We who have spent 20 years arguing with newspaper lawyers as to whether it is safe to call Boris Johnson “a liar” should resist the temptation to dance on his grave. Partly because he may yet think he can do a Carrie, for those who remember that terrifying film, and shatter our hopes in the final reel.
But also because the man deserves some sympathy. Of course he is brilliantly gifted, has had a life of extraordinary good fortune and privilege; yet he has lied to wives, colleagues, foreign politicians and 60 million-odd Brits in the cause of self-advancement. I can think of nobody else who regards his own greater glory and “the public good” as not merely conceivably cohabitants but synonymous.
But the reason we shouldn’t gloat too much is that he is one of that breed of public figures genetically programmed not to get the hint. In short, he has delighted us long enough, but his puppyish assumption that we can’t get enough of him will be enormously difficult for him to take on board.
The most recent comparable Conservative example of that is Lord Archer, whose stake through the heart moment only came when he had to serve a prison sentence for perjury. Even then – after a bit of a pause, admittedly – he couldn’t stay away from the carnival, giving interviews, writing books and reminding us of his irresistibility. (Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson were John Profumos by comparison.)
Peter Mandelson is another one who kept bouncing back, on one occasion telling us – bless him – that he had “learned humility”. Oh, how we laughed. The Duke of York is another – like his former wife – who still can’t understand why the world doesn’t see quite how marvellous they are.
Boris Johnson doesn’t share this characteristic on the side. With him it’s the main dish, central to his being. He lives and breathes it every day, and seemingly has done so since childhood. The truth – like the law, decency, honesty, public-spiritedness, humility – is a trifling matter, mere values to keep happy the petty folk who keep their noses clean, stand in the queue, do the right thing and… oh yes, watch their loved ones die while their betters lord it in SW1.
Never mind all that. The clever people know those are means to an end, tools to be manipulated, not qualities to be aspired to in themselves. So admire the cleverness! Feel the brilliance! Enjoy the jokes! And yes, he’s very good at those, and much else.
But he was terrible at most of the things a prime minister needs (integrity, conviction, sense of a destination, decisiveness, organisation, delegation, etc), making self-destruction all but inevitable. As Clint Eastwood said when a crooked cop, thinking he had outsmarted Eastwood, blew himself up: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Which is why Johnson should have stayed a journalist.
Given that lack of self-awareness, what can he do now? One feels for his family, particularly sister Rachel, who loyally defended him, yet surely knew how ill-suited the man-child was to the grown-up world where intelligence, jokes and affability aren’t enough. The child’s desire to be “world king” tells its own story. He wanted approbation, but that mad competitiveness made him want power as well.
Politics was part of his Churchillian destiny. For a start, he, the great cavalier, needed to out-do the “swot” whose success he never understood, his co-Bullingdonian David Cameron. So instead of being a genial Stephen Fry figure, he is disgraced. (Footnote: I wonder if the BBC will refer to him as “disgraced”. By what standards is he not?)
Where does he go now? If he doesn’t lie low with hopes of returning to save his defeated party in 2024 – as a chilling briefing about his wanting to bury the hatchet suggests – what can he do? Money has always appealed, and if he has a bashfulness gene, it won’t be the after-dinner circuit that brings it out. Presumably he will also write, and will be able to afford an army of researchers to do the work for any books.
But his Great Man’s sense of destiny, there since childhood, will surely be harder to shed than anything. That, cheap jibes aside, is why, perhaps more than any recent PM, he will find the years to come a struggle. All his previous jobs have been means to an end. Now that end is behind him.
As a former prime minister with an interest in Ukraine (though to my mind a blemished one), he might have expected to head Nato, for example, but he has shown himself unsuited for anything that requires a nodding acquaintance with detail, patience, etc.
So television – which probably prizes busking more than any other arena – may have to be his way of reaching those millions of admirers (those little people – they can be so handy, can’t they?). Assuming somebody can advise him sufficiently to steer clear of the real tat (I’m a Celebrity and so on), maybe Boris could explain Ancient Greece to us.
The problem remains, though, that he would have to be centre stage. After you’ve played Downing Street, where else is there?
James Hanning is co-author of Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative
