Unleashed by Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson portrays himself in this memoir as a deposed monarch. On page 77 he describes how he came to put in for Mayor of London:
“I liked the sound of the job. It was basically monarchical. You didn’t have to worry about cabinet mutinies or backbench unrest. You didn’t have to understand the difference between the Second and Third Reading of a Bill. You had your powers and your budgets, and you just got things done.”
We find here the seeds of Johnson’s downfall. Parliament is a tiresome institution. He does not want to understand the difference between the Second and Third Reading of a Bill.
By page 680, his backbenchers are out to get him, and Johnson is moved to reflect:
“Looking back, I am absolutely sure that with enough love and attention I could have restored relations with the party in Parliament.
“But I was just complacent. I bitterly regret it. I was used to being Mayor, with supreme monarchical power and no backbenchers to worry about. I also believed that they would not be so foolish as to get rid of me.”
When canvassing the support of parliamentarians, it is best not to let them know you regard them as foolish, but this Johnson had never been able for more than a short time to do.
After his election in 2001, he spent the bare minimum of time in the Chamber. Proper parliamentarians love being there, will wait hour after hour to be called, take a close interest in obscure topics and procedures, learn by trial and error how to read the violently fluctuating moods of the House, and to gain its ear.
The curious almost conversational style of speaking which is required in the Commons, the necessary courtesy of treating each Member as an Honourable and therefore worthy interlocutor, were mastered by Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister from 1721-42, of whom Lord Chesterfield wrote:
“He was both the ablest Parliament man, and the ablest manager of a Parliament, that I believe ever lived. An artful rather than an eloquent speaker, he saw as by intuition, the disposition of the House, and pressed or receded accordingly. So clear in stating the most intricate matters, especially in the finances, that while he was speaking the most ignorant thought that they understood what they really did not.”
Johnson was never a Parliament man. His greatest successes were as an insurgent who derided the conventional wisdom. Max Hastings, as editor of The Daily Telegraph, detected in him a kindred spirit, and sent Johnson at the age of 24 to Brussels.
Here Johnson had great fun deriding the European Union, and was soon able to paper his office with herograms from Hastings.
But as Johnson relates in this book, by the summer of 2000 Hastings had become editor of The Evening Standard, and his “early pride in my reporting from Brussels had evolved into a Dr Frankenstein-like horror at the monster he had created”.
When Johnson was selected in July 2000 to succeed Michael Heseltine as MP for Henley, he “detected the hand of Max Hastings” in an Evening Standard leader lamenting “the Tory Party’s increasing weakness for celebrity personalities” and calling the new candidate “a noisy Euro-sceptic who, for all his gifts, is unlikely to grace any future Tory cabinet”.
Hastings became, perhaps, Johnson’s most vehement critic (a title for which there is stiff competition), but it is characteristic of this memoir that not one word of the later criticism is quoted. Johnson has long been inclined to tease his opponents by barely mentioning them, or indeed excluding them altogether.
In 2008, Johnson was the insurgent who overthrew Ken Livingstone by inciting the outer boroughs of London to chuck out the metropolitan socialist in City Hall. The new Mayor proceeded to show that he would stand up for the people of London against central government whenever required, i.e. at least once a month, and in 2012 was rewarded with a second term.
There are useful chapters in this book on how to improve the city of which you are Mayor. You need “to hustle”, to get out and make things happen, new buses and trains, new houses, new investors.
Good King Boris did this in London. No one needed to point out to him that kingship is a performance. During the London Olympics he outshone David Cameron.
In the EU Referendum of 2016, he placed himself at the head of the insurgents, the angry people who were cross with London as well as Brussels, and who did not think Whitehall, Parliament and The Financial Times had done much for Bolton or Sunderland in the last 50 years.
Referendums are an anti-parliamentary device. Johnson brandishing a Cornish pasty led the rebels to victory against the majority of MPs, including Conservative MPs, who wanted to remain in the EU.
He was not immediately required to make good the promise to leave the EU, for as he relates in the skimpy account he gives here, Michael Gove “decided to blow me up on the launchpad”.
