“He’s a shit. He’s utterly selfish. He’s destroyed the family.” This anonymous verdict on Boris Johnson is apparently delivered by someone in the Johnson clan. On the first page of Tom Bower’s plodding biography of the Prime Minister, the tone is already set. The scene is Chequers, August 2019, and the occasion is a party thrown by the new PM to celebrate the 79th birthday of his father, Stanley. Unfortunately, the mood is hardly festive. The PM’s estranged wife Marina and their four children have refused to come. It should be a moment of family triumph as the eldest son has realised his life’s ambition, but it sounds awkward, joyless and grim.
There is, sadly, plenty more in the same vein. As the pages turn, and they turn rather slowly, we discover that this is indeed the story of a shit, an utterly selfish man who has allegedly destroyed his family. But the real shit it appears is not Boris. It is, according to Bower, Stanley. The peculiar arrested development of the man-child Prime Minister is here excused at every turn. The treachery, the betrayals, the mendacity—it all seems to derive from the sins of the father. There is no good reason this book is called Boris Johnson: The Gambler. It should be called “Boris Johnson: The Victim.”
There is an unexpected symmetry here with a more richly written recent father-and-son reflection. Martin Amis’s Inside Story is a meditation on the men in Martin’s life: Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin and, of course, his father Kingsley. The relevant point of comparison might be Kingsley’s 1984 novel Stanley and the Women, which Martin called “a mean little novel in every sense, sour, spare, and viciously well organised.” These verdicts could easily apply to the protagonists here, all except the last, because not even the friends of Stanley or Boris would describe either as well organised.
Bower does present a pretty comprehensive litany of Boris Johnson’s treachery and tergiversation, to adopt the Prime Minister’s own idiom. And there is a lot of it. We go through Johnson’s sacking by the Times for making up a quotation and his repeated and blatant lies—the publication of which is a mark of enduring shame for the Daily Telegraph—about eurocrats regulating condom size or the curvature of bananas. We revisit the notorious piece in which Johnson wrote of “grinning piccaninnies” with their “watermelon smiles.” We get the indecisiveness of a man who made a documentary in 2008 to argue that Turkey should join the EU and who headed a Brexit campaign in 2016 that warned of a flood of Turks into Britain. Johnson’s personal life is full of betrayals and unpaid debts, his relentless ambition yielding only empty success. He comes over as needy, driven, priapic and miserable. He doesn’t seem to like himself very much and that is a judgment which, on this reading, the reader is liable to share.
Yet through it all, Bower is breezily ready to brush the dirt away. Yes, maybe Johnson did make stories up and maybe his colleagues in Brussels did regard him as a charlatan and a liar but they were, we are loftily informed, “an undistinguished pack.” How undistinguished to care that what is printed in newspapers isn’t fictitious! Sure, Johnson did write phrases which, on the face of it, might sound a touch racist but it was in the cause of satire. Pretty unfunny satire, Bower might have added, but doesn’t. Johnson’s position on Europe was, apparently, “clear and principled,” which is generous to the point of fantasy. As political analysis this is barely even trying to be serious.
Bower is nearly always ready with a convenient excuse. As foreign secretary, Johnson’s inept handling of the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen jailed in Iran, was the fault of “the Foreign Office, a failing department.” The pandemic response was messed up by the scientific advisers and by a cabinet secretary who, we are told, didn’t know what he was doing. The president of the Supreme Court was out to get him and so is the BBC. The various sagas of Boris and the Women are dealt with by blaming anyone but Johnson. His first wife, Allegra, was “too demanding” and his second, Marina, was “distant.” Even on the evidence assembled by Bower himself, this is hard to swallow. But if there is no public official or ex-wife at hand to be blamed, then Bower can call on the ghost of Stanley Johnson to supply a retrospective explanation for almost every one of his son’s failings.
This is where we arrive at the governing idea of the book. The hole where Boris ought to be is filled by Stanley. Bower offers an account of the Phaeton complex, the psychological condition defined by Maryse Choisy, which suggests that the source for the ambition and need for adulation in senior politicians is found in a traumatising childhood. In 1970, Lucille Iremonger published a study of 24 prime ministers between 1809 and 1940 showing that 62 per cent of them, a great deal more than the national average, had lost one or both parents by the age of 15. Though Stanley Johnson is still alive and well, it is in the brutal childhood that we can find the source of what follows.
There does not seem much doubt that Stanley Johnson is a pretty dreadful man. He is lazy, disloyal, entitled and selfish. When the family live in a remote part of Somerset, Stanley will not let his wife Charlotte have a car, so every morning, in her husband’s absence, she walks the children two miles to a garage where she can pick up a lift. In 1976, during the water shortage of that hot summer, Stanley pretends that it is impossible to wash any clothes and so forces his two au pairs to walk round the house naked, before beginning an affair with one of them. But far worse, Stanley is violent. Boris Johnson’s mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, says of his father: “He was always hitting me, and Boris saw it.” On one occasion Stanley broke Charlotte’s nose and the children were told that a car door had hit their mother’s face. In 1974, Charlotte was treated for eight months in the Maudsley hospital in London after a nervous breakdown. The couple divorced in 1979.
I do not want to minimise the horror of this domestic violence—as you read, you wonder whether it is too late for Stanley to be brought to book. And yet there is a difference between explaining the failings of the Prime Minister and excusing them. As you plough through page after page it is impossible to suppress the urge to shout: “Oh, grow up!” The younger Johnson siblings—Rachel, Leo and Jo—are not like Boris. Nobody is programmed at birth and it is about time Boris Johnson took responsibility for his own actions. Even if he is incapable of doing so, a biographer has to confront them, and a failure to do so constitutes the largest failure of this book.
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Bower’s inability to recognise Johnson’s vices makes him an unreliable witness to Johnson’s virtues. In seeking so uncritically to build him up, Bower diminishes his subject. Boris Johnson is an intriguing political figure because he is both very bad and very good. I do not mean that in a moral sense—there is little evidence for his goodness here—but in a political sense. He is a divided soul like perhaps no other post-war prime minister.
There are three dimensions to success in politics. The first is that a good politician needs to court popularity within the party. The second is the ability to win the affection of a less interested and less committed electorate. The third is a capacity for administration: the skill of getting things done in government. The real stars can do everything. They inspire loyalty in their parties (at least for a time), they can reach the electorate and they leave behind a legacy of achievement.
This trinity of virtues could be attributed, in varying degrees, to Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher and Blair. The leaders who struggle most are those whose appeal to party and country is limited and so struggle to sell any substantive achievements due to their lack of charisma. Into this category we could place Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Ted Heath, John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May. Jim Callaghan and David Cameron are somewhere in between: theyhad all manner of party difficulties but were both capable of doing the job as prime minister, even if we might regret what they did in office.
Boris Johnson, though, is a case apart. Johnson appeals very much to his party as well as to a wider section of the electorate than any Conservative since Margaret Thatcher. When he was the mayor of London during the 2012 Olympics, he had 60,000 people chanting his name in Hyde Park. Yet, for all his popularity, Johnson appears to be singularly ill-equipped for the job of prime minister. This is the paradox of Boris Johnson the politician: to be simultaneously very good and thoroughly hopeless.
By not assigning Johnson responsibility for anything, Bower does not get anywhere near this. In an epilogue to the book, which contrives to be both dull and strange at the same time, Bower offers a painstaking chronology of the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. I am more sympathetic to Johnson in this regard than most commentators. Covid-19 has called for tough decisions that had to be made on imperfect information, to strike a balance between the incommensurate imperatives of health and the economy. If errors have been made, then that is no surprise. Yet all Bower offers is blame-shifting of the most tedious kind. In private, reflective members of the government know that the pandemic has hardly been their finest hour. We get none of that here.
Neither do we get any particular insight into Johnson’s intellectual character, or even if he has one. Is he the low-tax, light-regulation, liberal cosmopolitan Tory of the London mayoralty? Or is he the man who was more relaxed than he should have been invoking anti-immigrant sentiment to win the 2016 referendum on Brexit? Or is he the Heseltine-inspired industrial strategist who is not shy to use the power of the state in the pursuit of regional equality?
I suspect he is all of these characters and none of them, by which I mean that Johnson is just trying to please. He will be what he needs to be to win. In politics there is an advantage in being a screen onto which other people project their own views. It makes you popular, at least for a while. The trouble is that government imposes choices on a leader, and at least some of your coalition thenends up disappointed and claiming betrayal.
The politician called to mind by this biography is Peter Sellers, whose 1958 sketch “Party Political Speech” is a beautiful satire of the fluent vote-seeker with plenty of words but nothing to say. Droning on and on, Sellers reveals, with his very prolixity, that he has no idea what he wants to communicate. The comparison with Johnson is probably deeper and sadder than this one Sellers role. In interviews, the real Sellers would routinely break into mimicry and borrowed voices because, as he once conceded, he wasn’t sure where the act ended and the character called Peter Sellers began. There is something of the same mystery about Boris Johnson and, though the appalling father will certainly be part of the reason why he turned out as he did, we get no real answer to the question of who Johnson truly is. This should concern us now as this man is our prime minister in a crucial period, in which Britain is struggling its way through a pandemic and about to leave the European Union.
Bower likes to attack and when, in previous books, he took on Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black and Mohamed al-Fayed, he proved he could attack very well. This book proves that he cannot defend. His subject eludes him in the end; he adds little to our understanding beyond what has already been provided by previous biographers Sonia Purnell and Andrew Gimson. The reason for the failure is that, no matter how much Bower tries to shift the focus, it is Boris who is Prime Minister, not Stanley, and it is Boris who has to take responsibility for what he does. (It might or might not also be relevant that Bower’s wife Veronica Wadley worked for Johnson when he was mayor of London and was given a life peerage this year.)
This book proves the opposite of what it asserts. It proves that Boris never has taken responsibility for what he does and probably never will. He lets down nearly everyone he ever meets, including credulous biographers. He will let the country down in due course, because that is what he does. Plenty of us already knew that. But anyone disposed to doubt it can find all the evidence in this book, even if it shirks the conclusion.
