Although he was found guilty of lying, albeit by a manifestly biased parliamentary enquiry based on a report by a civil servant who went on to work for the Labour Party, there is an extent to which you know where you are with former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I’ve had a soft spot for him since 2003 when I submitted an article to The Spectator, which he edited. Rather than ignore it or send out a standard rejection letter, Boris took the trouble to the write back, explaining why he liked the piece but why it was not quite suitable for his magazine. For that is what Boris is about; the Shakespearian jester-type who makes other people feel good and who, through this comedy persona, is able to get away with things which would finish off ordinary politicians.
Charisma is often a response to profound sadness and it buoys up the charismatic as much as it does his audience. This is clear in Boris’ long-awaited brick of a memoir Unleashed, which, in my view, vies with John Major: The Autobiography as the most readable Prime Ministerial memoir ever penned. The key difference is that Major is extremely self-aware, sometimes disarmingly honest, and shares with us the many poignant moments from his early life that have made him who he is. Boris doesn’t dream of doing anything like that, and, let’s face it, you wouldn’t expect him to. There is nothing about his extremely unhappy and difficult childhood in which he was part deaf and lived in an isolated farm house with parents who violently despised each other. To the extent he looks at his childhood at all, it’s jolly memories of his brief time at a state primary school.
As I’ve said, the point is to take us on a jolly jape. Boris is particular good at this, due his comedic brilliance. The Supreme Court judge who tried to scupper Brexit, and who wore a silver spider-shaped brooch is referred to as “the curse of Spiderwoman,” while the UK’s anti-Brexit Establishment are “prune-lipped Pharisees.” Boris is self-aware enough to concede that he is “gaffe-prone,” but, then, he would concede this; it is part of his comic charm and of his cunning: Appear a tad helpless and people will love you. The women will want to mother you, the men won’t see you as a real threat and so will underestimate you, or they’ll believe that they can obtain true power with you as the comic frontman. And before you know it, you’re Conservative Mayor of London (a Labour city), and then Prime Minister, winning a large majority, including numerous seats in safe Labour areas, breaking the deadlock and finally bringing Brexit about.
Boris admits, though, that, secretly, he’s worked hard to get there, but even here there is comic camouflage and poetic skill: “Some people have a knack for being in the right place at the right time. They just happen to be under the tree when the apple plops into their lap. Some people have to bash and butt at the base of the tree for an awfully long time until the exhausted apple stalk can bear the weight no longer. I am definitely in the second category.” In many ways, these sentences encapsulate Boris’ rhetorical brilliance. There are so many layers to this. We are invited to imagine a genius – Isaac Newton – sitting beneath the apple tree, yet this is contrasted with the onomatopoeic “plop,” and the comedically scatological dimensions of this word. We then imagine someone like Newton, perhaps Boris in a late-seventeenth wig, bashing at the tree of UK politics and its apple of being the UK’s premier – with a self-deprecating nod to his being overweight – until it just gives up and, exhausted, says, “Okay, Boris, old bean, you can be Prime Minister.” It is this kind of skill with which he ascended so high and did so relatively quickly.
Boris also wants to transport us to an idealised old England in which he was our Shakespearian Fool leader. He achieves this, for example, by frequently quoting canonical poetry, such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” about dead peasants and the talents they wasted confined to a tiny village. Johnson, apparently deeply moved by this poem, uses it to explain why he wanted to “level up” the British education system, so he manages to boast about a supposed achievement of his premiership. But he’s managed to make it not seem like bragging, because he’s beguiled us into being in an idyllic English country churchyard with him in which he is a shaman, into which the spirit of Englishness has somehow entered; his recent Turkish ancestry not with-standing.
I could give many other examples of this skill, but it also means that we are intellectually disarmed. He justifies his ludicrous green policies on the basis of Pascal’s Wager. We should be fervent environmentalists just in case the climate change alarmists are correct. This is an absurd comparison. He is suggesting that we should make life less enjoyable, more expensive and more difficult just in case Woke fanatics are right. By the same “just in case” logic, Boris should have shut the borders the moment there was the slightest hint of Covid-19. By the same logic, there is evidence that multiculturalism leads to inter-group violence and the collapse of society, so it’s quite obvious what he should have done “just in case.” The problem is that he is so bumblingly likeable and persuasive that he makes you actively not want to seriously scrutinise him, which is part of his political genius. As I motorist, I cannot stand cyclists, yet he is an avid cyclist and he almost makes me sympathise with them with his Romantic portrayal of their vocation.
All of this, though, permits him to smuggle in the fact that, on many issues, he is secretly rather based, and he can do this because of the way he has charmed people. For example, in Chapter Two he dares to look at intelligence and the extent to which it is genetic. Politicians have been fired for saying as much. “As I close my eyes and wait for the judgment of the examiners on myself, I feel I am in the presence of some ineluctable biological-process. I have read somewhere that intelligence like other human qualities reverts to the mean (Was it H.J. Eysenck that gave me that idea? Eysenck it was.).” To those “in the know” he is making it clear that he understands the biological realities, he is scientifically literate and he is based. For the more purple-pilled, pathetic conservative reader, there is the pun to soften the blow and to permit Boris to pretend he was joking all along. He even explores, indirectly, the issue of Incels and their causes (women are more educated than men but want to marry hypergamously in terms of education), though Boris makes out that someone far cleverer than he has explained this to him and he is just blithely accepting it: “In his view, there are complex reasons for the drying up of social mobility, not least the habit of ‘assortative mating’, by which female graduates tend to only marry men who are themselves graduates. . . . The only way to break the cycle of assortative mating . . . is for more female graduates to be encouraged to marry hod-carriers and dustbin men . . .”
And he also traffics in some seriously interesting stuff, such as that the Queen did not die of “old age” but rather of bone cancer. She’d known she was dying for a year and, of course, it’s all been covered up. A friend of mine, a consultant geriatrician, told me at the time that the state of the Queen’s hands strongly implied treatment for some kind of cancer, so I am inclined to believe Boris on this one.
But the problem is, his rhetorical skill and charisma mean that I’m inclined to believe him on most things, even though I know, deep down, that I have been manipulated by this self-serving autobiography wherein he never displays genuine weakness and never looks honestly, or at all, at his painful and rogue-ish, womanising personal life. Instead, you sit down in a pub with him and have a laugh, forgetting that he needlessly closed those pubs for the best part of two years, backing down to shrill, manipulative voices opposing the very sensible policy of herd immunity. Such is Boris’ skill and charisma, on such evident display in 700-plus pages of Unleashed.
