‘Boris Johnson: The Gambler’: What to Do with a Problem Like Boris?
A review of ‘Boris Johnson: The Gambler’, by Tom Bower; WH Allen, 2020.
Tom Bower writes unauthorised biographies. His subjects are invariably interesting and divisive. Robert Maxwell, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair, Conrad Black—Bower picks out the big names and, usually, proceeds to demolish them. He has been attacked by Peter Oborne and others for failing to add footnotes and for guarding his sources closely. He has been sued several times for libel. But he has quite a good reputation as an investigative biographer. He is a kind of literary hitman who is remarkable, if anything, for not being sued more. That he isn’t suggests those who might be minded to do so know he is at least quite close to the truth. In any event, he is very fun to read.
It was only a matter of time before he turned his attention to Boris Johnson. At the time of Bower’s writing the book, Boris had just won a landslide election victory, the slogan of which was the famous (or infamous) ‘Get Brexit Done’. Bower traces the personal history of one of the most influential and divisive figures in British public life for half a century. He tells of how Boris went from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to Fleet Street, from Fleet Street to Westminster, and all the way to Mayor of London and Prime Minister.
At the time of Bower’s writing the book, Boris had just won a landslide election victory.
Oddly for Bower, he does this in a tone that conveys at least as much admiration as it does condemnation. And this is in fact quite common: those who know Boris a bit — Petronella Wyatt, with whom he worked (and with whom he had an affair) at the The Spectator, for instance—talk about his sensitivity, vulnerability, introversion. He is clearly intelligent: I saw him fend off questions as London Mayor one Wednesday afternoon when I was training to be a journalist and was struck by how quickly he could assimilate information and then talk about it. He writes well. He is charismatic. People, in any case, seem to like him. But it is also a matter of record that he has lied throughout his career, including to Parliament, said a great number of unsavoury things, and had numerous affairs and numerous children, including love children. The news that he wrote two Telegraph columns—one for Brexit and one against—before choosing to publish the more politically useful one, was widely seen as proof of his basic dishonesty and opportunism. So he is a bit of a contradiction.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in 1964 in New York. Over the first 14 years of his life, the family moved 32 times. Boris’s mother, Charlotte, was sent to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital when he was ten and later said she thought his boyhood wish to become ‘world king’ was born out of a need to ‘make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of [his] mother disappearing for eight months’. A friend also said that by going into politics, Boris was trying to replace ‘genuine love with synthetic love’. It was at Eton that Boris supposedly invented his clownish persona, which was so successful at making others like him and underestimate him that, in a sense, he became the mask. Andrew Sullivan, the Anglo-American political blogger, said that at Oxford, all the other Old Etonian tried to hide their privileged upbringing for fear of being disliked. Boris did the opposite, transforming himself a self-consciously ridiculous and flamboyant toff who invited people to laugh with him, at him.
By going into politics, Boris was trying to replace ‘genuine love with synthetic love’.
That persona continued to charm. He was sacked by The Times for making up quotes. He was promptly hired by The Telegraph, where he wrote eurosceptic columns from Brussels. At The Spectator, where he was editor, he motivated clever and conscientious people to do his job for him and circulation boomed. When Ian Hislop invited him to appear on Have I Got News For You, his cheerful incompetence made him an overnight celebrity. Soon, he was occupying a Tory safe seat and had turned London blue (London is a Labour-voting city) by selling not much more than good vibes. He made the city feel good about itself when the Olympics came to town. The rest is really history. But all throughout, he was lying, double-dealing, stabbing people in the back, cheating on his wives, etc. etc. In the words of Sir Max Hastings, who was Johnson’s editor at The Daily Telegraph: ‘The only people who like Boris Johnson are those who don’t know him.’
The theme of Bower’s book is right there in the title. Boris Johnson is a gambler—someone who has rolled the dice again and again, risking his career, reputation, marriage, friends, and country, and, most often, gotten away with it. Many have noted his profound optimism—some have called it delusion of narcissism—and his genuine belief in his ability to bend the world to his will. But there is a sense in which Boris does not really see losses as losses. He does not live like a man with much to lose. He seems to thrive in chaos. Dominic Cummings, his former strategist, claimed Boris told him: ‘Chaos isn’t that bad. Chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge’ More revealing is that Boris’s father, Stanley (at whose feet Bower, as well as Boris’s ex-wife Marina, lay much of the blame for Boris’s actions), used to quote Arthur Balfour to him: ‘Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all.’ Bower sets out the trail of human destruction that Boris has left in his wake in his race to the top of the pile.
Bower’s style is straightforward and unspectacular, punctuated with humour and bolstered by many mad, amusing and downright appalling comments drawn from his subject’s vast repertoire. And if he was planning to write either a dispassionate account of Boris’s rise (I doubt it) or a damning one, he doesn’t succeed. He doesn’t try to hide Boris’s myriad flaws and failings, but the emotional atmosphere of the book is, as I have suggested already, one of slight admiration. Bower might not think highly of Boris’s moral character (how could he?); but he clearly respects his boldness, cleverness and doggedness in pursuit of his goals; his way with words and people; and his uncanny ability to ‘fail upwards’ by means of extraordinary self-belief. He seems also to feel some sympathy for Boris on account of his subject’s father, who is painted as absent, self-involved and violent towards his wife. Or perhaps it is because—and this comes across strongly—Boris strikes us as very, very lonely man. In any case, almost all of character flaws are formed in childhood, and it is up to us to decide whether we hold ourselves accountable for them or blame our parents or surroundings.
It is quite popular now (in fact, boringly popular) to dismiss Boris now as a garden-variety narcissist who had no talent and accomplished so much because he also had no shame. I think this is unreasonable. He was clearly bright, funny and good with people, endowed with an extreme measure of self-belief and an unslakable desire to reach the top of the pyramid. That he was also a deeply flawed, possibly narcissistic or even psychopathic person does not invalidate those other sides of his character. And we only have to peruse a history book to discover that many accomplished or even brilliant people throughout history have been deeply, deeply flawed. Martin Luther King supposedly plagiarised his doctoral thesis and was a prolific philanderer as well as— according to David Garrow — someone who was not just present at a rape but egged on the rapist. Boris Johnson: The Gambler, is, admiring or not, a rich psychological study of an interesting man. You do not have to like him to enjoy it.
