, when he was spoken of as a future prime minister, began work on a biography of him, but I would not claim to have arrived at anything like a full understanding of his character. He knows how to shield himself from inquiry behind a screen of unfailing geniality, and possesses an exceptional capacity to throw journalists off the scent by giving them amusing stories which have nothing whatever to do with their original questions. In his ability to provide vivid material for the media, he has few rivals. Here is a man who knows that in the theatre of politics, advantage can accrue from making the audience laugh.
Puritans disapprove of jokes, and when they get the chance, shut down the theatres. But the wider public, which expects as a rule of thumb to find politicians dull – an expectation which many career politicians take infinite pains to fulfill – is delighted to find a performer capable of amusing them. And one of the points about jokes is that, in order to work, they generally need to be informed by the truth. Many a true word is spoken in jest.
The truth – as Boris saw it
Consider Johnson’s first big journalistic opportunity. In 1989, Hastings – an admirer of the young Johnson – sent him to Brussels as The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent. Johnson saw that Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, was driving forward European integration, centralising power in Brussels at the expense of the nation states. The other British correspondents saw this too, but on the whole they approved of it, or at least treated the plan with a degree of respect. Johnson fell with joy on stories about changes in the rules governing crisps and sausages, which could be made to symbolise the threat to the British way of life. As his then-wife said: “He knew he could get a front page with a sausage.”
He did not stop at sausages. In May 1992, he filed a piece for The Sunday Telegraph from the informal meeting of European foreign ministers at Guimaraes, in Portugal, which appeared under the headline “Delors Plan to Rule Europe”. This was picked up by the Danish press and probably contributed to the Danes’ rejection, in the referendum held the following month, of the Maastricht Treaty.
Johnson’s reporting made a tremendous impact in London, where Margaret Thatcher’s resistance to European integration dismayed her Cabinet colleagues. She described him as her favourite journalist, while the Foreign Office regarded his activities as “basically mischievous” and tried to get him sacked. Hastings wavered, for he was friends with some of the leading Tory Europhiles, but he stood by his correspondent, who was supplying him with eye-catching stories and possessed the energy and cavalier dash which Hastings himself had shown in the Falklands War. Johnson decorated his office in Brussels with herograms sent to him by his editor.
The other British correspondents were infuriated. They found themselves telephoned late in the evening to follow up stories in the first edition of The Daily Telegraph which were simply not true. One can see why they were annoyed: Johnson dramatised events in the manner of a Victorian novelist. The facts which were so sacred to CP Scott, and which remain sacred to The New York Times, were to him quite unimportant. He was a caricaturist, who told the truth by exaggerating it, and he possessed an urge to mock anyone who was foolish and self-important enough to declare that by simply studying the facts one could arrive at the correct view. Journalism, in his hands, became an imaginative art. He threw the story forwards: got ahead, as it were, of the facts, and certainly ahead of his competitors.
On July 23, 2019, when Johnson won the Tory leadership contest, he said in his short acceptance speech that the Conservatives have had the best insights “into human nature … and how to manage the jostling sets of instincts in the human heart”. Here is a leader who does not claim often-conflicting feelings can be reduced to some desiccated orthodoxy to which one must cling with desperate conscientiousness.
This gives Johnson the freedom to change his mind – a freedom of which many in the European debate are terrified. In both journalism and politics, a certain impudent flexibility is required if one is to make a success of things. Both the journalist and the politician have to perceive, amid a cacophony of voices, what the story is. Their even more difficult task is to spot when the story has changed, at which moment they have to change, under acute time pressure, where they are going to go, who they are going to talk to, and what they are going to say.
He was mocked, while working out which side to back in the EU referendum, for writing two Telegraph columns, one for Remain and one for Leave. This was said by his opponents to reveal him as an opportunist. The charge is understandable: no one is quicker to seize an opportunity when it presents itself. But on the great and always changing issue of Europe, on which so many politicians since 1945 have changed their minds, it was surely a sign of wisdom and prudence to recognise that there were arguments on both sides. Europe is such a difficult issue because the principle of democratic self-government conflicts with the need, acknowledged for centuries as a principle of British foreign policy, to ensure that no single, potentially hostile power dominates the continent of Europe.