“To this day I don’t know exactly why he did me in,” Johnson writes a few paragraphs later. “He had all sorts of voices in his ear. George Osborne was certainly urging him to run.” Of such hints we must make what we can.
Three years later, in the summer of 2019, when Parliament had failed to get Brexit done, but had also failed to find some way of defying the people’s will, and Nigel Farage had pushed the Conservative Party towards extinction in the European elections, in came Johnson to save the party and break the logjam, which he did by a series of astounding provocations.
He relates in this book that after withdrawing the Whip from the 21 Tory MPs including Oliver Letwin, Ken Clarke and Nicholas Soames in September 2019, “I felt like Octavian – that chill and subtle tyrant – ordering the proscription of names from the grandest senatorial families”.
Octavian became better known as the Emperor Augustus. He preserved the forms of the Roman Republic while changing it into the Roman Empire.
In Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How they rise and how they fall – from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson, published last year, Ferdinand Mount explores the comparison with ancient Rome, and remarks:
“For the Caesar, Parliament is a rival for public attention, a place to be bypassed, neutered, prorogued or actually closed down.”
Johnson fought the general election of December 2019 against Parliament and won a decisive victory. At this point, however, he ceased to be the insurgent and found himself obliged to become the chief upholder of the Establishment.
Almost at once came Covid, and he did, with reluctance, what the Establishment, and the greater part of the public, wanted him to do: he locked us down.
No longer could he be the Merry Monarch: life was real and life was earnest. He describes going into St Thomas’s and finding himself with a view over the river to the Palace of Westminster:
“The view rang a bell, and I realised I was in the same ward – perhaps the same room – where my stepfather Nick Wahl had died in 1996. I had been with him right to the end.”
Not a word more about Wahl, who was a remarkable man. Death flits past and Johnson recovers. He cannot put everything in his book, or it would be 50 times longer.
Like his critics, his supporters do not receive much in the way of coverage, though he does on pages 736-737 thank by name the 118 Tory MPs who remained “more or less loyal to the end”.
The book is dedicated to his wife, Carrie, “and to the memory of my mother, Charlotte”, but of the latter we read almost nothing. That, perhaps, is a book Johnson is not yet able to write.
Charlotte was a very good painter – I have just browsed through Minding Too Much, the catalogue produced by Nell Butler for the retrospective exhibition of 2015 – and she never shied away from emotion.
She helped form her eldest son’s visual sense. He too is a keen painter, and as a campaigner has always understood the need to provide good pictures.
On the back cover of this book is an enjoyable picture of Johnson, helmetless, riding his motorbike across a field at Chequers, pursued by Dilyn the dog.
After his mother’s death in September 2021, Johnson’s judgment became worse than normal: so at least I suggested in my own account of his time in office.
In November 2021 he, the Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, and the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, made a complete hash of the Owen Paterson affair. Johnson admits in this book there was “a clear risk that the whole thing would drag on and hang round our necks like a putrefying albatross”.
A U-turn was the only possible course, but as Johnson recognises, “if there’s one thing that colleagues hate, it’s being marched up the hill and marched back down again”.
His response to Partygate was even more cack-handed. He now writes:
“I should have been far more robust at the outset. I tried to defuse public anger by a series of rather pathetic apologies, even when I knew zero about the events for which I was apologising. My grovelling just made people even angrier – and made it look as though we were far more culpable than we were.”
The tribe lost patience with its chief and began to find him embarrassing. He could no longer change the subject, nor could he take refuge in jokes.
Often as I read this book I laughed out loud. Johnson may not be as amusing as Disraeli, a figure of whom he appears to know little, but he is the funniest and most literate PM since Macmillan.
He got Ukraine right, and continues to remind us that he got vaccines right, but these grave contentions were in vain, and in the summer of 2022 out he went.
Johnson is sometimes a frivolous man pretending to be serious, and sometimes a serious man pretending to be frivolous. No one, himself included, has yet fully understood him.
In the rural seclusion of Brightwell cum Sotwell, the Colombey-les-Deux-Églises of Oxfordshire, he awaits that rare but not impossible event in British politics: a restoration.