The doubt-suppressing dogmatism with which the two sides in the referendum debate proceeded to address us was an insult to our intelligence. It was a nicely balanced question, where a sensible person might come down on either side of the argument, and Johnson had the wit to recognise that.
He also had the wit to see that by the end of 2019, “Get Brexit Done” would appeal to people on both sides who were sick of the debate, and wanted it resolved. He adopted a policy which would enable the Conservatives to win against a divided and indecisive opposition, many of whom were saying, in effect, “Don’t Get Brexit Done” – by this stage, not a popular cry.
Still joking but with a professional inner core
But Johnson knew that if he fought a dull campaign he could still suffer the fate of Theresa May in 2017 and fail to win outright. So he bent his formidable talents as a performer to the task of connecting with the public, entertaining us by appearing in videos of such humdrum scenes as himself making a cup of tea. A pleasant touch of absurdity entered his manner: we were invited to share the joke with him, to enjoy the incongruity of the prime minister acting out this undignified, almost pitiful scene from office life, while at the same time getting his message across.
On the last night of the campaign, Paul Goodman, editor of ConservativeHome, and I happened to interview him in a sports centre changing room, where he was waiting to go on stage for his final rally, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London. We sat at a makeshift table strewn with sandwiches still in their supermarket wrappers, surrounded by showers and benches, with for some reason a loud noise of running water. “I’ve got to beat the cistern,” he remarked.
A certain kind of serious-minded journalist, indeed a certain kind of serious-minded person, cannot bear levity in public life. To them, Johnson is never likely to appeal, and they have tended to underestimate his abilities, and his capacity to learn from mistakes. Those mistakes would need a volume to catalogue. But by taking so many risks, he has become better than his rivals at coping with dangerous situations. As David Cameron remarked after Johnson got stuck on a zip wire during the London Olympics: “If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zipwire, it would be a disaster. For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.”
Voters like a touch of implausibility in a leader, as long as he or she knows how to carry it off; and so, on the whole, do reporters, who need something to write about. Johnson in the early years of this century carried implausibility too far: he gained election to the Commons in 2001, decided also to carry on as editor of The Spectator, and at the end of 2004 came a spectacular cropper. When the magazine attacked the people of Liverpool in grossly inaccurate terms, the Tory leader Michael Howard ordered him to go and apologise. Soon afterwards, Johnson asserted that reports of his affair with Petronella Wyatt were “an inverted pyramid of piffle”. The press showed he was lying, whereupon Howard sacked him from the posts of shadow arts minister and vice-chairman of the Conservative Party.
These ructions meant that the following year, when Howard resigned after losing a general election, Johnson was in no position to run for the leadership, for he was seen as unreliable. David Cameron got the leadership, and proceeded to keep his fellow Etonian at a safe distance from the levers of power. A less resilient and determined figure would have retreated into a well-paid life as a columnist and television personality. But, on perceiving that he was going to get nowhere at Westminster while Cameron was leader, Johnson went off and defeated Ken Livingstone in the 2008 race to become mayor of London, a post he retained in a rematch four years later.
In retrospect, those contests, won because he evinced a high degree of self-discipline and brought in gifted people to perform the administrative tasks for which he himself was unsuited, can be seen as good preparation for defeating Livingstone’s friend Jeremy Corbyn in the general election of December 2019. Johnson had turned professional, while appearing still to be a hapless amateur. Pious commentators, gazing disdainfully at him from the moral high ground, continued until a late stage to do him the favour of underestimating his chances. Perhaps now he has entered No 10 and, unlike Theresa May or Gordon Brown, has consolidated his achievement by winning a general election, the press will at last start to take him seriously.
